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
Games, especially video games and online games, are incredibly fascinating. They can be beautiful, intriguing, social, but in order to become a success, they need to be engaging. There is a kind of gold rush to games by marketing specialists, human resources experts, experimental economists, psychologists, neurologists, educators, and they… Continue reading
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
Yesterday the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, held a public speech – for the first time ever. He was dealing with ethical issues such as torture and secrecy. I’d like to focus on some other aspects of the speech (full version here) by… Continue reading
I made this blogpost using a new service, Storify, which is currently in beta preview, and which makes it easy to curate blogposts, tweets, status updates, videos, pictures etc… (more about this at the end of the story).
A strange sequence of events: last Saturday I was on a personal finance event (I’m a financial journalist) in Brussels, Belgium, and the day after I went to the Photo Museum of Antwerp (Belgium). I visited the exposition of the work of Willy Kessels (1898-1974), who is considered as one… Continue reading
I saw this fascinating video about Minecraft (via Kotaku). Wikipedia explains: Minecraft is a sandbox game which allows players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. It is currently in development by Markus “Notch” Persson on the Java platform. The gameplay is inspired by Dwarf Fortress,… Continue reading
Where does our inspiration come from? It seems that for Philip Rosedale the inspiration for a virtual world came from Burning Man, an annual event in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The idea is to build a city for about a week, collaborating and exchanging gifts. It… Continue reading
Talking about OpenSim, John “Pathfinder†Lester, an expert and strategist in educational online communities and virtual worlds, launches an open club for anyone interested in group explorations of virtual worlds on the Hypergrid and sharing their experiences with others. Pathfinder officially starts the Hypergrid Adventurers Club: We’ll be meeting regularly… Continue reading
I attended a wonderful Metanomics community meeting in Second Life, where Jennette Forager (Metanomics) interviewed Maria Korolov from Hypergrid Business, a website focusing on enterprise users of virtual worlds. Korolov talked about the development of OpenSim, the open source server platform for hosting virtual worlds. OpenSim is compatible with the… Continue reading