Kansas to Cairo: vanishing cultural differences, or rather avoiding stereotypes?

If there is one thing which seems to be perfectly suited for collaboration and research in a world such as Second Life, it seems to be architecture. If such a project also involves geographically dispersed teams, education, and different cultures, it really becomes a fascinating challenge. Students from Cairo and… Continue reading

Existential questions about virtual worlds

It has been interesting to be away from virtual worlds stuff for a few weeks. I had some catching up to do, but at first sight it seems not much has changed. There is another famous Linden Lab employee leaving the company, Jack Linden. Other virtual worlds are presenting themselves… Continue reading

Looking for meaning in social streams using Hootsuite and Storify

I’m working hard covering the crisis in the euro zone (Ireland, Portugal, Spain, etc). It’s a crisis which is not “just financial”, it’s a real social tragedy as well, and I feel it should get more attention on networks such as Twitter. It seems that the newest version of some… Continue reading

Mary Meeker sees ‘unusually high level of global innovation’

Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) talks in her recent state of the internet about disruptive innovation: new or incumbent players disrupting whole industries by offering cheap or free products and services (Google, Amazon… ) or by creating new markets (Apple, Facebook, Zynga… ). One of the remarkable aspects of the recent… Continue reading

Howard Rheingold’s virtual community / social media course 2010

Have a look at the interesting mindmap of this course about virtual communities and social media at Stanford, the instructor is Howard Rheingold. In fact you can get an overview of the course material using a concept map or this Prezi presentation: Virtual Community/Social Media Course on Prezi

Qwiki wants wikis to act human

Just a quick shout here about Qwiki, which does something extra with wikis: “working to deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.” The site explains: We’ve all seen science fiction films (or read novels) where computers are able to collect data on behalf… Continue reading

FT Alphaville expands chat sessions

This is nice, and another example of how mainstream media embrace social media: the Financial Times runs a number of blogs, and one of their major blogs is FT Alphaville (about all things markets). It’s a very classical blog, but they also have a daily chat session and a kind… Continue reading

Mainstream media embrace social media

While there are still journalists out there who ‘don’t get’ social media or try to ignore them as much as possible, it seems that mainstream media are more and more embracing blogs, video sharing, social networks and microblogging. The coverage of the US elections demonstrates this: have a look at… Continue reading

Making sense of our streams, in real time

How do we make sense of the streams of information on social networks? It’s easy to get overwhelmed and difficult to tell a good story about what happens on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. I’m a strong believer in virtual worlds as islands in those streams, where we can gather, and… Continue reading