http://www.ted.com Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

All hail the new flesh! Woot!

It certainly isn’t my place to argue with her and really, what’s a plebe like me going to add here? She nailed it. Or rather, she nailed us.

The only thing I suppose I could nit-pick is this notion of “slowing down”, which I hear echoed in everything from New Age and Zen to bleeding-edge technology conferences. People are spending an awful lot of time worrying about us becoming creatures that operate on a pure stimulus-response level, rather than thinking and creating ourselves.

This, I would argue, has nothing to do with technology. TV was demonized along the same lines. No, the problem isn’t the tech.

It’s the culture.

We live in a world where the wealthiest nations on the planet can’t be bothered to raise their own kids, or question the veracity of the nonsense that passes for news these days, or wonder if maybe there’s something to be concerned about when animals and insects are spontaneously dropping dead all over the globe. As long as we’re fed and entertained, we’re happy and content to take whatever we’re spoon-fed.

That’s not technology. That’s the sleep we’ve been slipping into as a people since my grandparents were born.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

One of the biggest challenges I have always faced in my efforts to broaden the appeal of virtual environments is the perception that they’re just toys. The public’s thinking is often that gaming is not a business application, and so by extension virtual worlds are just a game that isn’t all that much fun.

The effort has been to help people see that a virtual environment has nothing at all to do with gaming, and is often a very practical solution to real world problems. Slowly this understanding is growing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that the fun factor of virtual environments does play a part. I got involved with Second Life because I’m a gamer, despite it not actually being a game. The intuitive connection exists.

While my primary outreach strategy is currently the Virtual Worlds Keynote series, I’m beginning to realize that I need to start using gaming as a framework in my future planning. Gaming strategies lead to much better ROI than traditional project management. If I can find a way to leverage existing human instincts, rather than my current policy of educating people to overcome what their instincts are telling them, I’ll get further, faster.

The seeds of some new ideas are starting to germinate… but I’d love to hear your ideas, if you’re willing to offer them. I’ll give a +1 Vorpal Sword to the best one.

Good lord!

China’s perverse blanket censorship of the Internet was one thing – if the Chinese people want their thoughts to be controlled by a bureaucracy that’s their business. Public opinion influence and control by political entities is old news. But this is something startlingly new. This is them saying: “keep your filthy stinking money!”

Are they honestly that rich already?

Apparently China’s online games were worth over $900M in Q2 alone. So sure, maybe that’s enough… if there is such a thing as “enough” in modern economies. Still, can anyone really afford to slow down when things are moving so fast these days? Won’t this make foreign investors from a variety of industries flinch a little?

Morality (however you define it) is expensive, and it looks like they’re willing to pay the price. While I’m not entirely certain I agree with their particular philosophies, I have to admit: xenophobia in the digital age takes guts.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out five years from now.

This is why the following presentation about the “experience economy” is, for me anyhow, a true shift in the way I think about my virtual evangelism. This economic shift is something that brings along with it an entire lexicon, profit model and value system that goes a long way toward explaining the successes and failures in virtual world business practices.

Take some time to really understand what’s being said here. This is 14 minutes well spent.

http://www.ted.com Customers want to feel what they buy is authentic, but “Mass Customization” author Joseph Pine says selling authenticity is tough because, well, there’s no such thing. He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway.

Let’s get that done now, shall we?

Trend #1 – Terminology Stabilizes

I used the term “Metaverse” in the title almost as a joke, really. Like “Cyberspace” and “Information Superhighway” before it, the term hit the point of over-use awhile back, which was quickly followed by almost complete disuse. “Web 3D” made a valiant fight for mindshare, but only IBM’ers really pushed for it and we haven’t even heard them say it in a few months. It’s called “Virtual Worlds” now, that’s it.

Why does this matter? Simple: if there’s a common term for it, then people will feel like it’s something worth knowing about. In a sense, settling on a single name for a concept is the final and most critical step in legitimizing all that is being done in the field.

Trend #2 – Adoption by the Medical Industry

I don’t know if anyone saw this coming at all, but the facts are undeniable. If you just look back through the Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundups, which I’ve only really been doing since August, you’ll see a steady stream of training programs for medical students, nurses, and paramedics.

But it’s more than training. The dissociative nature of 3D spaces is now widely used to help patients work through post-traumatic stress disorder, and to analyze their own behavior from various perspectives to see if maybe they can “see themselves” doing things in healthier ways in the future.

Trend #3 – Rapid Prototyping

So useful and economical it’s fast becoming a standard, virtual worlds are great places to try out new designs in front of consumers, grab instant feedback, and work out the kinks before you’ve even built your first prototype in the real world. The fashion and medical industries are the biggest adopters of this concept, with several large-scale projects having been launched.

One significant missing link here is the auto industry. While it would be downright odd for an auto manufacturer not to have a virtual presence of some kind, none of them seem to be distributing concept cars for us to take out for a test drive. The most likely reason: Second Life physics are still glitchy, and even if they did work it would be difficult to accurately simulate how a car accelerates/decelerates/corners. They’d let us drive concept cars in video games, but most game makers want already-popular cars in there.

Trend #4 – Linden Lab Changes Just Enough To Maintain Lead

This was a really close call. For a long time Second Life seemed like it was ready to implode, largely due to the fact that Linden Lab has always had notoriously terrible customer relations. (With some significant exceptions. We love you Torley!) Their festivals are regularly handled in just such a way that the residents are infuriated, their marketing group make themselves completely inaccessible, and technical development priorities have always seemed a bit upside-down.

The appointment of Mark Kingdon as the new company CEO, however, has brought many positive changes. The whole Second Life Grid process is making more sense, the messages from the company have been much more straightforward, and priorities seem to have been set in order. While you won’t ever see a blogger telling the world how happy they are that nothing terrible has happened to them in awhile, overall people are starting to fall back into the groove of things. It has been a year of chaos, no doubt about it, but the past few months have been good ones.

Expect proper enterprise support soon. Things seem to finally be coming together there.

Trend #5 – Collaboration Becomes Key

Platforms like Twinity and ExitReality have been really showing us lately how a 3D space can be enhanced by enabling other people’s technologies and promoting other companies. With the massive number of virtual worlds out there these days, strategic partnerships are what makes or breaks a company, and we’re seeing some fantastic collaborations these days that truly enhance the user experience.

These two worlds are also forerunners of a sub-trend: web browsers in worlds, and worlds in web browsers. How important is that long-term? Jury’s still out; we may know by the end of 2009.

Trend #6 – The Virtual World “Market Correction”

This was one of the biggest years ever in virtual worlds, but there was a good deal of attrition as well. The fact is that many companies jumped in and played around without really knowing what they wanted to accomplish in the first place. They spent months trying to get a little mindshare as a forward-thinking company, but they had no way to measure success. If you don’t know when you’re succeeding, the whole enterprise gets difficult to justify no matter how much hip nerdcore jargon you have at your fingertips.

There were enough companies in this situation that when one finally gave up and left many others followed suit. To the casual observer it looked like a “mass exodus”, and many a short-sighted pseudo-intellectual editorial clogged our newsreaders.

Those who were seeing concrete return on investment paid little attention, and the steady growth of the industry continued unabated.

Trend #7 – Events, Meetings and Conferences

Clever Zebra‘s activities aside (we’ve been around just a bit too long to be considered a “2008 trend”), we’re seeing a number of other fledgling virtual event companies launch. While this usually involves them launching with a single regular customer, the fact is that it’s becoming understood in the events industry that they absolutely must adopt this type of technology. It’s often so much more practical than flying people in from all over the world.

We’re seeing a good number of new event-focused web technologies as well. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make my analysis of these tools public any time soon, but for now I’ll just say that this is an exciting time to be working for a company like Clever Zebra!

Trend #7 – Virtual Recruiting

Job fairs in virtual spaces are pretty common now for a simple reason: they get results. Human Resources professionals often report high numbers of extremely well-qualified applicants that they would normally have to pay a head-hunter thousands to track down.

It’s not just tech jobs either: more than one police department has successfully recruited through Second Life this past year, and the US Army has been making efforts in this area as well. Virtual worlds are now an essential to any recruiting drive.

Trend #8 – Productivity

Zebra Corporate and Qwaq have been around for awhile and are well-developed solutions, but we’re seeing some new entries into this area as well. The general trend is to simply make these spaces useful for the average employee’s work-flow. We’ve seen some good successes here, as well as some miserable failures from some of the more short-sighted companies out there. The real big stuff in this area will come in 2009, but 2008 saw a great deal of behind-the-scenes development.

Trend #9 – Mixed Reality

Importing massive data sets, maps, video feeds, and live audio into virtual spaces became common somewhere in 2008. Output into the real world became equally as common, sometimes in the form of control commands for large systems, other times in the form of data overlay on a camera display. Here’s a quick tech demo of what I’m referring to:

Trend #10 – Here Come The Feds

The military were the earliest adopters of virtual worlds, but now we’re seeing every branch of the government building presences. From Taxation to Legislature to the Post Office, everyone is laying a virtual foundation for big things in the future. Watch NASA this coming year – they’ll shock you!

The Obvious Stuff Others Can Write Full Articles About When Stumped For Better Ideas

• Lots of worlds launched.
• Graphics got better.
• Gadgets abound.
• Toy manufacturers picked up on MTV’s product promotion worlds and started building hundreds of kids worlds.
• Non-Profits find big audiences regularly. (See Global Kids, Relay For Life, etc. etc.)

Stuff People Mistake For Trends

• Second Life in mass exodus – no, not at all. We are seeing some older residents leaving, but this is really about the law of averages: there are many, many older residents. They can’t all stay forever.
• The failing economy crushed the industry – actually no. That’s just hype. Things seem to be trotting along just fine as a matter of fact, with venture capital firms injecting a sane and sober amount of millions into the industry on a pretty regular basis.
• Google is leaving, so it was all a “fad”. Well, no, clearly it’s not a fad. If anything, this indicates that there’s something really wrong at Google. Why haven’t they leveraged that massive 3D library of theirs yet? They spent the whole year just sitting on it.

Looking Forward

Hmmm… maybe in another blog entry. Check back next week. What are your predictions for 2009?

As I’m typing this I have YouTube open in another window going through a playlist of old Fats Waller tunes from 1943. Some of you may have been following my Twitter feed where I post the “Song of the Day”. If you go back through them, you’ll notice something: there’s no bias toward any style or era.

There may have been a time where people defined themselves by their specific musical tastes. They only listened to Punk or Classical or Rap. That’s who they were, but in the 90s we started hearing something new: people saying that they listened to everything but “X”. People didn’t bother with a strong preference anymore. As the availability of music increased with portable players and specialty radio stations, all styles became of equal value.

Of course, there’s always something you don’t like, but the same applies to food. Personal taste.

Now, with the Internet’s uncanny ability to make all media from all time equally available, another area of identity has been lost: time. Modern music is what it is, and its in the best interest of record companies and content producers to really push the new stuff, but the idea that new music is somehow better is pretty old-fashioned now.

Now, with the rise of things like Creative Commons licensing and the impossibility of effectively regulating distribution of media online, the availability of our media for future generations will be preserved (whether we like it or not). This massive body of artwork that makes up our cultural heritage is growing every day, and in a real sense we are as connected with 1943 as we are with 1983 or 2003.

For some, this is great. Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s rant on Free Culture, for instance, that prompted the “Free Mickey” campaign:

For others, this is a big problem. A few years ago the Disney Corporation were known for keeping a death-grip on how and when their media is used and distributed. Even today they still dictate to retailers when they are allowed to sell copies of their movies from any era, and actually tell people to take their movies off the shelf when they’ve decided people shouldn’t be able to buy them anymore. If they could keep people from selling copies of Snow White second hand they would, and if it were up to them, they’d buy the rights to every bit of media everywhere and hold those rights forever.

Some have objected to this phenomena. But you know… can you really blame Disney? In the face of a culture that increasingly remains aloof about the new stuff and don’t feel like they should pay much for the old stuff, how is a company whose brand is intimately linked to old classic stories to continue to make a profit?

They did find an answer, and oddly enough it had nothing to do with beating their customers over the head with rights enforcement. All they had to do was encourage a community around their brand.

If you look at what Disney does these days, they focus on personal interaction with their brands. Current virtual world endeavors include:

• Pirates of the Caribbean Online (free to play)
• Club Penguin (purchased for $700 Million)
• Toontown Online (create your own Disney-esque cartoon character)
• Pixie Hollow (expanding the “Tinkerbell” brand)
• …and those are just the virtual worlds. In 2006 they established Disney Cruise Lines, and this won’t be the last “immersive” product they come up with!

Disney is understanding something here that few others are picking up on: the future of branding will be inextricably tied to how well you enable your customers to touch the past. We’re moving into the era of experiencing media, rather than simply absorbing it. Those who provide and capitalize on experiences will survive the information age quite nicely, regardless of how “retro” the audience becomes.

It makes me wonder if we’ll even bother with a term like “retro” in twenty years.

Brilliant work via @Intellagirl via Charles Aruther via John Naughton via Dipity (the timeline people). Hmm. The story of how this ended up in my hands is the story of the Internet, isn’t it?

2012: The Year The Internet Ends
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2012: The Year The Internet Ends
http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality
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I Power:
http://ipower.movielol.org
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TANIA’S PICS OMG
http://ipower.ning.com/profile/Tania
–
Athene:
http://athene.movielol.org
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Athene movie:
http://www.wrathofthe1337king.com

If I had the choice between two ISPs, and one had a clear and public Net Neutrality policy, I’d go with that one without hesitation. A lack of net neutrality could be a major expense for companies large and small, not just consumers.

Click for biggie version

As we come down to the end of the year I find myself once again in a strange moment of transition. A few months ago I said goodbye to my little Games Park and settled on Metaversed Island. Now we’re renaming the island and moving it… I’ll fill you in on that some other time. Nick Wilson officially added another member to our team too, although I wouldn’t dream of stealing his thunder by announcing who that was here. We’re launching two gigantic, v-world changing projects next year… which means lots of late nights coming up on my part.

On a professional level, I went through a number of transitions this year. I made a go of it as a full-time v-world journalist, but I discovered something along the way. While I could rock the job, I’d rather make things move.

I started off the year creating Second Life Games. It was fun, and had the edge of being unique: I couldn’t even find someone interested in doing games reporting. Based on that I ended up with a weekly at New World Notes and settled into some freelance work for the Second Life Herald.

It kept me in Linden Dollars, and I was skilling up my writing as I went, but it wasn’t doing much else. I needed to get serious about the business of virtual worlds. So I started looking, and discovered Metaversed.com.

Nick Wilson was one of the few people writing no-nonsense business news about virtual worlds. We started talking, and discovered that we wanted the same thing: to learn more, and to work in these new places. I started writing for Metaversed for free with the understanding that we were going to work toward extremely high quality content that would be worthy of sponsorship. Eventually, while somehow putting full-time effort into Metaversed and at the same time a day job, we made it. I was working in New Media full -time.

Nick and I surfed the absolute bleeding edge of business in virtual worlds, reporting what was going on in the industry, interviewing the influentials, and digging for answers. It was thrilling and, at times, downright mind-blowing. Every day we found a new frontier that was being explored for the first time. We were discovering things that nobody knew about, and often things that nobody had imagined. I was living in a constant state of amazement.

Somewhere along the lines, though, I think we both realized that being a newsie wasn’t really going to change things. Yes, our blog absolutely kicked butt, our events were awesome, and the podcasts were followed closely… but none of that was changing things “out there”. We started talking about a “Project X”, another kind of business we could start that would change the way things were done in v-worlds. Eventually we settled on two.

Of course, I’m not quite ready to tell you what those are. I don’t mean to tease, but all good things…

This meant that Nick would need to do some running around in preparation, and I would have to hold the fort around Metaversed. I stopped contributing to New World Notes, and eventually even my one-offs to the Herald stopped entirely. I was chasing stories, making contacts, doing the whole “investigative reporting” thing and at the same time I was producing events. Eventually, I hung my reporter hat up as well to focus down on the events and on planning for the “Project X” I’m heading up next year.

I was sitting in my office in Second Life, taking care of some IM’s and juggling notecards, when I took the picture above. That was earlier tonight. The artifacts around me (there are a dozen more just off-camera) each represent entire stories that I could fill volumes on. Let me end this post by telling you a bit about what you’re looking at in the picture above. Hopefully it will help to paint a picture of how much humanity fills a v-world, and why we’re all bothering to be there.

The red cup is a re-creation of a Tim Hortons coffee cup – instantly recognizeable by any Canadian. It was created by Jade Serdyuk as part of her incredibly true to life rendering of a Tim Hortons franchise. We met randomly in the Straylight sim, and it turns out she’s the one person in Second Life that I’ve met in real life. She actually hired me for a job a few years back.

The glasses, I’ve written about in the past. Incredible creations by someanimal Arnold. When I bought them the permissions were set wrong, and the copy on the shelf actually disappeared. There was a bit of a scramble to get them back up there, as I recall, as I think there was some land permission oddities.

The retro-style 35mm camera is from Tooter Claxton and is highly detailed. Look him up – Tooter makes some of the most fascinating avatars and grungy/dirty/rusty/dusty builds in Second Life. You’ll feel transported just walking into his main shop.

Just behind me is AngryBeth Shortbread’s “SL version” of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. It constantly transforms, and I’ve never seen the same image twice. Annie Ok put up an incredible Flickr stream of the show. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure this is how I first met Annie Ok. Very cool person.

The sword. It’s like the ultimate symbol of New Media. Danny Zelmanov created this version, and it sells well to the folks who frequent the Midgar sim. (My article about the Midgar sim got Digg’ed big-time, earning Wagner James Au a nice boost to his traffic.) Lots of fan-fiction has revolved around that blade. It’s is based on the one that the character Cloud uses in the movie “Final Fantasy: Advent Children”. It’s a composite of several swords, actually. The movie is actually based on the incredible game “Final Fantasy VII”, which is legend (and rightly so). When you play as Cloud you swap out various giant swords.

So there was a game, a movie, fan fiction, a v-world community, and eventually a v-world rendering. The artifact represents volumes of experiences and emotions that have transcended generations of media. Looking at it I feel… I don’t know… connected to the media itself.

I’m in my “real” avatar; the one I wear when I’m dealing with executives and professors entering v-worlds for the first time. I change into “Mr. Generic” when I meet them, but I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I do. There’s a picture of both of my avatars on the desk there, standing back-to-back. I’m still sorting out how I feel about adopting two unique and completely separate looks. It’s still strange to me.

I’ll tell you about the year to come very soon, I promise.

I’m experiencing the Digital Divide, redux. What I’m discovering this time around, however, is that there’s no “right side” of the divide.

I’ve taken technologies like Voice over IP and virtual worlds for granted. They’re things that have become obvious to me, simple conventions that I use to get things done and extend myself with. Words like “immersionism” and “engagement” are part of my daily lexicon. I’m discovering, however, that even the word “avatar” isn’t really as universally understood as I might have thought.

An old friend from a few years back got in touch recently. We used to hang out every day. She’s working at a temp job coordinating volunteers, but hoping to move into a company doing some really cutting-edge stuff with biofuels in third world countries. Her kids sound like they’re doing real well these days and she’s still with the same guy after all this time, so that’s a good sign. Winter’s already rolled in up where she lives, and she’s excited about the snow. She always did love the cold.

It was all going really well but then she asked me what I do for a living. Suddenly I realized I could barely even begin to explain myself.

“I work in these things called ‘virtual worlds’. Specifically, I help businesses find their feet in them. Oh, right, well a ‘virtual world’ is a ‘place’ where you… ah…”

After babbling on for a few minutes she kindly told me that while it all sounded fascinating, she didn’t understand a word I said. I couldn’t blame her.

It gets much worse. Last night I went to a friend’s birthday party. Lots of old friends, a few new ones, and a few people I didn’t know. They all seemed to want to know what I did for a living these days. “I… uh… I’m a writer. Basically. Well, also I produce a lot of live events too. And there’s some consulting work… in… well, in these things called ‘virtual worlds’.”

I take a sip from my beer and look around the room, hoping to be interrupted by one of the more drunk guests. No such luck. Part-way through my description of what I do one of the fascinated (drunk) guests tells me she doesn’t even own a computer because she doesn’t have a use for one.

She doesn’t even own a computer. She… seriously? Really? Not even just for Facebook?

The next morning I mull all of this over an Alka-Seltzer eye opener. These people that I’ve been speaking to over the last few days are smart, happy, and in no way living lives that are any less vibrant than mine.

You know, years ago I used to tell my friends about “the Internet”. “You’ve got to check it out! It’s this worldwide network of computers that you can use to interact with people all over. It has ‘Usenet newsgroups’ where everyone can contribute to one huge discussion, share files, and work together on things! I’ve been able to meet some incredible people on ‘IRC’, this big chat program. Oh, and I have what’s called an ‘e-mail address’, which is incredible because your letter will get to the person you’re sending it to right away…”

“Uh, yeah, whatever. So are we playing DnD tonight?” Even my geekiest friends couldn’t care less.

Of course message boards and instant-messaging are all old news now. Web 2.0 came, the bubble burst, and now all anyone can think about is how foolish they were to miss out on the big opportunities that were around back then. So here we are, surfing the bleeding edge, determined not to miss the “next big thing”. We’ve found it. Virtual worlds, augmented reality, and life-logging are going to change the world. There’s no fooling us this time, and no convincing us that it’s just a fad. We are on top of this.

There’s only one problem: some people still couldn’t care less. While we’re out there on the “next big thing”, they’re doing just fine without any of that nonsense. They’ll use whatever technology they’re stuck with at work, but that’s it. When it comes time to clock out for the day they’ll just stay offline while the rest of us fall all over ourselves with how edgy and awesome our gadgets are.

What really strikes me about it is that this new digital divide that’s forming is one of choice, rather than economics or physical access. We of the virtual worlds are choosing to travel there, and others never will. Some may never in their entire lifetimes create avatars. To me that seems like a downright bizarre thought; that there be a person on planet Earth who could ride this wave but chooses not to.

That wave must seem equally bizarre to them.