28 April

Sense of Place

I think we normally speak of work being done “in Powerpoint,” “in Word,” and so forth. This morning I looked at a transcript of people discussing virtual worlds while in one. The words “Qwaq” and “Forums” appear once each. The word “here” appears 49 times. We are finally getting to the point of having discussion about the results, not the technology. The program itself disappears, in just the same same way as we usually discuss being “at a Web-site” rather than “in Firefox” or “in Safari.” (Internet Explorer users may indeed reflect their tool's relative intrusion by thinking of their activity as being “in IE” more often.) [Read More!]
10:00:13 - Stearns - 2 comments

24 April

If 100 people watch a PowerPoint together on the Internet, is it still boring?

My last post referenced a movie of a “talk show” in Second Life, prompting John to ask about the relationship of avatar richness to the experience. I think there's a simple trick that's worth making explicit. [Read More!]
10:38:08 - Stearns - 5 comments

23 April

Inventing the Present

Here is some new-media content about Information Week's Mitch Wagner and Gartner's Steve Prentice vs SL's CFO and even Prokofy Neva. It is mostly about Second Life's power and problems and how that relates to others. Croquet's Qwaq Forums comes up a lot.

You can probably get out of this whatever you're predisposed to. (I took away that Geoffrey Moore is right.)

Do follow the link from there to the video. It's long and not densely packed, but it is a good tour of the non-technical state of virtual worlds — i.e., the things that matter to most of the world. Ten years from now, this is going to be how archaeologists remember today.
08:41:10 - Stearns - 2 comments