Second Life Future Salon

Globalizing Education Via Virtual Worlds

A book that I have been recommending to nearly every person I've recently come into contact with is The World is Flat.  Written by New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman, it describes the causes of our increasing movement towards globalization as well as some of the challenges we will be facing in the upcoming decades.

He calls the causes of globalization 'Flattening Forces.'  These forces are a combination of historical events and social trends; however there is a common thread between them.  The overall flattening of the world has been catalyzed by our increasing ability to communicate and process information.  Virtual worlds continue this trend by increasing the quantity of information that can be communicated as well as the quality.  By involving more of our senses and taking advantage of our innate ability to process spatial information, virtual worlds are quickly becoming a medium that allows us to express ourselves to an extent only previously possible in the physical world.  As such, I fully expect virtual worlds to be included in a future edition of The World is Flat as a flattening force.

Non Profit Work within Second Life

The metaverse will present vast opportunities for non-profit groups if they are able to adopt the technology and adapt their methodology to harness the power.  Using Second Life as a platform, nationwide non-profit groups can begin to expand their relationship reach into new digital communities that exist in the ether. As shown through our Second Life Relay For Life the digital community is as vibrant and responsive as and small town or big city, and it should be treated as such.

There are tremendous opportunities to perform outreach, and advocacy through the digital worlds. Organizations can set up information outreach centers maintained by staff or volunteers who can provide  information to residents.  Development of fundraisers is already a proven issue. Yet there are still  ways to build relationships and maintain them.  The sale of digital music has become a major portion of that media’s sales, but is not the sole distribution channel. Similarly, I see that over the next 5 years that action through digital worlds will make up a notable portion of our fundraising, education, and advocacy activities.

More powerful yet is the resident’s ability to create micro events for personal causes. Using their meme, residents can collect their friends and tap their in-world social networks for causes very close to them.  I feel that as the virtual world grows more material world causes will appear and we will see the growth of micro events.  Geographically local events will draw donors from all around the world.  This challenges the mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’ and flips it on its head.  Through virtual worlds we will be able to ‘Think locally, act globally’. 

Web 3.0

Another meme has left the barn. From Joi Ito's blog:

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"While we're at labeling the web x.0. Philip Torrone jokingly mentioned to me the other day (inside Second Life) that 3D was Web 3.0. I agree. 3D and VR have been around for a long time and there is a lot of great work going on, but I think we're finally getting to the phase where it's integrated with the web and widely used...

"Second Life (SL) is sort of the next step in development. Instead of trying to control all real-money and real-world relationship with things in the game like Blizzard does with WoW, SL encourages it. SL is less about gaming and more about building and collaboration. However, SL is not open source and is a venture capital backed for-profit company that owns the platform. I love it, but I think there's one more step.

"Croquet, which I've been waiting for for a long time appears to be in the final phases of a real release. Croquet, if it takes off should let you build things like SL but in a distributed and open source way. It is basically a 3D collaborative operating system. If it takes off, it should allow us to take our learning from WoW and SL and do to them what "Web 2.0" is doing to traditional consumer Internet services."

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Joi Ito, David Smith from Croquet, and Philip Rosedale from Linden Lab were all at Accelerating Change this year. As soon as I get them online we'll stream video of their sessions into Second Life for a salon. In Second Life right now, check out MAKE:land. Looks like we'll also be doing an event there with Phillip Torrone sometime this fall.

Second Life + Rocketboom

Amanda Congdon 1/2 way through Monday's episode of Rocketboom: "Meanwhile Andrew [Baron] was at the Second Life conference where he was asked to move out of the way by an MTV crew, but managed to spend the time doing indepth investigative journalism...or whatever. Turns out Second Life already has citizen journalists, as well as a lot of other interesting creatures. So we've kind of figured out a set up. Look for some crazy virtual weirdness to occur soon and perpetually."

Cool! So hopefully we'll see some SL avatar correspondents appearing on Rocketboom doing machinima news reports. Please leave ideas and brainstorms in the comments. SL Future Salon goers will remember Amanda's appearance at the June salon. And Hey, Rocketboom and MTV, please play nice, you two :-).

Podcast of Ray Kurzweil and Moira Gunn @ Accelerating Change 2005

Podcasts from Accelerating Change 2005 have begun going up on IT Conversations. First up, Ray and Moira:

Dr. Moira Gunn is on-stage with prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil. You know him best as the inventor of speech recognition systems and music synthesizers. In more recent years he's moved his focus to artificial intelligence, human consciousness and biological intelligence. They talk about his latest book: The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Up and To the Right

In Alvis Brigis's first post on this blog, Rosedale's Bloom, he considers Second Life's growth as measured by the number of SL accounts. Both he and I think that SL's growth pattern looks and feels more like technology adoption (more and more people coming to use open-ended digital worlds for a variety of purposes), not media consumption (a burst of people coming into a closed-purpose and/or game virtual world before wearing it out and leaving). Below is the subscriber data taken from MOGchart.com for you to look at and think about. I've augmented the out-of-date MOGchart with red arrows pointing to their subscriber updates plus my own taken from Second Life's homepage over the last couple of months. Note that SL hit 50,000 accounts on or about September 16th, and is already up to 63,224 at the time of this posting. That's 20-some% growth in the last three weeks?!

So what do you think the future growth trajectory will be and why? In this Second Life Herald interview from June 2004, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale forecasts 1,000,000 users some time in 2007. Which way will it go, what are the drivers, and what are the major obstacles to the rapid, sustained growth of SL? And beyond that what does it all mean?

Second Life sprays its possible futures

SLCC Shout-Outs (Organizers, Volunteers, Donors, Media, and Sponsors)

The first Second Life Community Convention went down in a major way at the New York Law School this past Sunday. Before a full post on the event, I'd like to thank the rest of the organizational team and our amazing volunteers, donors, and sponsors. I can't say it enough: without their generous support this could not have happened.

Click continue reading for a full list of convention credits. From left to right below that's the organizing team being split between two worlds: Jerry Paffendorf/SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, Valadeza Anubis, Jennyfur Peregrine, FlipperPA Peregrine, Jeska Linden, and Hiro Pendragon. I didn't know *any* of them before we started working on this less than three months ago, and met three of them for the first time *at* the event, which I think is pretty amazing.

At the podium I'm saying: "Hey, that fairy watching us inworld matches my tie!" :-)

1994: Rosedale's Bloom

Not only is Second Life about to catalyze an economic boom period, it may also result in better people, according to Philip Rosedale.

At State of Play and SLCC (10/07/05 - 10/09/05) distinguished legal scholars, employees of Linden Lab, and diverse others already exposed to the SL technology and corresponding memes, all reiterated the party-line phrase: "Second Life is a platform, not a game."  The existing data on the adoption rate of Second Life overwhelmingly supports this notion. 

The SLRFL won the State of Play Public Space Competition

The Second Life Relay For Life won the State of Play Design competition. I am so excited for all of the volunteers who worked their tails off to make the event happen.  The recognition only solidifies all of our efforts to expand the event next year and grow it bigger and better. Thank you again to all of the volunteers!

SL Currency Exchange

Linden Lab has launched a new currency exchange called the Lindex.  Here is a current snapshot of the market, which is being held stable at an exchange rate of about L$266 to the USD. This is becoming a critical issue as more and more SL users are making their living and depending on a fairly constant currency exchange rate.  I think that just like the real world economy, the SL and other virtual economies deserve some artificial assistance in keeping their exchange rates stable, but not fixed!