Second Life Future Salon

Read-Ahead for Tuesday's SL Future Salon

This Tuesday at 6 PM PST the Second Life Future Salon will meet with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett on the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower on Sheep Island [<--SLURL, click to launch Second Life]. More details here. The meeting will be conducted in voice over Skype and made available as a podcast thanks to Johnny Ming of Secondcast and Metaverse Sessions.

The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information. As prep reading, viewing, and listening, here are a few timely links on the topics of transparency and privacy on the web:

•Justin Hall's short video about passively multi-player online gaming (PMOGs)

•Onlife, a program Justin Hall mentions in this MP3 of his keynote at the Mobile Games Conference:

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.

•Mark Barrett inverviewed on Secondcast, responding to criticism over SLStats.com originally being opt-out, not opt-in for avatar tracking, as in the Second Life Herald article Is Big Brother Watch-ing?-- that, I might add, starts by calling out my avatar, SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, for not having any SLStats friends, ha!

•Podcast of futurist Jamais Cascio on Personal Memory Assitants and the Participatory Panopticon from Accelerating Change 2005. From the abstract:

The value of mobile camera phones as a means to capture events in one’s life will only be further enhanced as these devices become more powerful, their cameras improve, their capabilities increase, and the speed of connectivity continues to grow. There will be an opportunity to view and save everything we do. This is monitoring on a huge scale but we will do it willingly. Moreover, the sheer size of the numbers of people involved will overwhelm any attempts to use this monitoring in a 'Big Brother' way.

•danah Boyd writes about backlash within the Facebook community over news feeds that let you easilly follow every little change your friends make to their pages: Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. She lists her main takeaways:

• Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
• The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
• We've experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot.  When are we going to learn?
• Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
• Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
• Facebook lost its innocence this week.

• MoBuzz YouTube video on the Facebook feeds. I like this analysis.

• A New York Times article on a woman identified by piecing together her AOL search queries that were made public along with thousands of others: A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. From the article:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

•Links to David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, on privacy and surveillance

Join the SL Future Salon group in Second Life  for inworld announcements and reminders and I hope to see you on Tuesday!

Next SL Future Salon Tuesday, September 26th with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett

The Second Life Future Salon continues on Tuesday, September 26th at 6 PM PST with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett. We'll be talking on Skype and streaming live into the Sheep Tower 5th floor conference room [<--SLURL] on Sheep Island. The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information.

Justin Hall has been working on a framework for what he calls passively multi-player online gaming or PMOGing. See his short video presentation here for a succinct introduction, and an MP3 of his inspired keynote at the Mobile Games Conference for more. PMOGing asks that you make your online activity transparent to others in order to turn the web itself into an MMO of sorts, one that we play simply by behaving and performing for the networked public eye. From PassivelyMultiplayer.com:

Description

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous people, gangsters, soldiers.

Summary:

A system for using user data and device-use history to generate avatars and/or game moves in an online multiuser environment.

Mark Barrett came on the Second Life scene relatively recently and made waves with his site SLStats.com which tracks how much time you've spent inworld, where, and with who. After initial controversy over people's SL information being posted to the web without their explicitly opting into the SLStats system, Mark quickly modified to the service to only track those who've signed up themselves. Mark is also the creator of SLBuzz and SLTags. From SLStats.com:

Second Life Stats allows you to see how much time you spend playing Second Life, and can even keep statistics on other interesting things, such as tracking your whereabouts. It does this using a small attachment that your avatar can wear.

SLStats is completely passive, and doesn't require you to do anything besides wearing the SLStats attachment. You can browse statistics of other Second Life residents using SLStats, rate them, and also write blog entries straight from within Second Life.

I also find myself now working on an SL side project that juggles opt-in etiquette, transparency and privacy. What is it? Well, I kid you not, it's a kind of mix between the old SLTV, Subservient Chicken, and "Someone keeps stealing my letters..." (a kind of massively multi-player alphabet sandbox). More on that soon, and at the salon.

And so the three of us will discuss our projects and visions, issues and expectations around privacy and transparency, and work with saloners on defining some groundrules for lifelogging etiquette on the web and in virtual worlds. There's been a lot about this in the news recently. More background posts coming soon.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes to the SL Future Salon

Hi everybody,

As you've seen, things have been quiet with the Second Life Future Salon for a couple of months. I'm working on changing that. Please never mind the site holes as we update.

The situation is pretty classic, though this was my first time going through it: A community forms, momentum builds, it takes a lot of effort, way goes on to way, some entropy sets in, it's tricky to clean up, other sirens call, updates seem daunting, attention goes elsewhere, things go on the back-burner. But I've got a solution that seems to fit.

For me, most of the dauntingness grew out of SL Future Salon's early hybrid role as a multi-gadget SL and virtual worlds site, trying to do a lot of different things and developing a lot of blogly "spaghetti code" while doing them. We started the blog and monthly meetings back in April 2005, which for those following Second Life's growth is an absolute eternity ago. Now there are so many great SL voices and news sources out there that we don't have to sweat that hybrid role and can clean things up, pair things down, get  fun and sustainable again, and focus entirely on the monthly inworld audio conversations and podcasts with invited guests about the future of virtual worlds.

Look out for some updates on the blog soon and an announcement about a meeting in September. Here is what I'd like to see SL Future Salon become:

A very simple, clean, and clear blog that:

*Announces a new meeting with invited guests at the start of each month
*Pushes a few posts with links and ideas directly relevant to the meeting, with background on the guests and related issues
*Hosts pics, podcasts and transcripts of the salons

And that's it!

We could still use some help, so please let me know if you're interested in assisting in:

*Site design
*Basic podcast editing
*Suggesting/inviting guests
*Event wrangling (teleporting people in, taking and prioritizing questions for Q&A)

For those who aren't familiar with the SL Future Salons they are monthly gatherings inside Second Life where up to 50 people get together with invited guests to listen to (in audio) and discuss ideas relevant to virtual worlds in all their forms, not just SL. I started them while I was working as a community director with the Acceleration Studies Foundation as a node in their Future Salons Network of monthly meetups in real world cities. In December 2005 I joined The Electric Sheep Company as their futurist in residence and haven't had a lot of time to do house-cleaning on former projects.

Examples of guests we've had over the last year include Babbage Linden (Linden Lab/Second Life), Richard Bartle (co-creator of the first MUD), Thomas Barnett (author of the NY Times best-selling The Pentagon's New Map), Amanda Congdon (formerly of Rocketboom), Peter Ludlow (founder of the Second Life Herald), Paul Marino (machinima.org), Howard Rheingold (smart mobber), and a bunch of other interesting folks.

Stay tuned and drop me an IM inworld or an email at jerry[at]electricsheepcompany[dot]com if you're interested in participating, learning more, or passing on ideas. We also have a Yahoo group with over 100 people and a group in SL called SL Future Salon. Join those and subscribe to the blog to stay in the loop on meetings.

Thanks for the patience and support and see you again real soon!

Jerry Paffendorf/SNOOPYbrown Zamboni