This week Mitch Kapor, one of the most influential innovator of the past 30 years, gives the third presentation in a series which is
A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.
Everyone knows who Bill Gates is and quite a few know who Steve Jobs is, but many people don’t know or are only vaguely familiar with Mitch Kapor who is in some ways more influential than Gates or Jobs. Through his involvement in Firefox, Second Life, EFF and other projects, he has a strong connections with very large communities of social change agents. Last year Mitch spoke about Second Life as a disruptive innovation, but a lot has happened since then and I expect this week’s presentation to be insightful.
Links to pictures and video of the William Gibson book reading in Second Life are available at Penguin Books
… Audio was beamed in from the MDM campus in Vancouver to the riversrunred studios in London, and out to Second Life. What made me happy about this event was that it gave people from all over the world a chance to be in the same space as one of their favourite authors, and during the event I was receiving goodwill messages from people thrilled to see him.Penguin Books Blog
Eventually, locations where events like these are held will have the ability to record and playback holodeck style. Croquet’s animatronic video gives a glimpse of how this next generation of avatar will play out.
Links to pictures and video of the William Gibson book reading in Second Life are available at Penguin Books
… Audio was beamed in from the MDM campus in Vancouver to the riversrunred studios in London, and out to Second Life. What made me happy about this event was that it gave people from all over the world a chance to be in the same space as one of their favourite authors, and during the event I was receiving goodwill messages from people thrilled to see him.Penguin Books Blog
Eventually, locations where events like these are held will have the ability to record and playback holodeck style. Croquet’s animatronic video gives a glimpse of how this next generation of avatar will play out.
Although Second Life clearly isn’t fading away any time soon, corporate interest is broadening. Analysts such as Joe Laszlo of JupiterResearch predict virtual worlds are poised to become the next hot Web acquisitions for big media companies.
I think corporations – especially media entities need to keep in mind that the meshverse is more than media. There are a few history lessons worth considering that I’ve mentioned previously
Virtual venues as marketing gimmicks won’t really work – they need to have deeper integration with business processes.
The economic upside isn’t in selling more records, tshirts or other stuff, but rather in creating the compelling, thriving locations for user-generated content.
There are important relationships between real world locations and those in virtual space
Shopping is important because the meshverse has a very strong inherent sense of time and place which influences experiences in ways that simply don’t exist with the web. You really have to go to locations at different times and under varying conditions to get a feel for how the local virtual community fits with your objectives – events at or nearby can have a huge impact.
Recently, Lego announced a virtual world they will release in 2008. They’re not merely getting on the Second Life bandwagon but have understood the importance of virtual community and have been working on it for a decade:
We humans are social creatures. We enjoy doing things together. Fact is, we’re interdependent. Perhaps our need for each other is the reason the Internet allures us: it transforms our computers into community centers. The Web brings color, movement, and non-linearity to the community, while VRML adds a sense of space.
VRML-enhanced Web sites hint at how citizens soon may interact with each other inside virtual space via desktop computer. But right now, behind the scenes, folks are working in collaborative, immersive, simulation-based environments. Such an environment exists inside the Virtual Reality lab at the LEGO Group, makers of the world’s most popular toys.
An account of my 1997 take on the subject talks about why it’s taken 10 years to get here, where the path is leading and what the broad impact of mixing the physical and virtual worlds may be. The following video provides a small peak
at a recent augmented reality event.
What I’ve heard is that the game could be sort of like Second Life but, you know, a game. The idea, I believe, is that you will be able to construct your own in-game content using the fun and familiar mechanic of building with real world Legos. GamersGame.com Blog: NetDevil Signs On to Build Lego MMOG
Clickable Culture raises the question of why anyone would use Legos to build in Second Life. The answer is that a tangible user interface(TUI) gives you perspectives that are hard or impossible to get via a screen. However, it’s not an either/or choice, one doesn’t have to use only one or the other – the meshverse is a universe of both/and.
April 4, 2007 at 12:16 pm
· Filed under Events, People
Having already credited Dave for predicting the meshverse, I’m happy to see notable folk recognizing the contributions he’s made:
Yesterday, Dave Winer celebrated the 10th anniversary of Scripting News, his seminal and enormously influential blog at scripting.com. Dave co-created or popularized of a broad range of blogging technologies — from RSS to podcasting to blogging itself.So this week, in honor of Dave’s milestone, we’re going to talk about some of the people who’ve been tinkering with blogging and personal social media for a decade. We invite you to think back to 1997, as many of these seminal sites were just getting started, and try to imagine the breadth of changes they brought to the web in the years that followed. In fact, in just the few years after the founding of sites like Scripting News, blogging had gone from an unnamed or even nebulous concept to helping form a nascent community and then to becoming fundamental evolution of the social web.
I remember 1997 very well since it was then that I made a prediction about the emergence of both the 3D social network and 4D aspects of the meshverse. I ran into Dave a bit then and had been following DaveNet from the beginning. I’d met Dave 7 or 8 years before that(our paths seem to cross every 7 years or so) and he’s always come across to me as a very decent human being who genuinely cares about people. Now that hasn’t kept either of us from irritating each other on occasion but I’ve never felt like he was being negative towards me. Dave’s just passionate about what he believes will be helpful. I know for sure I’ve had more positive interaction than disconnects and a lot of problems don’t get addressed because we don’t have enough Dave’s committed to solving them even if it pisses a few folk off. People who try to downplay Dave’s contribution to the state of blogging today are either mis-informed or are wrestling with something else. I followed the development of blogging – first hand in many cases and was on the advisory board at CNET’s Web Builder conference along with Peter Merholz who coined the short form ‘blog‘. In the early days of blogging Dave was one of(sometimes the only) visible, can-do voices pushing it into the mainstream. I’ve yet to see a viable history of blogging that pushes Dave to the side. Whether people like it or not, Dave had a big impact. All of us who are benefiting from blogging could stand to give him a little love for Scripting News. I for one am glad he didn’t retire early.
Life 2.0 will include resources both in Second Life and on the Web to help developers take advantage of the business opportunities in Second Life.”What is really most impressive about Second Life is that it is the most powerful engine we’ve seen so far for identifying, motivating, training, and maybe even — in the next couple of years — employing.
This kind of event along with how-to articles like Giving A Powerpoint Presentation in Second Life and books such as Second Life: The Official Guide and Designing Your Second Life are improving Second Life’s chances to be a long term meshverse player. They represent the emergence of a business ecosystem and provide decision-makers with valuable inputs. This is what 4 million – make that 4.5 million registrations helps to catalyze. I expect to see rapid movement in this direction with Croquet whose development community has been growing since 2003 and now has an open source foundation which meshes industry and education together.
In support of the national march for peace in Washington, DC on January 27th, 2007, members of the SL Netroots group organized the following events. All of the events took place at RootsCamp on Progressive IslandRoots Camp
Whether it’s the Swedish embassy mentioned in the previous post or a corporate location such as the Pontiac dealership whose grand opening is Friday, meshverse places will tend to appreciate going forward because they’re where the events and stories people care about take place. There are a lot of wonderful pieces of what I call “land as art” in Second Life whose current value is to showcase the possibilities of building in Second Life. Few people return after the first visit because nothing happens there(another Crash remix) and the art never changes. In the world of tangible atoms, art galleries take up a small portion of the land and have events and changing exhibits so people, places, things and events converge. As the Second Life economy evolves, fewer land as art galleries will be built as people seek to find more lucrative uses for land.
There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England, began keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 more months to hit 100 million, late in the month of October 2006.
Consider the Web’s average of 1.6 million new sites per month over the past month compared to the over 210,000 members Second Life has added in the past 2 weeks since it hit the 1 million mark. That’s approaching a half million per month – up by a factor of 30 from the roughly 15 thousand a month from January to May when SL hit the cover of Business Week and nearly 3 times the 190,000 members per month added since May!
Clearly these are rough numbers, but this is just Second Life and by itself it appears to be moving faster than the web! So if you’ve been following my blogs, you won’t be surpised to hear me say The Virtual Is Real, Just Do The Math if you are new, welcome and enjoy the links!
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are improving Second Life’s chances to be a long term meshverse player. They represent the emergence of a business ecosystem and provide decision-makers with valuable inputs. This is what 
