Wow. Typepad just sent an email saying they lost some pictures from my blog, and sure enough, there are missing pics in the posts below. Dangerous stuff. Will fix it when I have a chance. Good luck to Typepad in sorting this out as it seems to have affected others, probably many worse than me.
psst... psst... hey, reader, you into virtual worlds? wanna meet some creative, like-minded peeps? then on the down low i got a link for you to check out:
*NOW TELL EVERYBODY ABOUT IT!!!*
The Second Life Community Convention, October 8-9 at the New York Law School. Only 95 bucks (organized by unpaid volunteers entirely through Second Life as a labor of love) for an open bar party where everyone will imbibe and divulge their most secret virtual world projects, followed by a full day of conniving with others who are building the metaverse in their own little and big ways. No other show like it on Earth. You know our motto: come for the State of Play, stay for the SLCC ;-)
Here's a pic of our NY Law School recreation in Second Life from a New World Notes article:
Here's a pic of my avatar floating around in front of a picture of the real NYLS interior (used in making the virtual build):
We'll be playing around with some mixed-reality back-and-forth between the physical and virtual event. Please email with questions and ideas. If this is your bag, consider registering, and swing by the Second Life Future Salon blog.
For the time-being, all of my blogging has moved to the Second Life Future Salon blog. Anyone interested in me directly can find more on the About page.
Right now I'm writing and doing research bridging concepts of the metaverse (like what Second Life is becoming) and mirror worlds (like what Google Earth is becoming) and working hard to organize:
I just moved to New York if anyone wants to look me up there. Thanks for dropping by!
Jerry Paffendorf
Community Director, Acceleration Studies Foundation
I've spent the last few days putting together the Second Life Future Salon blog which you can now check out at http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com. A lot of energy is going into this project and the blog will have guest authors and daily posts for sure (not only about SL), so add a feed or check back often if you're interested in what we're up to.
Our first meeting in Second Life will happen on Thursday, April 28th at 5:30 PM PST. Check the blog for more info. This is my first time trying to create, moderate and maintain an active online community, and feedback, news, links, story suggestions, etc. are greatly appreciated.
Bonus incentive to stop by: is Bruce Sterling modeling himself on SNOOPYbrown Zamboni?:
Click here to read "Already An Influence?"
Thank heaven and Photoshop the Acceleration Studies Foundation homepage has entered the '90s with a bang! We've moved away from the Word document look and now we're rocking a beautiful site that's beginning to do justice to the high-end futures work and community we're creating. w00t!
Click the partial pic below to check it out and let us know what you think:
"Come check out the stuff not yet being taught in your classes!" I love that line in the UCLA/LA Future Salon description.
If you're in the LA area on Friday drop by the UCLA campus at 8 PM for a free and friendly meeting with presentations on Virtual Worlds by (left to right above) James Au (embedded journalist in Second Life), Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari and CEO of uWink), and Dr. Lewis Johnson (professor at USC and director of Virtual World research programs).
Check out all the goods at ucla.accelerating.org.
From Jame's presentation abstract:
"A homeless hacker with a virtual mansion; a flying avatar controlled by nine disabled people; an online Burning Man and an in-world Oz; a virtual simulation of schizophrenia; weddings, funerals, wars, memorials, and tax protests; politics, religion, sexuality, economic shifts and general social upheaval. Highlights from two years of articles from the embedded journalist in an online world--and thoughts on what they say about the future of online community and journalism."
The three talks will be followed by a panel Q&A session from 9:30 - 9:45 (which usually ends up running longer). After the salon, people usually walk down to the California Pizza Kitchen restaurant at the corner of Broxton and Weyburn in Westwood Village. There'll be about 60 people at the Salon. Wish I could go, but I'll be in New Jersey. Someone go, write me, and tell me what happened! :-)
Earlier today I posted on the upcoming Super Nova 2005 sub-theme of the business implications of Virtual Worlds. Now I see that the "Real Money In Virtual Economies" debate from Accelerating Change 2004 has just come up for free download at IT Conversations.
As an organizer of this panel, I can tell you truthfully that this is indeed a massively multi-player market moshpit. I would not want to run into this bunch in a dark alley:
But intimidating (almost criminal) looks aside (ha), these are all great fellows :-). From left to right that's Brian Green (Founder, Near Death Studios), Jamie Hale (President, Gaming Open Market), Daniel James (CEO, Three Rings), and Steve Salyer (President, IGE). Second Life's Cory Ondrejka (not pictured) is the one on the mic framing the debate and moderating the conversation.
IT Conversations has a nice descripition:
"This debate will clue you in to one of the most interesting developments most of us haven't yet heard of: virtual property markets and their intellectual property issues. The participants make legal, dollar, behavioral, and design forecasts for the virtual property markets within massively multi-player games, debating the practice from seller and designer viewpoints, and business vs. gaming intentions."
See a whole spread of free AC2004 audio here (with more talks posted every week or so until they're all up).
A couple of provocative new Google Maps bits (see my pitch for a "WikiCity" app).
Danah Boyd spotlights a Craigslist overlay (see pic below with available apartments!). Yea, that rules. Jon Udell was right when he said Google Maps 'isn't a service, it's a service factory' and called it 'an environment we colonize'. This could go places sooner rather than later.
The Make blog also has a small round-up of GM projects. A commenter notes that you can see the annual Burning Man city early in one of it cycles of being built (see pic below). Cute. Note also for reference that a group called Local Projects has been working with the concept of memory maps (mentioned in the post) since 2002 (see City of Memory), though Google Maps + Flickr (+ geo-blogs, see below) will take it to the next level.
So I'm now wondering two things. One, more as an aside, when will we see some really cool video games built on top of this (finally giving Americans the incentive to learn geography :-). And two, when will I be able to sign up for my own geo-blog through Google? They should provide simple tools for GPS-integration and space annotation (pinning text and media files to geography), and allow me to integrate my geo-blog with those of others to (as the saying will go) collectively annotate the planet.
There are companies like WaveMarket and Dodgeball that are already working in mapspace, location intelligence, and public authorship. What now from their point of view? Does everything migrate to Google's standard? What are the necessary conditions of openness and flexibility before a company can begin building their own for-profit services on top of Google's geo-spatial Web platform?
Just got an email update on the upcoming Super Nova conference from event organizer Kevin Werbach. From the mailer:
Technological and business trends are converging to change the way we work, live, and play. Did you know that:
•There are more than 10 million active weblogs, a number doubling every five months?
•The largest type of traffic on the global Internet is video peer-to-peer file sharing?
•You may soon get your TV from a phone company, your phone service from a software company, and your Internet access from your city government?
•More cameras were sold last year in mobile phones than as stand-alone film or digital cameras?
•The annual market for buying and selling "virtual assets" in multi-player online games is over $800 million per year?
Super Nova will be held on June 20-22 in San Francisco. I haven't been able to attend one yet and unfortunately can't make it to this year's (I'm waaay out in New Jersey), but I've met Kevin and he's great (as a relative newb to the violent gang of tech world conference organizers I had to be jumped in and pummeled for 15 minutes by him, Tim O'Reilly, Andrew Zolli and some others... ouch ;-), and I've enjoyed the Super Nova 2004 audio hosted at IT Conversations.
I'm really excited to see Super Nova 2005's sub-theme of the business implications of online Virtual Worlds. Aside from the $880 million global market for virtual swords, skirts, and avatars, etc., more reality-based worlds and next-gen gaming platforms are also emerging user creation and commerce platforms for selling things that both originate within and exist outside of game worlds. An increasing number of worlds, games, and surrounding networks will function as media content portals on the real world, and I always enjoy seeing the non-gaming business community taking note and making contributions here (even though it worries many gamers sick...).
See the Super Nova blog and Kevin's personal blog, Werblog, for some good stuff.
Last month a Flickr user named brevity wrote "a program to blend Flickr images which share the same tags. No human is involved in choosing, positioning, or blending the images."
Here are a couple of the beautiful, Rothko-like results:
"50 People See Sadness and Happiness"
"50 People Experience the Seasons"
I see these works as a triple bulls-eye: aesthetically satisfying, intellectually exciting, and emotionally moving.
But wait, that's not all. So I go to brevity AKA Neil Kandalgaonkar's website and see that he's the one who first figured out how to draw GPS pathways on Google Maps as I wrote about here and here. It's a small Web after all.
Thanks, Neil. This is now officially a double triple bulls-eye. One triple on the art side, one triple on the tech side. Get on with your bad self :-)
GPS-drawn circle from Neil's site:
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