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!]

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!]

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.

There's a photo of me in the current Information Week. Only it isn't a “photo,” and it isn't “me.” [Read More!]

[For ITF readers who haven't seen this on Wetmachine.]

In conjunction with Reporters without Borders, the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm is hosting a virtual demonstration Web event today to protest the imprisonment of more than 60 cyber-dissidents worldwide, and the thousands of jammed or blocked Web sites.

It's a sort of sub-2D affair, in which you can't communicate with other protestors or leave your permanent mark, although they do ask for your name.

Is Croquet a medium for individual interactions or group interactions? Both! [Read More!]

Another Croquet-based project has been launched this week. Cobalt is the first such coding project to be done by Duke University, which is also the home of the Croquet Consortium. [Read More!]

We seem to be wired to be able to solve difficult problems, but only in a community where we have support. To create that support, we have throughout history sung songs of heroes around the campfire. We are inspired by movies. Militaries breed close-knit groups and create splendid uniforms and other rituals. We go to church. With a support group, we overcome depression. We set our sports records before a stadium full of humans cheering us on.

Alone on Antarctic ice, we die.

[Read More!]

Lord help us. Microsoft is putting Windows on the OLPC box. Note the added memory.

I had been working with an engineer from a large multi-national company. I had never met or conversed with this engineer except by email, but I understood from her name that she was female.

Having been married for 17 years to an MIT graduate, I like to think I have some appreciation of how women engineers behave and how they should be treated.

In the course of our work, this engineer created an avatar, and she commented on how it looked like her. Her model was based on a typical digital content industry product. Few people other than my wife look like these figures - Barbie dolls on steroids. By what turned out to be an accident of technology, this model arrived on my desktop stark naked – no clothes and no hair. But it was highly detailed, and artfully done.

[Read More!]