|
The Archives
-
04.08.10Through a Prim Lens: Social Media Outlook 2012Virtual worlds prototype the future. Or one possible future in any case. And while social media pundits breathlessly anticipate our, um, social media-ish world, those of us who have thought about technology because we've spent time in digital landscapes like Second Life there are alternatives to the connected future we're all supposed to rush headlong towards. AdAge has a post by Freddie Laker in which he puts on his futurist hat to predict the future of social media. It's hardly earth-shattering stuff - it's sort of like predicting it will be sunny this summer to say that "our interactions with search ...
-
02.21.10Social Contexts and Telling Tales: Virtual Worlds and the Evolution of the Web III find myself tangled up on language. It's my own fault really: I get off on a tangent and the bus doesn't seem to stop. I used to have this idea, for example, that open source was sort of a homogeneous concept where we'd all build barns together in some kind of collective "let's put on a show" burst of creativity and effort until I realized that, well, someone needed to supply the tools and the roast chicken at the end of the day. By flipping the language around a little, I've come to realize that open source is more ...
-
10.24.09Second Life’s Killer App for Residents: Each OtherTom Hale Presents at Web 2.0 Tom Hale, or T Linden in Second Life, recently presented at the Web 2.0 conference at which he proclaimed that while the hype cycle came and went, the world stayed, survived, and thrived. And it did so because of its 'hardcore' users who were there not for sex but for because they could connect and socialize with each other. Now, I've seen Hale present a few times, including a keynote at the Second Life Community Convention at which he previewed the new SL client (which by all accounts is a game changer when it comes to ...
-
03.18.09Looking Out from Virtual Worlds: Web is a Tool Not a SubjectAs the Internet grows and networking seeps into all its darkest corners, social scientists, engineers and physical scientists are recognizing that the Web is becoming a "tool" for research rather than a "subject" and that virtual worlds have shifted from being, well, recursive and internally focused, to being valid platforms from which the real world can be studied. Findings from the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago that happened this month found this to be conclusive. Mark Fellows of Michigan State University wrote, Increasingly, the Web is moving beyond its use as an electronic “Yellow Pages” ...
-
12.07.08De-Meming Malcolm Gladwell: Virtual Worlds, Social Media, and SuccessMalcolm Gladwell is a threat to the economy. He is dangerously depleting the supply of memes at a time of economic distress and political change. For each Gladwell meme there is another - something more useful, something that means something, a whole series of unborn memes that will never see the light of day because there's Malcolm again, slurping from the meme pool like a drunken sailor. Even his hair is a meme. Sure, once we would have called it his "trademark" but those days are long gone. In a world of social media and Web 2.0 and whatever, Gladwell's hair ...
-
11.14.08Philip Rosedale: We Have the Right to InnovatePhilip Rosedale, Second Life founder, wandering evangelist, and noob-haired avatar, has a guest column on BBC in which he says that the 'coolest' technology is "anything born from the right we should all have to innovate." Now, frankly, I like Philip when he's floaty and his eyes gaze off in the distance. I remember when I met him at the Virtual World conference he had that faraway look that I either associated with someone who's so visionary that they're always paying attention to the horizon, although maybe he was looking for the restrooms or any means of escape. I suppose he ...
-
05.17.08Education Professional on Virtual World TrendsGlenn Wiebe, who blogs at History Tech and maintains the site Social Studies Central, recently blogged about future trends in the virtual space. Wiebe writes about the ongoing fight between educators and Congress, which is trying to pass the Deleting Online Predators Act to limit the use of Web 2.0 in schools. Wiebe writes that one solution to help Congress not be afraid of Web 2.0 in schools is "to use less threatening virtual worlds than Second Life." Wiebe cites a number of new sites, including MinyanLand geared towards kids in grades 4-8, and ActiveWorlds. He then points his readers to two ...
-
04.24.08Community Planning Crashes Head-First Into Web 2.0Planning cities and buildings - the real ones - has, for a long-time, been a top-down exercise. Meaning that concepts and city plans were, for the most part, implemented from on high through architects, city planners, consultants and developers, allowing for very little collaboration with those in the "bottom" and those for whom these projects would impact the most - namely, the ordinary citizen. And there are lessons for other industries in how typical hierarchal disciplines can use the tools of Web 2.0 to communicate with their "users". A fascinating article published by the American Planning Association argues that the Web 2.0 ...
-
04.10.08Librarian Outlines Trends in Online CommunitiesJill Hurst-Wahl, a lifelong information technologist and library scientist, visited the Memorial Library at the SUNY campus in upstate New York recently to offer some keen observations about social networks. Hurst-Wahl said that online communities are the "virtual coffee pot," a place for users to gather around a water cooler and discuss... well, anything. She also noted that the trend towards social networking will not abate any time soon. Here are a few of her observations, pulled from the SUNY Memorial Library blog: - Social Networking Tools (SNTs) will be everywhere. In the course management software, in the library catalog, in ...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.