blinkit

'Meet me by the neko slave club'

Today's bLINKit: Corporations that rushed headlong into SL to set up boring corporate sites that no one ever visited are rethinking their approach to virtual worlds, says PC Mag. They're going to use them for meetings. IBM, according to the story, reckons it can save nine years of employee time per week by replacing phone conference calls among its global cadre of 330,000 employees with virtual world meetings:

A virtual meeting space, [Ian] Hughes [of IBM] said, is a good replacement for a telephone conference call, which typically has a lot of "dead" time at the beginning as participants dial in. A virtual meeting emulates a real one, giving people a chance to mingle.

Mingling would be fine, as long as participants don't mind waiting minutes for SL environments to load up, clothes to download, and missing textures to finally kick in, only to see that their counterparts from across the continent have recently gone Gorean and are dressed the part.
 

'New worlds' at UBC

WMD: Catching up, here's a feature story I wrote about a project at UBC to use the technology of computer games and virtual worlds for research and education. In other words, students in select courses are being given the option of building, say, an ancient Greek temple using 3D modelling and rendering tools as opposed to writing a standard text-based paper about it. The idea is to eventually use these models to create networked virtual worlds which profs,students and the public can join, perhaps as avatars. The longterm goal: virtual recreations of the forum in Athens, and virtual counterparts of archaeological digs that grow in cyberspace as the physical dig in Armenia or northwest B.C. is uncovered.

I let this simmer for far too long before committing it to words, but the outcome pleased those involved, in that they recognized themselves and their work in the piece.

Because of the length, I won't reproduce it here, so I'm not sure the link will last. The future of such links remains in debate as the Courier remakes its online presence. Read it while you can.

Europa, Europa: SL demographics

SL Neighbourhood Update: According to demographic data for June (stupidly, I've lost the source of this information, but I found it in a past post at the excellent New World Notes), one quarter of the active avatars in SL are American. American residents also participate in SL beyond their numbers, racking up nearly 35 per cent of the total hours users spent in the world. But if anyone dominates SL, it's Europeans, who make up, by a rough count, almost half of the active residents. I've noted this before, in the increasing presence of European languages on the chat logs and Eurocentric buildings and institutions appearing on the landscape. Just across from me, an Italian avie is building what looks like an art house/gallery in the sky. It's massive, with several floors and ten times the floor space of my flying loft. And although I can see the building from my living room, I have to see anyone actually in it. The Euros are on when the North Americanos slumber.

Chief among the Europeans are Germans followed by the French and Brits. My hunch about Dutch going into SL in a big way was correct. Despite Holland having one-sixth the population of Canada, they rank one level above Canadian residents in both number of active avatars and number of hours spent in the world.

Asians are generally down the list, but NWN notes that Japan has come on strong lately, with a look and in-world culture uniquely their own.

Other updates: according to NWN, Linden Labs has declared gambling illegal in SL. That's huge.

And around my hood: the neopagan I sold my initial land to awhile back is building a castle. There's that art house project across the way. And some very ordinary, and refreshingly so, new houses have popped up. But whenever I log on, there's still seldom anyone around. It's not very neighbourly.

The pic: the flag of a united Europe flies over my hood.

Today's bLINKit: Neocons on a cruise, and how they go fascist when lounging at sea.

SL update: Europe invades

SL Neighbourhood Update: The hood has changed yet again. The extensive townhouse development west of me vanished overnight, to be replaced with smaller homes and empty lots for sale. There's also, for the first time in eons, a retail development nearby, and it's a half respectable looking mall with an interior courtyard open to the sky (I can literally leap out the front door of my skyhome and land in the middle of it). Meantime, the two big condo towers that sat empty forever to the southwest of me also vanished, seemingly overnight, and have been replaced by a much smaller single building, which is also empty. And that seems to be the cycle of many SL economic hopes and dreams: people enter the world, get excited, buy land, develop it with a retail or housing project, and then stand back as it utterly fails. It's like watching successive government make work projects going on all around me. Meanwhile, the fellow that built his neopagan reserve, which now includes my old lot, seems to have finished his project, but I never see anybody there.

The bigget macro story of past months seems to be a large increase in the number of European residents. In the old days, SL was populated largely by Americans, Brits and Canadians, with some Australians. Now there are Germans, Italians, French and, for some reason, tons of Dutch. (Few Asians though, which is odd considering how wired places like Hong Kong are, or that Korea is the most online culture in the world. Perhaps it's the dominance of English in SL, or the absence of bubble tea houses.) And what do the continental Euorpeans bring? Dance parties. They like to rave. They've also altered the most popular sites ranked according to traffic. When I started SL more than a year ago, the top sites were casinos and a strip club called Barbies. And some more educational things. Now the top sites in the world are Ibezia-like dance and party islands and resorts. Ah Europe: great art, architecture and lots of flashing lights.

Regular reader Karen sent a link to a PC Magazine article about how online activities like SL are virtual flashes in a digital pan and doomed to disappear. I can't say the article is wrong, but if SL disappears, it's because it will be replaced with something that's better. Perhaps something that doesn't crash every 30 minutes. And maybe less like Ibezia.

Today's bLINKit: Is Google the new Big Brother? Opinions differ, especially those coming from Google lawyers.

Virtual land baron/SL business overhype

SL Neighbourhood Update: If only real estate in RL were this lucrative. I finally sold my land. It went to an affable fellow who had bought the parcels on either side of me and wanted to complete his spread with the missing middle piece (mine). He's setting up a quiet, "neo pagan" spiritual retreat for him and his friends. He's already framed it with a hedge and outfitted it with rustic buildings, implements and a giant garden pentagram, all presumably neo-pagan. The top pic shows us just as we were concluding the deal and I was taking a last nostalgic look at my property. Then I turned around and bought the land right next door, shown in the second pic, with a view of the neo-pagan hedge on the property border. The new lot is the same size and in the same neighbourhood as the old one.

And I also turned a good profit. I sold my original land for $10K (in Linden dollars, the currency of SL.). A little less than a year ago, I paid $512 for it, which represents an amazing profit for my investment. But the cheap original purchase price was part of a program by SL's parent company Linden Labs to provide affordable "First Land" for new residents. They've since abandoned that program and now simply try to expand the world as much as possible to add more real estate to bring prices down. But that means no one is ever going to find land for $512 ever again, especially in the established areas, where prices are like a Bob Rennie wet dream. The new property I bought went for $6K, which means I pocketed $4K for the night, which is not bad. And all in a world of little pixels.

Today's bLINKit: PC Mag takes a good hard look at the hype surrounding SL and whether it's truly the emerging business marketing tool many people say it is. Not only are claims of "millions" of users in SL highly exaggerated, says PC Mag, but the virtual "stores" and "campuses" in the world, from Reuters to Reebok, might be fairly lonely places:

In December, Greg Verdino, the vice president of emerging channels at the tech-savvy marketing firm Digitas, took a tour of Second Life's big-name business campuses, including Starwood's virtual hotel, the Aloft, and virtual stores from American Apparel, Toyota, and Reebok. None of them contained even a single customer.

And the much vaunted use of SL avatars to hold meetings and seminars might also be more awkward and less efficient than they're hyped to be. IBM for example encourages many of its far flung employees to meet as SL avatars in the world for business meetings. The company, which spends $10 million US a year on creating a virtual presence for itself in virtual worlds, believes virtual 3D chats are more fun and also more social than standard telephone calls. But, adds PC Mag, these in-world gatherings might also be...

...a huge time sink. In some ways, virtual-world chat is just a more cumbersome and time-consuming version of instant messaging, and although Web-based video conferencing has been around for years, offering a visual experience that's in some ways superior to 3D chat, most people still prefer good old-fashioned telephone calls.

 

Bug wars: The next offensive

WMD: They're back. I found a nesting area in a plastic tray of pens, pencils, paper clips and a million other pieces of junk. Needless to say, the contents went into a Ziploc and the Ziploc into my freezer (which already is full of Ziplocs of books and papers and my cycling saddlebag) and the tray went into the garbage. I also found a fully grown adult in a previously cleared out hiding place in my bed frame. I don't know if it was orphaned there and couldn't get out, thanks to the surrounding double-sided tape, or if it found its own way there. Either way, there have also been some recent bites. That's why I'm glad the pest guy is coming again tomorrow as we nuke the place once again in the great struggle. I'm also leaning toward dumping the frame altogether. Same with the mattress. What I'll sleep on will be an interesting challenge -- I'm looking at cots/portable beds at Canadian Tire as a transitional step.

One thing to add: bedbugs are not the only critters people face. Friends and family have recounted their own similarly stressful tales of dealing with head lice (common in school children) and fleas (common in pets). And they, too, require some stringent measures in dealing with them.

And a second column on the subject, courtesy of readers who wrote in to tell me their advice about how to deal with the bugs. Some interesting suggestions.

Finally, I've bought more of these. Time to buy stock in the company.

Today's bLINKit: Lisa Smedman is doing another terrific history series for the Courier. The first story centred on the early history of the Chinese in Vancouver. The most recent story tells about the early Germans: their early glory and their fall from grace as a result of the First World War.

SL Neighbourhood Update: Trouble in paradise. First, I haven't been able to log on for about two weeks because I'm having major video card problems. I'll be getting a replacement card soon. Not being able to log on annoys me, because someone offered me about $40 for my land, an offer I'm considering but haven't been able to negotiate. The second problem is universal: SL is falling apart due to too much growth (kind of like Vancouver), and residents are losing their patience. Read a recent petition here.

Spin doctors

Recommended listen: The CBC has done a series on PR and spin doctors and their historical, complex and sometimes corrosive relationship with journalists. One of the themes of the series: the PR folks, with a lot more money, more people and arguably more creative talent, have the upper hand. Each episode is available in MP3 format for download.

SL Neighbourhood Update: Not much in my hood. It's boring. But SL is due to introduce voice chat to the world this month. That'll change things, especially for the gender benders and the shy. And one of the funnier eviscerations of SL out there.

Today's bLINKit: Fewer people use watches because their various toys, such as cellphones, tell time for them. As a chronically seldom-on-time person, I feel ahead of the curve.

What if you gave a memorial and no one came?

SL Neighbourhood Update: Today I logged on for a bit to see what was up and decided to do a search of today's events, where residents post meetings, parties, games and the ever popular lawn sales, where avatars with too much stuff get rid of that stuff for often fairly good deals. (I picked up a rug at one the other week.) I discovered that there was a memorial for Anna Nicole Smith and I had to attend, to see who would be at such a thing, besides disbelievers like me. I got there and found someone had created a small memorial garden, with a little dais and a floating ghost video of rotating images of the working person's Jackie O. But no one was around. So I waited, hoping to observe the first weeping avatars. And I waited. And waited some more. No one showed up. Are people smarter than I think they are, at least in SL?

Today's bLINKit: Net neutrality is a big issue in the U.S. but unheard of here in Canada, where Internet providers seem poised to get whatever they want in terms of charging (and overcharging) for service from a compliant federal government. Here's a one-man crusade to make a difference in the Great White. Plus, an older Dvorak column explaining why the issues like net neutrality are important as the old Net dies and a controlled, regulated and largely corporate creature takes its place.

Roundup: Attention shoppers: Lady Smith in Aisle 5.

WMD: A bunch of things today ... First, a rant about the outpouring of "grief" for Anna Nicole Smith. "I truly believe she had a lot of love to give and just wanted to be loved back," said one young office worker from London, according to a recent AP story noting Smith fans are flooding the Net with messages of remembrance. "Also I looked up to her because of the background she came from. Humble roots and making it big time gave me inspiration." I, too, am inspired, for only in America can you become a stripper and bag a lonely and very old man to inherit his fortune when he dies, leaving you still quite young enough to destroy yourself through expensive indulgences. Yes, it's too bad she died. And it's clear she's the Diana of the Wal-Mart crowd.

24 Watch: I've only watched the first of what was a two-hour outing yesterday. But in one hour, Jack upped his bodycount by 2 as the show went in its periodic Rainbow 6 direction. Nothing borrowed or stolen though. And one person saved. Meantime, the upper echelon politics are taking a familiar turn. Yet another conspiracy against the president.

SL Neighbourhood Update: I have a zeppelin parked to the north of me. I'm not sure why it's there. Plus, some of the environments to explore are getting increasingly complex. A new San Francisco Sim has opened up, complete with street cars that, thanks to lag, move like snails doing slow-motion jackrabbit starts. I also discovered the futuristic City of Fortune, with some impressive pointy architecture. Lots of people were gathered around a central square, where music videos were being projected on giant screens. Other than that, I wasn't sure what they were doing. Picture of the centre of the area above. (I can't post RL pics on the blog at the moment, camera is busted.) Big art events and gatherings in SL also seem to be the order of the day.

Today's bLINKit: You, too, can track your DNA through thousands of years of human lineage through the Genographic Project. I'm tempted to get one of the kits to find out where in the world my genes have come from.

The "joy" of upgrades

Today's bLINKit: The pain that is upgrading, courtesy of the Guardian. And the best satire yet of Second Life.