The periods between the different Metanomics seasons are unsettling. It’s not that Second Life has nothing else to offer, there are lots of intellectually stimulating gatherings. Metanomics however stands out. If you want to convince someone that Second Life definitely is worthwhile, this great show and gathering is a very good place to start.
The first show of the Metanomics spring season begins on Wednesday, January 27 at 12 pm PST, when host Robert Bloomfield interviews Douglas Rushkoff, correspondent and writer of Frontline’s Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier – a PBS documentary that explores how our lives have changed due to our digital world. From how we learn, work, play and even make war, Digital Nation documents what we’ve gained – and what we’ve lost.
Find out a lot more about Wednesday’s show and watch the Digital Nation trailer on the Metanomics site.
Do virtual worlds and social media in general help us to build bridges between cultures? That was the difficult question discussed at the latest We Are The Network gathering. At least one practical idea was suggested for enhancing communication in Second Life, but as usual the idea could be applied elsewhere.
The idea was suggested by the organizer of our meetings, Joel Foner. As often, the simpler the tool the better. Joel looked at Twitter for his inspiration.
Twitter makes it possible to follow what particular people say, but it makes it easy to go beyond that using hashtags. Those hashtags function as tags which enable you for instance to see all the tweets about a conference or an event like the uprising in Iran, regardless whether you follow the authors of the tweets or not.
Joel suggested that Second Life would make it possible to use hashtags as well – and I would suggest also related tools such as the Trending Topics feature which enable you to see what is the talk of the town.
I have now idea how complicated this would be, technologically speaking – maybe integrating Twitter in Second Life would be a solution.
What would be nice is that people would be free to use hashtags or not and of course whether to look at the “inter-group” stream or not. Basically there would be three levels of text-communication: instant messaging between individuals, group chat and “inter-group” chat. Maybe the inter-group chat could stream outside Second Life into the Twitter-universe and beyond.
I posted a story on PBS MediaShift about how to engage a community using meta-stories. What do I mean by “meta-stories”? In a newsroom context it simply means writing not only about “the news out there”, but also about what the community is doing (on the blogs, on the site, in a virtual environment…) and about what the newsroom is doing and how the interaction goes.
As a community organizer in Second Life or in other virtual&online environments, it could help to do something similar: write about what happens in the community, about what the organizers & facilitators are doing, and invite people in to add their take.
The post on PBS MediaShift is about newsrooms, but I think you could easily expand it to other communities:
How do we create a community? This question is frequently asked by editors as well as by marketing managers and other business people. More and more, I don’t think you can create communities.
Communities already exist. You can try and offer them a news service or a platform that the community finds useful and engaging, but forget trying to control that community or shape it to meet the needs of your media company. The community calls the shots, not you or your company.
In December, I attended the LeWeb conference in Paris. I was impressed by Chris Pirillo, who told us that people who view communities as “tools” are tools themselves. Control is an illusion. (In fact, during his passionate presentation, Pirillo said “control is bullshit.”)
With that in mind, I’d like to suggest a simple way to make your newsroom or website do a better job of connecting with the community you serve: writing meta-stories.
Meta-stories are stories about what’s happening on your website, and about what happens in the newsroom. They’re a great way to engage the community.
Cultural translation happens whenever we try to communicate across cultural differences. These differences might be triggered by language, ethnicity, geography, time or other conceptual variations that create communication hurdles. This week we’ll explore how social media and virtual worlds affect cultural translation, in both positive and negative ways.
What are the possible triggers for cultural translation hurdles? Where do they originate? Have new hurdles appeared with the rise of the always on, globally networked society, or are they just exposed in new ways? Do social media and virtual worlds assist in reducing or removing these differences, or do they exacerbate the problems?
As always, suggested reading and more information can be found on JoelFoner.com.
I recently got my initiation in the world of the hackerspaces. These are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects. In my town, Antwerp (Belgium), we’re looking for such a space right now.
“Projects” is rather vague, but then again, I guess the projects involved will be as diverse as the people involved: electronics meeting social media, ICT meeting handicraft…
Hackerspaces are an international phenomenon as this site shows. This video gives a better feel for what it’s all about (I found it on the site Security4all):
You could call this grassroots innovation. It tells us a lot about the future of capitalism. While we used to think about society and the economy as about a mixture of institutions (state institution, the judiciary…) and the market, we clearly have to add the collaborative layer in order to understand what is happening.
I don’t think this open source-like, collaborative layer is anti-capitalism, anti-state etc, it is an extra dimension, it goes somehow beyond the old political oppositions. Open source may be free and based on meritocracy, but implementing open source solutions may very well be a business venture, to give but one example.
The fact that it is not anti- but rather beyond does not mean there is no fundamental or even disruptive change. Stowe Boyd does an excellent job defining “social business”:
Metaphorically, a social business will seem more like a village than an army, and where a lot of 20th management approaches will be obsolete. We can expect these features:
* ubiquitous use of social tools, and social networks,
* greater levels of personal autonomy,
* self-organization of groups and projects,
* very porous boundaries with the world,
* high reliance on non-financial motivation, or personal meaning and purpose,
* internal marketplaces for ideas and talent,
* and senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats.
Now what can virtual environments do for hackerspaces? As a newbie hackerspace-guy I have the impression that the physical, the materiality is of great importance here. We talk about actual interventions in the physical space, about labs experimenting with how technology changes our physical surroundings and our real life relationships.
Virtual worlds in this context will have to be like an augmentation of reality, enabling for instance the exchange of experiments and experiences between the internationally dispersed hackerspaces, or by allowing the construction of prototypes (enabling the builds to materialize using 3D printers for instance).
If you have experience or information regaring the interaction of virtual spaces with hackerspaces, please let me know!
So may “dumbing down” work as a strategy for Second Life? Do we need a Second Life Lite, for instance on the Facebook platform? My previous post got some interesting comments. Lalo Telling reacted:
Facebook does not allow accounts in the name of avatars. They have, in fact, completed their second annual purge of such accounts. (Example of recent reporting here — http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2010/01/is-… )
Facebook does not give a rodent’s posterior about their users’ privacy — http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_…
Therefore, a “Second Life Lite” running in Facebook will automatically, irrevocably and publicly link an avatar’s name with the RL name of its human counterpart, which: [a] currently violates Second Life’s Term of Service; [b] could expose that person to potential disclosure of their activity in SL *and* everywhere else on the Web, which may in turn lead to [c] harassment, fraud, phishing, and identity theft.
“Second Life Lite” may be a good idea, but Facebook is absolutely the wrong platform to consider using as a portal.
I fully agree avatars should have the possibility to keep their real life typists anonymous. I also do realize keeping your real life identity is part of Second Life culture, but then again, there is also group of Second Life residents who explicitly want to link SL and RL identity, who even want to use their RL names rather than SL nicknames in-world. CEO Mark Kingdon of Linden Lab acknowledges this and we should get this possibility somewhere in 2010.
I want to push this even further. I suspect that many potential SL residents stay away because they dislike the secrecy of SL folks. Facebook is popular just because it maps real life relationships on an online platform – the famous social graph. SL is far less popular because it does not do that – I have the impression (but I could be wrong here) that especially young people dislike this because they are looking for real life friends and relationships, and they somehow consider Second Life as being a fake world, just because of this secrecy.
I do not say I agree with that, and people should have the possibility to use nicknames without revealing real life identity, but I think that SL culture is at odds with mainstream online youth culture here. This is another reason to at least offer the possibility to link directly to your online identity on platforms such as Facebook.
Of course, we could also connect to other platforms such as the location based social network Foursquare, or to Twitter or Plurk. But if you really want Second Life to go mainstream, Facebook is the place where you have to be. The reason I’m in favor of Facebook is not because I endorse each and every Facebook policy, but because that’s the place people are these days (at least in the English-speaking part of the world, I guess other online platforms should be taken into account in other parts of the world).
What’s your take about Second Life Lite and Facebook? What about the technical challenges? (how would people using only the Facebook-version pay for goods and services, for instance?)
I am a happy (?) farmer now on an island on Facebook. The island looks a lot like a Metaplace thing, which is normal, because this game, Island Life, is Raph Koster’s creation and it seems he used lots of stuff from his Metaplace universe (which closed down).
I learned about Island Life on Second Thoughts, where Prokofy Neva reports that Raph said more people had joined this game in the first day than had joined MP in two years and the retention was good.
The game is still in beta, but it seems simple, but you’re not really invited to create your own world. What strikes me is that the game has such a success compared to Metaplace.
Which brings me back to the theme in my previous post: keep things simple. Maybe not only in order to respond to emergencies such as the earthquake in Haiti, but also in order to appeal to a mainstream audience.
I’m not a technologist, but would it be inconceivable to have a Second Life Lite, which would run in Facebook, and which be just fine for folks to participate in events without actually building and creating stuff? An application which would not need a download or fancy hardware, but yet sophisticated enough to give that immersive feeling of actually sharing the same virtual space with others?
It would open up events of all sorts for the broad Facebook audience. I guess some of those new users would eventually level up to become builders and creators themselves.
I’m more and more convinced that this is the way to go if Second Life wants its user base to grow substantially.
Roland Legrand
Read also:
New World Notes: Forrester Analyst Suggests Second Life Stymied by “Iron Law of Oligarchy” – He’s Half Right
Social media are mobilizing for supporting the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. In cases of extreme urgency like now, simple tools work best.
Mashable reports how Twitpics and updates on Twitter and Facebook sweep the web. Mashable also explains how to help online efficiently (checking out the organizations which you want to support).
Talking about simple tools, what do you think about texting? Mashable says the Red Cross collected more than 800,000 dollar through a text message campaign.
From the very simple to the complex, like Second Life. Wagner James Au on the New World Notes asks in open forum whether there are Second Life fundraisers supporting the victims of the Earthquake in Haiti.
I rushed in-world (the second life-way of saying one enters second life) and found a message from millay Freschi, the Rings Discussions:
HAITI EARTHQUAKE URGENT ACTION
Wed Jan 13 21:32:34 2010
We’re all wondering what we can do. The note attached has Siri’s Information card embedded and I have included information from the Red Cross. We know they’re going to need two things DESPERATELY! Blood and money. Give blood so that internationally we increase the supply. i’m going right now to do just that. Donate to Red Cross. Every dime will help this resource poor country to rebuild. Please, do what you can.
peace
~millay
Attached was information from the Red Cross:
(…)
12:30am (1/13/2010) You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti.
6:20 pm The American Red Cross is pledging an initial $200,000 to assist communities impacted by this earthquake, and is prepared to take further action as local responders assess the situation. As with most earthquakes, we expect to see immediate needs for food, water, temporary shelter, medical services and emotional support.
Furthermore there was talk on the in-world Chilbo Community chat channel about organizing events to support projects in Haiti which have been hit by the earthquake.
I also contacted very well connected residents, but even they had no extra information about fundraising actions. I’m pretty sure initiatives will be announced in the coming hours and days, but I have the impression that Second Life is very good for organizing longer term projects, not for immediate responses to emergencies.
So we had another great discussion in Second Life at We Are The Network, this time about plagiarism and related issues. Even though the topic in itself is interesting, I felt rather tired.
Of course, bloggers and journalists are upset when other media use their work without mentioning the author. That’s sloppy, unacceptable etc. As a journalist, I know my colleagues complain regularly that their work has been stolen by other media outlets. I can imagine that those media who actually charge subscription fees for access to their content feel threatened by plagiarism and over-extensive quoting.
But I also think that maybe the issue is not that dramatic. Some media expert once said that bloggers and journalists should really be worried if no plagiarism would occur because maybe that would mean that their work is not that valuable.
I’m convinced that if a blog, site or whatever media outlet consistently brings information (scoops, ideas…) that is very relevant for a particular community, and if that outlet really reaches out to that community, that blog or site will be rewarded. So I think journalists and bloggers should focus on bringing that information and on reaching out to their community – and if they succeed in doing just that, in most cases they’ll discover that those who specialize in plagiarism will soon enough be rejected by that same community.
Just look at media work as engaging into a conversation. Who do you think is most likely to be appreciated, the guy who tries to come up with some interesting thoughts or the other one who systematically repeats or rephrases what the first guy said?
Am I being too optimistic here? Feel free to give your take on this issue (and have a look at JoelFoner.com for links and information about this topic).
Joel Foner gives more information about these practices on his site. He mentions services which write your paper using “your ideas”, naming you as the sole author. Other practices want to improve search engine placement (search engines penalize duplicates, and re-writing can fool the engines).
I don’t know whether other practices will be discussed. What about services such as Posterous and Tumblr which make it very easy to re-blog posts? This is not different from re-tweeting, so it seems. The original blog is mentioned, and sometimes blogs make it clear that they appreciate re-blogging.
Is tweeting and re-tweeting fundamentally different from blogging and re-blogging? If so, why? Because tweets are no longer than 140 characters? Because re-tweeting is part of the game? But what about short form blog posts? And how much people can quote from other posts and in what proportion to “new” content?
The periods between the different Metanomics seasons are unsettling. It’s not that Second Life has nothing else to offer, there are lots of intellectually stimulating gatherings. Metanomics however stands out. If you want to convince someone that Second Life definitely is worthwhile, this great show and gathering is a very good place to start.