Business

Kevin Braddock posted Lego: thinking outside the box last Sunday, and it gave me pause. Legos have been important in my life; back in the 1970s they were my chief mode of entertainment - and for a while, in the mid 1990s, they resurfaced again as LEGO Mindstorms - allowing me to connect a computer to Legos in fun and interesting ways. So, with Kevin Braddock's article in mind, I re-explored Second Life for a bit of comparison.

Second Life allows one to build things as Legos would - except you don't have to buy prims (the building blocks of Second Life), and you can twist and texture the pieces until they scream. Like Legos, you can 'play with them by yourself' or 'collaboratively', but there are some differences. { Read more }

Benjamin Duranske points to the very interesting Virtual Property Rights Case. Some of this should sound familiar:

...Soon, wealthy avatars were taking the form of "metaverse speculators" buying in bulk, driving up the cost of virtual land and, in some cases, developing it for a tidy profit. The stakes were high and, to some, there seemed to be a bubble forming, mirroring the frothy bull market for real property investment that had taken place offline. Meanwhile, the real world owners of Third Life were becoming more wealthy than they had ever dreamed. The incremental cost of strategically creating and introducing additional parcels of virtual land to Third Life was essentially zero, and there were always eager buyers...

If that doesn't sound familiar, then you haven't been in Second Life - or if you have, you've been spending your time in those brain-numbing camping chairs. It provides a platform to discuss the issues without having to write of Linden Lab and Second Life directly - but it is all very tongue in cheek. This is a reality in Second Life today - enough so that Linden Lab posted Rates of Mainland Supply. How real is that?

Virtual, Artificial or Real?

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Yeah, I know, if you're here wondering what kind of obvious headline that is, you're in the choir. I'm just translating.

When John Connell mentions this bit of Wired's vanilla reinvention of what was predicted, I had to chuckle. People have shouted, they have screamed, and given the opportunity they will avoid marketing and advertising unless they like the product enough to get past the gimmicks.

People Don't Like Marketing and Advertising. They like products, they like services, and given half a chance they will find the products and services that they want without being beaten to death by wasted time on commercials on radio and television. There is a reason people use those times to go to the bathroom or grab something from the refrigerator. There is a reason that people don't sell advertising on their houses, cars and refrigerators. If you ask anyone who pays for cable television why they pay for the service and have to watch advertising, they may well scratch their heads.

And if you expect people to log in to a virtual world to go visit something that they avoid by going to the bathroom - well, what then? How long will it take for people to get that?

Useful products and services pretty much do their own advertising and marketing. By all means, enable visibility of the product but don't make us camp in our bathrooms.

When Sarah Nerd posted about cheating on Second Life, I paid attention. I'd never heard of Project Entropia before.

I tried it out, or tried to try it out - when it got down to 5 out of 10 for a review, I gave up on it. First of all, it is a Microsoft only space. That got it losing 1 point for not supporting Mac, another for not supporting Linux, and another for not supporting both. I'm sorry, there are too many Linux and Apple users out there for a system to not support them by design. Then the less than informative downloading of stuff just took forever and left me wondering what the heck it was doing. Sorry, when you hit 5 points lost before I even load a client for a virtual world, something is wrong. { Read more }

Reading MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed , there was a lot of 'duh' when it came to MySpace. In many ways, MySpace seems to be the opiate of those who couldn't find any more Microsoft Frontpage - which is not a bad thing, but it is necessarily ugly and has given other technologies a chance to mature into more user friendly ghosts of what they need to be. I'm referring to content management systems.

Plus, everyone got their 15 Megabits of fame from MySpace. Twitter I won't comment on because I haven't used it and have felt no urge to. It is named too much like what I think of a small muscle spasm. I can't take it seriously, and if I did I would go to see a doctor.

SecondLife. Yeah, SecondLife. Here's what Lance Ulanoff had to say: { Read more }

After reading Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future and Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, it is difficult not to review some things I've seen over the past 20 years. It may be no mistake that an old friend from DeVry and I connected recently after 20 years, or that the ads for DeVry that I see on cable late at night offer a degree in Game Design/Programming (whatever) - which is what I wanted to do 20 years ago. Maybe it is no mistake that my path has taken me into multilingual and multicultural environments, even formally so, forcing me to learn languages I condemned in secondary school. Maybe it is no mistake that I write more than program computers these days. So better to get it out, write it, and move on. That is what this is.

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