Setpoint Originator

Second Life Future Salon Blog Launch

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?"

Sweet Accelerating.org Site Redesign

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:

Next LA Future Salon This Friday at UCLA w/ James "Second Life" Au, Nolan "Atari Founder" Bushnell, and Lewis "Training in Virtual Worlds" Johnson

"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! :-)

"Real Money In Virtual Worlds" Debate Audio from Accelerating Change 2004 at IT Conversations

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).

Google Maps + Almost Anything = Promising (Geo-Blog, Anyone?)

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?

Super Nova 2005 Conference To Cover Virtual Assets in Online Worlds (Amongst Other Things)

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.

Flickr Image Composites: 50 People See... + OG Google Maps Man, All In One

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:

Time-Lapse Video, Agent Modeling and Simulation: What's Next In Envisioning Complex Dynamic Systems?

For several years I've thought seriously of trying to start a company dedicated to advancing time-lapse video and computer generated time-lapse simulation. I'm not talking about your standard stationary single camera time-lapse with shots of clouds rolling by overhead or a single building being thrown up or car headlights becoming laser lines on a highway. Oh no, no, no, though sadly my periodic Google searches for time-lapse lead me to believe this is where the field is planning to keep hanging its hat for a while.

No, I'm talking about pioneering 1.) time-lapse on a whole new scale using new technologies for real world image capture and digital simulation and 2.) time-lapse for the over-riding purpose of examining the ways things work together as a system over time (not just one isolated plant blossoming in fast foward, nice as that is).

I'm talking about stuff like a shot from outer space that lasts five years and pans up the entire eastern seaboard at a scale where coastal cities are visible as little living systems, or a computer generated version of the accelerating evolution of our universe (from Big Bang to World Wide Web) straight from Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calander model, or a closely human-focused study of the spread and complexification of human civilization, innovation, demographics, and warfare etc. (portrayed at various scales of size and speed, alternately emphasizing the local and the global). I'm talking about big, hairy, breath-taking, life-changing, mental-model-making, profound-observation-provoking real and photo-realistic graphical time-lapse that will give us a clearer view of our world's systems, cycles, evolution and development. I'm talking about well-produced media models that engage our human-scale aesthetic and narrative sensibilities but play out over great spans of time to show us things that temporally thin and local narratives can not.

My dream here: For someone on the level of Massive Software, who did the breath-taking battle scenes for the Lord of the Rings films, to do a universal evolution or deep human history time-lapse simulation film of the kind only vaguely hinted at by existing big picture films like Baraka. Is anyone out there working on or thinking about something like this? Who might have it on their to-do list down the road? Is it Massive? Is it Pixar? Is it Godfrey Regio who made the brilliant Qatsi Trilogy? Is it James Cameron who just did Aliens of the Deep for IMAX 3D theaters? Who will it be?

Last year, after I started working with the Acceleration Studies Foundation I shared this general idea with ASF President John Smart. He liked the idea too and since we were organizing a conference on the topic of Accelerating Change we had conferences on the brain. So the first idea was that it might be valuable to start networking people with similar interests to present their ideas and resources at an event themed something like "Visualizing Complex Systems Over Time: Integrating Time-Lapse, Simulation, and Agent Modeling". I hadn't thought about it in a long while but it came back today and I wanted to float the idea out there.

If anyone shares an interest in this idea, has thoughts on the right imaging technologies, some good time-lapse links or any news of projects along these lines, please let me know. If the right pieces come together maybe we can push to start the ball rolling with a large meeting of the minds and industry in 2006 :-)

Image from Massive Software's Agent Library (when do we get these guys to start doing more than fight wars?):

Al Gore + Google + User Created Content = w00t!

Al Gore is doing something that may be more interesting than running for President. He's leading a new Cable TV venture called Current that's looking to augment and leverage younger viewers' simultaneous usage of the internet (quoting Gore: "Those who are using the Internet are often watching TV at the same time"). Part of Current's regular programming will be user submitted video clips that have gone through an online jury process, and Google itself has signed on to provide Current with realtime search data ala Google Zeitgeist that will air throughout the day.

I support this project 100%. I've been banging on about how fantastic these "open call" creative markets like Threadless are and how it would be so nice to see more of what the world is searching for (read: thinking about) ala Yahoo! Buzz and Google Zeitgeist. Now not only does Current sound like a great (and sudden) step in that direction, but it's being led by former Vice President and hair's-width-from-being-President of the United States (and futurist, I might add), Al Gore, and the real King of All Media (sorry Howard), Google. Pardon my Fr3^ch3l337, but WTF? ;-) I love it!

Just listen to Gore go: "The Internet opened a floodgate for young people whose passions are finally being heard, but TV hasn't followed suit... We intend to change that with Current, giving those who crave the empowerment of the Web the same opportunity for expression on television."

While it sounds like it could be a flash in the pan, my feeling is that the network must have some brilliant cards up its sleeve or Google would never have touched it with a ten-foot pole. In a vague but possibly revealing line, Google co-founder Sergey Brin recounts his initial skepticism before conversion: "[When first approached] I thought it would be an extraordinarily challenging endeavor... Having seen some of the work they've now put together, I think it's an extraordinary opportunity." I wonder what he saw...or saw in it... At the very, very least expect the successful pieces of Current's experimentation to be picked up by other networks (perhaps to their detriment: imagine how creepy, for example, Fox News open content submissions might be :-)

Depending on how heavily they get involved, this will be a great chance for Google to showcase some of its new search platforms and services like Google Video, Google Maps, and, most of all Google Video Blogs. Maybe this could even somehow help the lagging Orkut (probably not, though at least I'll always have a hook up for a place to stay in Brazil—Orkut users will know what I mean).

Plus, you know, it's just nice to see Al Gore looking happy again (and, I might add, rather dapper, ha—see below). Best of luck to Al, Google, Current, and all those viewers-turned-film-maker-blogger-producers. Current will start broadcasting in place of News World International on August 1st. Further reading: Slashdot, SF Chronicle, CNET

Google The World: Google Maps Incorporates Satellite Imagery

Google has updated Google Maps with satellite imagery from Keyhole. Just go to Google Maps and click on "satellite" in the upper right-hand corner.

Then zooooooom on in to ground level. Pure beauty.

May I suggest typing in your childhood address to achieve just the right mix of nostalgia, wonder, and imagination for what could be next.

The New York Times has an article with more info. One of the breakthroughs here is Google's offering access to these high-res satellite maps for free. Not a lot of high-res access to territory outside of the US yet as far as I can see, but how long until that changes? Now bring on the services. Bring on the games. Bring on the world's realtime search info (or aggregate it ala Google Zeitgeist).

Google the world!