03.29.06
Posted in Social Media at 10:39 pm by
It was just last week when I mentioned an incredible project that had ported a virtual world inside a browser. The project is done in Flash. Just this week now comes notice that an enterprising developer has created a browser-based virtual world – completely in javascript. It’s called Hive 7 and Om Malik, senior writer at Business 2.0, has much to say about it:
It will be sometime before the world catches on to its true potential. Skibinsky says that his big breakthrough was in 2004, when he realized that “instead of building a closed online game it’s possible to do the reverse.” In other words, he had an epiphany that web is the ultimate API. He put together a virtual universe which has rooms where folks can meet, meet, chat, exchange resources and items. What got me excited about Hive7 was that it allows anyone to customize the whole experience. You can take the code, and tweak it.
Much like what I posted yesterday about virtual worlds Om doesn’t think Second Life is the end all be all experience that some make it out to be. Its a fact echoed by a frequent linkee of mutednoise, Tony Walsh:
Raph Koster asks “HasnÂ’t anyone else noticed that all of our virtual worlds — yes, even Second Life — are more like AOL circa 1992 than they are like the web today?”
…
No virtual world will be like the Web until it is free of gatekeepers. When was the last time someone got banned from the World Wide Web?
I’ve been a big fan of Second Life for quite sometime. But projects like Croquet, and stuff like Hive 7 are much more deserving of the ‘coming metaverse’ mantel.
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03.28.06
Posted in Social Media at 3:30 pm by
KCRW, a Los Angeles public radio station reports on a student protest organized, in large part, on MySpace and text messaging. From the story:
Picking up where they left off Friday, some 15, 000 high school kids cut classes today and took to the streets of LA. The protests are targeting so-called “immigration reforms” being considered today in the US Senate, including provisions to criminalize undocumented workers and the people who knowingly help them.
http://mutednoise.com/pics_site/119011571_13ad01316d.jpg
Pictures of the socially-networked kids protesting are here Big props to Dave Bollock – nice work.
Granted – the idea of skipping school is pretty attractive to almost anyone. But these are kids that saw something they disagreed with, grabbed an opportunity, and made their voices known.
It’s not just L.A. either. There were 700 kids in Carson City, NV.
Jesus Gutierrez, 18, stood at the top of the courthouse steps with his 16-year-old sister, Maria, leading the energetic crowd in chants. He said he didn’t plan the march but received a text message Sunday night to support the walkout. His sister said the message also was at Myspace.com.
“This started all by text messaging,” said Jesus Gutierrez, a Wooster High School senior.
There were ‘hundreds’ in Virginia. An equal amount walked out of classrooms in protest in Washington state.
Debating the correctness of the immegration bill is fodder for another post. Lets focus on what’s happening – youth are taking action on an issue and raising awareness with speed and organization never before possible.
The kids are going to be all right.
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Posted in Social Media at 12:37 pm by
Phillip Torrone, Make associate editor, is pitching an idea: virtual world credit cards. Its not exactly new – Phillip states that he first approached a bank about doing this back in 2001. However, that’s before WoW went big and ‘MMOGs’ became a recognizable acronym. From his post:
As the time of this writing, there are 166,922 residents, spending over 135,984.00 in 24 hours and $6.5 million USD in transactions took place is about 20 days. In 2006, there’s a good chance $100 million USD dollars worth of transactions will flow through the virtual world of Second Life. Linden recently rolled out their own exchange, Lindex, meaning – they’re almost a bank now.
It’s not a matter of if, just when – credit card companies, Pay Pal, Amazon, eBay and the individual “gaming” companies eventually bridge the real and virtual currencies with loyalty programs and private label credit cards – there’s too much money out there to -not- to do this. This “demographic” is the battleground. The more you spend, the more you earn, sorta. Virtual $ isn’t a crappy electronics doo-dad, it’s just a number in a computer. Maybe you’ll get some discounted airline tickets when you hit level 60 too, you deserve it! Earn your way to a new graphics card, why not.
Microsoft Blogger Robert Scoble has declared that Second Life is an OS. I disagree with that. Operating systems are distributed among the users and once their released into the wild they are (for the most part) beasts free from the creation zoo. Linden Labs keeps Second Life centralized much like a bank. Information goes in and comes out but the access points are always routed through central control.
But while Second Life, in an infastructure sense, is organized like a bank I doubt they’ll jump on the credit card tie in. They won’t do it right away, at least. Their terms of service very carefully point out that there is no relationship between the Linden dollar and the normal greenback. The reason they do this is because they’re trying to keep from getting sued, stay off regulations radar, etc. Financial institutions have a stack of paperwork that makes War and Peace look like an in-flight distraction. And that’s a good thing. But Second Life isn’t ready to accept the resonsibility of being a full fledged financial institution. To the government they’re trying very hard to just be a game.
In related news Second Life, thus far still in the operating red, got another infusion of $11 million. I wondering if the Metaverse needed regular cash donations to keep the lights on.
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Posted in miscellaneous at 9:57 am by
You may have noticed that haven’t exactly been setting the database on fire with new posts lately. This is just a quick note on all the other balls in the fire and irons in the air (despite the slow down I still have the ability to butcher not one, but two phrases like no one’s business – some things never change).
First off I recently launched BloomBurst a somewhat language agnostic software development blog. I do talk about ColdFusion (being the leader of a user group tends to do that). However, I hope to abstract that language out of the equation most days and provide useful info to anyone working in the realm of codifiable numinousness.
Second, starting this Wednesday I’ll be a guest on the Utah Tech Radio show. Its a true old-fashioned AM talk channel and the coming topic for this episode is RSS. Should be exciting. There also should be a podcast link and I’ll be sure to post it when its available.
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Posted in Social Media at 9:36 am by
Last week the conservative Cato Institute released a report talking about how they feared DRM was hindering innovation. The PDF report can be downloaded online.
What impressed me, however, was Wendy’s excellent recap. She did a tremendous job putting a lot of potentially boring minutia into stark relief:
Sound copyright policy has obvious attractions for advocates of small-government and deregulation. Copyright has become more regulatory and more market-crippling as it expands, and the DMCA is a case in point. As Lee describes, the DMCA has been (ab)used to prevent competitive development of audio and video players, cable boxes, and even, for a time, printer cartridges. Instead of a free-market rush toward the best technology to meet public demand, we get a trickle of major-label “approved” devices that must be bug-compatible: region-coded DVD players and can’t-record cable boxes.
Here-here!
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Posted in Social Media at 9:28 am by
I’ve loved the Kleptones ever since their landmark mashup/copyright rallying cry, Night at the Hip Hopera. There they took classic hip hop, dosed it with Queen, and lit it with a righteous indignation toward harsh intellectual property control.
The Kleptones are back with a new albumn, 24 hours. While not the cultural statement of the Hip Hopera, there are still some gems there.
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03.26.06
Posted in Social Media at 11:22 am by
I’ve highlighted a few examples of patents in my day. However, the Patently Silly website/blog takes stupid patent humor to a whole new level. For example, check out the comments regarding a biodegradable stone-replacement skipper:
Like, what were going to do, just throw a rock? Rocks aren’t biodegradeable, dickweed. That rock will just sit there at the bottom of the river forever. And you know what? That means there’s less room for the river, which means it’s going to have to flow out into the ocean, and then it’s going to raise the sea levels and then the whales will forget their migration patterns and the Eskimos will die off because they won’t be able to find the whales to eat. Way to go, Eskimo killer. I’m going to use my bio-friendly water skipping article, cause I happen to care about the future.
Lots more good stuff there – unfortunately it’s because there’s a lot more bad stuff patented.
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03.23.06
Posted in Social Media at 12:42 pm by
French lawmakers have passed a law to try and level the digital playing field. I’ve previously mentioned how DRM locks customers to a company. The French are trying to change that, pirate-haters be damned:
On Tuesday French lawmakers voted 296 to 193 in support of a law that would stop Apple, plus any other firm selling music downloads, using proprietary software to limit what people can do with tracks they have bought.
The draft law now goes to the Senate – the upper house of the French parliament – for final approval before it gets on to the statute books.
If the draft becomes French law it will mean that firms selling music must make available information about the software they use to stop songs being copied – so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems.
This would enable tracks downloaded in one format to be changed and played on any other device. France said it hoped other European nations enacted similar laws.
Of course Apple is more than a little upset but try and spin it to their advantage:
“If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers.”
…
“iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with “interoperable” music which cannot be adequately protected. Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy.”
Holy fence-sitter batman!
Hopefully we’ll be able to follow this law as it moves through the French senate.
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Posted in Social Media at 12:22 pm by
In a second hand link (sorry, no direct link to the Wall Street Journal Op Ed) we hear why patents are the way they are:
“We believe that the problems with the patent system are systemic and fundamental, the result of two congressional changes to the patent system. At the time, they were described as administrative and procedural rather than substantive; but taken together they have resulted in the most profound changes in U.S. patent policy and practice since 1836. One set of changes has made it easier to enforce patents, easier to get large financial rewards from such enforcement, and harder for those accused of infringing patents to challenge the patents’ validity; another set of changes has made patents much easier to get. The combination has created a perfect storm: a complex and intensifying combination of factors that increasingly makes the patent system a hindrance rather than a spur to innovation.”
They also go on to list two major upcoming patent trials that will be ones to watch:
[list:5fd1ae63f6] * eBay v MercExchange LLC
* LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories – which will actually examine whether laws of nature can be patented[/list:u:5fd1ae63f6]
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03.19.06
Posted in Social Media at 6:49 pm by
Released with little fanfare is the a report by Candian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) . It demonstrates that many of the record industry claims about P2P file sharing are completely false. Canadian legal professor Michael Geist has the summary:
CRIA’s own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders’ computers, that P2P users frequently try music on P2P services before they buy, that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic, and that reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services.
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