actually, it is time now, when you can repeat famous “may you live in interesting times” – it looks like SL will be going off LindenLab rather sooner than later, and it will be open and… most probably changing it’s DNA on the way…

BTW, from tech point of view – AFAIK HW accelerated shaders has improved so much for last few years, making dynamic shades so realistic, that you might not even see difference from RL, so the problem of “motion parallax vs. cue from shadows” might be mitigated by now

Why Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 will co-exist

Or why Secondlife and similar metaverses will never formally be coined Web 3.0, the next-generation Web.

My friend Rawn covered the recent announcement from Sony on their Playstion Home environment, lauded as a secondlife killer.

Rawn asks:

Is this the death knell for SecondLife or MySpace? Let me know what you think.

Although I cannot properly review something that isn’t released, I will say no on both counts….

http://blogs.globalcrossing.com/playstation-home

http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=41

All the vids on that site are showcasing things that are going on in the UK to do with this in one way or another.

Exciting times!

‘When will software empower Architects?’

We ended up discussing the structure of teams and disiplines and how they all could join together in real or virtual meeting places, to accomplish their tasks.

Second Life is an application that may make no sense whatsoever, to individuals who use their computers in the personal sense.

If you ask me personally, this notion of the all ‘empowered individual’ with their portable machine is off putting. This notion that everything is online, available and for free. No matter what, you can’t build a sustainable business model around it.

So much of the hype about Information technology, post the Bill Gates era has exclusively focussed upon individual empowerment.

Martin Campbell Kelly reflects upon this too in his book, from airline reservations to sonic the hedgehog. Kelly speaks of how Microsoft are ten percent of the software industry, yet in the public perception they seem more like one hundred percent.

Thanks for bringing up those points of yours.
Because, now that I think about it, I had done some thinking about shared working spaces online
myself a while ago. When I read about Doug Englebart’s vision for computing, which was based
around McCarthy’s time sharing idea. The whole notion that the one big computer is large and
powerful enough to service a whole team’s computing needs.

In the transfer over to the ‘personal’ computer paradigm in the late 70s and early 80s,
I think we must have lost some of what was useful in McCarthy’s and Englebart’s visions for
our computing experience. It is similar I think, to when Kevin Kelly talked about Darwin and how
his theories on evolution overshadowed the work of all other biologists. That it became impossible
to even mention ideas on evolution, which didn’t conform to Darwin’s notion.

I responded a while ago to Nicholas Carr’s blog entry, the grid land.
I also wrote something at the time on CG Architect about ‘Reinventing the Minicomputer’.
Both are easy to find using a google search.

I haven’t thought about this whole idea much until I read your post Eric, and I am absolutely
intrigued by the possibility of teams working together in a single virtual space.
You will find a piece linked at CG Architect called, How long does a Platform really last?

I posted up at Aceshardware forum, shortly after I had read of Doug Englebart and his
projects back in the day, in the great book about the era, What the Dormouse Said.
I am hugely interested in this subject of team building online, because I work in
construction and architecture, where it is impossible to operate just as an individual.
By definition, everything revolves around team working.

Yet, from my perspective, the whole notion of computing, wants to impose its structure
onto the structure of companies.
Critics like Nicholas Carr are against Information Technology’s insistence upon defining people as
individuals loosely joined for just-in-time collaboration.
In 2006, we still don’t have the platform to enable team work.
In fact, I would argue we were closer to it in the 1960s than we are today.

The web 2.0 touched upon the problem without dealing with it head on.
Mitch Kapur’s comments, not accelerating the individual, but accelerating the group.
But the trouble is, web 2.0 can only go so far, and never far enough – or risk offending the
pillars of Information technology thinking for the last couple of decades.
This notion about personal everything.

Even Neil Gershenfeld, working in the seat of MIT itself, who should know better is carried away
by his fascination with personal fabrication.
Yet the major problems in fabrication are not to be found at personal level at all,
but at the level of organisations and teams.
But Classic Information Technology has pushed too many intelligent people in the direction it
chooses to go – not in a direction, which would benefit organisations.
In this sense, Nicholas Carr’s arguments in ‘Does IT Matter’, are bang on the nail.

Brian O’Hanlon.

Are we trying to shove everything into a single package? At some point I had realized that the success of podcast advertising, wasn’t really about advertising in the audio, but in the audio *and* the supporting infrastructures– and this lead me to see the brand, not the medium. And that’s a bit old school.

And yet, there’s lots of discussion about the virtual world (and sure, SL is not a game-it’s a platform, yadda yadda), but how is that different from creativity and social structures based on game worlds. The social networks around something like Warcraft or Halo or whatever the hot title du jour is?

My network of friends is my network of friends, and that spans Skype, mySpace, Second Life, Warcraft, blogs and so on. Even business!

When my pals who started Crayon made the reference to being distributed and working in a single virtual place, I saw it being the same thing as having a web presence and a company’s employees being spread about, using a variety of tools. Locking in interaction to the SL locale *first*, seemed to be a bit short sighted as technological barriers make it very very difficult to interact with the company.

Sorry for that brain dump, I’ve been working for a while now on my post about how much of what I believe about blogging/podcasting/vlogging and DIY/social media of 2006, is the result of having a dual existence in Warcraft and Second Life *combined*. Not an easy post to write.