Changevine is a companion to the MJ that will reference posts here like Moon Mesh.
Archive for General
No Surprise – Blogs Trump The NY Times
In 2002 a $2000 bet was made between blogging pioneer Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times that:
“In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the ‘New York Times‘ Web site”.
This isn’t shocking to many who’ve been following the trends – people were saying that a decade ago. Though it’s harder to pinpoint the timeframe precisely from a decade out, given the assertion that it’s 1994 again, MJ readers ought not be surprised when the coming boom arrives. Toffler has been painting broad brush strokes for nearly 40 years and Kurzweil is sketching the next 40. Scenario thinking can help you at least prevent big surprises and position yourself to take advantage of the coming changes. One highly recommended book is:
How To Characterize Second Life
The mainstream press has struggled with how to characterize Second Life. The term “3-D online virtual world” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as the term “game.” And it’s a whole lot harder to get in a headline. But what is it, really?
I look at Second Life as an emerging augmented reality, something that perhaps can be best summarized as the electronic convergence of people, places things and events. Many people use the term metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, but I have proposed that “meshverse” is a more accurate and useful term as it encompasses all of the things people do and may do with worlds like Second Life.
No matter what term one chooses to use, as Dan Shafer has observed, this paradigm is very intriguing and is likely to produce a huge economic windfall.
Meshverse Ecosystem Survey
I’ve had this post in draft for quite some time but wanted to do an in depth review. After commenting on Howard Sterns’s How do distributed systems work? post I realized that a list of lists might be helpful. Read the rest of this entry »
Nanomesh
In my last post, I implied that nanotech will play a key role in the evolution of the meshverse. While at first glance, that may seem a bit speculative, I’ve writing about this since 2002 and more recently pointed out the near-term business case for linking information and nanoscale technologies. Ray Kurzweil recently pointed out the intersections between information and other technologies, concluding:
A primary implication of the nanotechnology revolution is that physical technologies, such as manufacturing and energy will become governed by the law of accelerating returns. All technologies will become information technologies including energy.
I coined the term meshverse to better describe the paradigm I’m developing the GriotVision platform for. GriotVision also points to this same convergence in the broader context of industries:
It seems likely that the GriotVision multicasting ecosystem(or something similar) will absorb the various “industries” which currently dominate computing, communication, media and consumer electronics. Eventually, it will become part of the fabric of all existing and new industries.
Although it’s not possible to accurately predict what forms this convergence will take, let alone what companies and products will bring nanoscale technology to the meshverse, it’s clear that we’re already on the way.
Crash – The Second Life Remix
While writing the last post, the opening line from the movie Crash came to mind:
It’s the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.
For SL it might go something like this:
It’s the sense of sight. In Second Life, you walk, you know? You see people, people speak to you. On the web, nobody sees you. We’re always alone. I think we miss that sight so much, that we watch YouTube, just so we can see somebody.
Update:
Take a look at this video of a live jazz event. It takes place at a location called Clyde in Second Life. In it you’ll see people in the audience dancing – you don’t dance at web sites …
IBM, Second Life and the End of The Text Based Internet
One of the pioneers in Second Life is IBM, which also played an important part in helping to make the Web (and open source) respectable for businesses. Here’s what Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology strategy and innovation at IBM, and the man who oversaw the company’s GNU/Linux policy in the early days, says about IBM’s interest in Second Life:
I think that what we are seeing is the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web in incredibly important new directions. Foremost among them is a much more people-centric Web.
We see this people-centric evolution of the Web in social networks and Web 2.0 – capabilities that enable people to find each other, form communities, share information, and collaborate on a variety of endeavors. Now we are bringing to this new people-centric spirit the highly visual, interactive applications in Virtual Worlds. This new breed of applications is being rethought around the people who design them, maintain them and use them, instead of asking those people to come down to the level of the computers.
We can now bring these exciting capabilities, already in wide use in science, engineering, defense and consumer applications, into the worlds of business, education, health care and government. This was the step that led to IBM’s e-business strategy ten years ago. Could we be at the onset of v-business? Based on my initial experiences in Second Life, we are all in for an incredible ride.
As we’ve seen with IBM’s entry into the PC, (OOP – Smalltalk, then Java), and Linux markets – the questions now aren’t about if the virtual world paradigm will take root but rather how fast and how deep those roots will grow. When a major paradigm takes root, the current paradigm doesn’t die off, but it does lose its place of primacy. I agree in part with author of the above link when he says:
… the 3D Web isn’t going to take over things that are primarily text-based – there’d be no point. I think rather that it will provide an easier, more intuitive interface to many things …
but the Meshverse(which is more than a 3D web) will subsume text-based stuff and then transform it. This is already happening in Second Life as the Mozilla based uBrowser technology brings web pages in world as functional decoration on the surfaces of 3D objects. When there’s a need to scroll through traditional text we’ll zoom full screen onto a window. This is just an evolutionary twist on maximize/minimize controls and the Dock(Mac) or Task Bar(Windows). Over time, we’ll see less and less text and most images will be snapshots of 3D models. There will also be more functional sound and Tangible User Interfaces(TUI). Text will remain but in a secondary, support role.
A Space Shuttle For Our Mind
A computer connected via the web is by far more powerful than a standalone desktop machine and the meshverse amplifies that power even more. If a computer amplifies the mind in the way that a bicycle amplifies locomotive force, the original web was a railroad, Web 2.0 a jet aircraft and the meshverse is a space shuttle! While it’s important to maintain some perspective on the computer/bicycle metaphor(see this Alan Kay Interview), the core idea is a very powerful and practical one. The latest round of tools such as the Google Reader are making it more accessible. Following this excellent, step-by-step screencast, anyone who can use a web browser can greatly amplify their ability to get the information they want in a timely manner. This is not a watered down version – seasoned bloggers are using it too. If you came upon this post via a regular web link and don’t know or care much about RSS, treat yourself to a ride with Google Reader!
The Art of The Bottom Line
One night, while Lipsky, who runs a nonprofit arts group, watched TV with his wife, an avatar art guide named Nata Clutterbuck sold a drawing he’d imported to Second Life. At a recent event in Filthy’s Warehouse, he sold $275 worth of virtual drawings and a real drawing for $325.
“I’m bringing my real art to the virtual space. Now I’m bringing things from the virtual space into real life and bringing it back to the virtual life,” Lipsky says. “It’s wild.”
This makes me think of an often quoted passage from a William Gibson novel
“the street finds it’s own uses for things”
At the same time experts and analysts seek out a few killer applications like Practical 3D Telepresence, regular folk, driven by necessity and empowered increasingly more sophisticated access to the means of producing goods and services are changing the face and pace of innovation. The artistic vision of the Star Trek hand-held communications device was pretty far removed from the creation of the cell phone. Today, artists are directly participating the evolution of things like Second Life and 3D Printing.
Towards A More Human-Centric View of Technology
One of the motivations for using the term meshverse is to shift the terminology of the post-web internet to be more human-centric so that more people can squeeze more value out of the technologies. Currently, most internet technologies are greatly underutilized because people don’t understand them. For example, many people consider the Internet to be synonymous with the Web but that’s just not the case. It’s understandable how this misperception came to be because the terminology of the Internet and Web is very technology-centric and people naturally prefer to use concepts and terms rooted in their daily experiences. People manage to wade through terms like SMTP and POP3 in order to use email but it isn’t comfortable and doesn’t leave them receptive to embracing something new and useful like webmail.
We can do better and if we choose more human-centric terminology as we transition from the Web more people will be empowered. GriotVision is the collection of interlinked stories accessible via the electronic convergence of people, places, things and events called The Meshverse. We can make it that simple. Sure there will be a need to map the specifications to human concepts, but technically trained people are in the best position do that, plus we have to do it anyway. There’s precedence for this approach – nobody needs to know about SMPTE in order to use their television.
