Blog post & video: 2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World’s A Stage

Gary Hayes is "doing a commercial report and curriculum development on the evolving range of social virtual worlds and have recently ventured into fifty of them to review and sample the culture, creative, business and educational potential." While working on it, he video recorded his travels and created a seven minute video that gives a quick peek into many virtual worlds. His blog post highlights a few of his thoughts from this project. The one that really stood out to me as being critically important is:

A few new entrants realise that using a fully fledged, 3D game engine as the client for what is in the end a glamorous 3D facebook and requiring a high spec’d PC is not the best way. Second generation services like vSide have followed a good middle ground

Indeed, Second Life is now requiring a more robust PC setup to run its software. The trend should be to lighten the computing requirements so that more people can use these virtual worlds.




The audio on the video is just music, in case you don't want to disturb your neighbors at work. I do like the quotes Hayes has used in the video. They really make you think!

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Thanks to Kathryn Greenhill for blogging about this.

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Technorati tag: Virtual Worlds

My Meez

I'm doing SLA's 23 Things and the person who wrote the pages has a Meez avatar. Okay, I've been seeing these for a while and finally decided to create one for myself. They are quick to do and free. She doesn't really look like me, but that's okay. Avatars aren't meant to be exact replicas of how we look in real life.

Not sure if I'll hang out on Meez at all, but if you want to see me there, my userid is jill_hw.

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Technorati tag: SLA23Things

From JibberJobber blog: LinkedIn maintenance you need to do immediately

The person in JibberJobber blog is correct; we spend a lot of time building our profiles in LinkedIn and don't want to loose that work. To guard against it, she recommends doing two things (quoting):

1. Export your contacts. Simply click on Contacts, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on Export Connections, and follow that process. Just leave everything at default and you’ll end up with your connections in a .csv file, which opens in Excel.
2. Export your profile. You’ve probably put a fair amount of thought into creating your profile, right? What about any references you have gotten? Simply click on Profile, then find the grayed-out icons above your name, and click on the adobe pdf icon. This exports your profile, including recommendations, into a very nice, presentable document (kudos to whoever at LinkedIn did that formatting, it is very well-done!).
   

I just did this and it took less than a minute and was easy. No I have this information on my PC in case I ever need to recreate my profile on LinkedIn. Why would I need to do that? Ah...read JibberJobber.

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Technorati tag: LinkedIn

PR Junkie says " Virtual worlds will never catch on"

Never? With...

• eight-year olds using virtual worlds like Whyville, BuildaBearVille, and WebKinz
• teens using virtual worlds for fun and gaming
• students using virtual worlds for classes (even college classes)
• businesses and governments using virtual worlds for meetings, trade shows, and training

...virtual worlds are not going away. We're still learning how to use them. Therefore, I'm not concerned about organizations that jump in and fail. I bet they learned from the experience and will do better the next time.

One thing is for sure, virtual worlds will continue to improve and change. What we see now is a foretaste of the worlds (and uses) that will come.

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Technorati tag: Second Life

Article: 101 Things To Do For Hubbers And Bloggers

Thanks to Laura Solomon for finding this. We all run "out of steam" on occasion, so lists like this are helpful. Here are some ideas from the list:

29. Enter a blog contest to get more exposure.
30. Encourage your readers to leave comments.

70. Submit a sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
71. Search for your articles in Google.
72. Setup a profile for yourself to network your blog on a social network

89. Try out a new template on your blog.
90. Update your keywords and title tags.
91. Write about the free online services your enjoy.
92. Write a constructive profile page.

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Technorati tag: Blogging

Article: Google Launches Virtual World Called Lively

I haven't tried Google's virtual world yet, but would be interested in hearing from anyone who has. I'm intrigued that:

Worlds can be embedded into web pages, although only Windows users on IE or Firefox can view them, after an add-on download and installation.

I'm spec'ing out a project where that could be very interesting.

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Technorati tags: Google, virtual worlds

Where was Matt? A neat Google Earth & video combination

You may already be familiar with Matt. If not, check out the web site. This video -- which is a take-off on his other videos -- is a wonderful use of Google Earth and video combined.