I found your site on stumbleupon and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!

Thanks for sharing….

No one had problems “visualizing the the web” as a media once it brought the “pay now” button to the page….the same is true in either 2 or 3 dimensions…

“land-locallity” as a visual “grounding” wont maintain, the 3d media web will move beyond it, as long as the PAY ME buttons can thrive.

But wait, as we use it in SL we fashion worlds in our own image – a 3D space with avatars in that space. Aye, that’s the rub: so few of us dare to use our minds for omnipresence. No problem, a synthetic 3D space can work, except we also bring with us our fears, our selfishness, our hate, our real world cultures and laws. We have eaten of the apple and our windows on the metaverse world are seeking technological and policy changes lest we evolve our way of being conscious.

As I was trying to follow some of the alternative maybes from LL or others, especially with the fear that some precious users might happen upon the metaverse manifestations of imagination that they cannot tolerate, I got the following idea. Instead of making the metaverse conform to the narrow mindedness of these users, let us fit their avatars with blinders, so as they roam the worlds they simply cannot “see” in-world content they don’t want. Let them gouge out their virtual eyes, lest they recognize their own intolerance and ignorance… (apologies to fans of King Lear)

But seriously, why hobble a metaverse because of intolerance.

avatars the key? well he first virtual travel games all had PDAs as record keeping devices, or journals..etc…. utility belts etc etc… metaphors matter less, than designed executions based on real user needs, not whatever code can be added to another release first….

the linden interface went from really bad “3d game creation tool” to overly disjointed “windows app”.. but that visual cleanup did allow it to be taken “beyond” game and into “platform” look and feel….

but look and feel is surface after a point, that point being of course, its usage…. sl inventory is still a disaster after 5 years……

the www made it easy for dumb interfaces to be made every day… and sadly we have bent to the computer, rather than form systems within tech oriented companies that create computer tools that bend for us….ask Googles last Graphic Designer tasked at justifying the 41 blues:)

maybe all avatars need are pockets in their pants for a wallet /palm/pda/iphone. or cool ultiiity belts.

freeing “invasion” as a comprimise on the way to the resourse economy aint so bad…it did allow for the USA to form 300 years ago….the question is how to retain a vested interst in the other, and not forster isolationism.

i think freeing “virtual ventures” up from the simple “bad neigbor” effort is fine. But its not fine to toss the baby( civic responseblity) to the other out with the bathwater(gridded systems)

so far its just sad that LL takes the worse of each to make its systems. but thats how they roll, over their customers.:P
and with seemingly now idea how PEOPLE work, and an misguided arrogance to how machines should…

such is the way at all companies run by binary technicians.

I quite agree that Linden Lab is attempting have its cake and eat it too. I can’t remember the last time I experienced the grid except on a sim by sim basis. I’d like geography to be important, but once you get beyond half a dozen to a dozen sims, I don’t think it matters very much where one thing is in relation to anything else on the grid.

I find that to be the case not because the potential isn’t there but because of longstanding technical limitations. One hope I’ve had for a very long time now is that the next generation (2.0) would allow for immersion in larger spaces (or smaller ones, making privacy more affordable). As long as view distance is short, and sim border crossings so treacherous, thinking on the scale of continents doesn’t really matter.

“These two spaces, lived space and measured space, are quite distinct. Lived space is different everywhere we look…Our space is full of opportunities, obstacles, and dangers, or what the psychologist James Gibson called affordances and the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the ready-to-hand. This lived space is the opposite of the measured space composed of uniform segments like the grid on a map.”

it does strike a chord with me when put in the same context as

“The deepest challenge, I believe, facing Second Life is the ability to find stuff, and under ’stuff’ I’d include both content and people.’”

But what I would say is my belief is we as a species, have an innate, gift for taking technology and tools, and incorporating them into what we in later generations perceive as “normal” I vaguely remember the introduction of the Telephone, and hearing my Dad yell down the phone, to as i guess in his mind help those little electrons travel their perilous journey to whoever he was talking to at the time.

Today who would have thought as we see the facial expressions of folk on their mobiles, in public places grimacing and flailing their hands around, leaving you no doubt that the “connection” is as real as person in same “space”.

So what am I saying? seems to me you were right about conflicts in Linden Labs concerning direction of fundamental ethos in direction grig/space/platform should go, and I for one taking my belief as stated above, that we as a species will inevitably, take on this new world format as the “norm” within our perceived space, and our perceived space, although influenced by this new perceptions afforded by virtual world, will not deviate from what we see as the norm, ergo The red light district is not on some foreign continent, but at hand and where the Taxi’s will not take you, but you see from your hotel room, or tour bus.

The main question facing us is whether those two opposing views i.e. benevolent Governor versus Corporate Guru will somehow communicate and take heed of the creators of “stuff” who after all makes this crazy world go round and come to some middle ground.

Thanks for the post even though I only managed to glean a bit from it “grin”

Julius Sowu Virtually-Linked London

I’m glad you’ve exposed the sort of rootless cosmopolitanism which is at the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto which ushered in the Web 2.0 heist and devaluation of creation on the Internet — place without space devalues private property and intellectual property quite handily, and that was the intention.

Yes, in some ways the world’s geography can said to have begun to be eroded with the first p2p teleports that went in in 2005 (and the concommitant removal of telehubs), but the same could be said about the first private islands in 2004 which created spaces where you couldn’t have contiguousness anymore and could only TP to them.

The Lindens turned out to be more about search than geography in the press conference we attended, it isn’t so much as conceptualizing a red light district as it is symbolically representing the filtration of search.

Given that the mainland is only a fraction of SL, 4000 simulators out of the 32,000 or whatever, and given that many adult-marked islands will also be appearing in addition to Ursula, you can’t really say that there is a red light “district”. But of course the Lindens continue to see the private islands as not public spaces, even though many are.