The Economist’s Geoweb, Neogeographers, and Virtual Worlds
September 8th, 2007
This week’s Economist has an interesting look at what its calls the Geoweb (“…resulting when the internet becomes intertwined with the real world…”) and neogeographers. As the article notes: “…Geobrowsers are a stunningly effective means of visualising the planet. But they are just one part of a broader endeavour, the construction of a “geoweb†that […]
Read more »Practical Suggestions on Bridging the Gap between Games and Social Networks
September 3rd, 2007
A bit more on bridging the dichotomous worlds of games and social networks, this time via the Aggro Me blog. What I find interesting is the author’s direct & practical suggestions of integrating various phenomena: “1. Feeds * Official News (obvious) * Dev Tracker (preferably with different categories for Technical, Design, etc.) * Community News […]
Read more »Compulsion Loops: There, Here, and soon to be Everywhere
August 29th, 2007
An interesting point from Worlds in Motion’s interview with There.com’s Michael Wilson, namely their efforts to bring “player compulsion loops†to the worlds they have build for MTV. “… Compulsion loops? “I’m going to point at World of Warcraft, because everybody knows they’re really good at this,” Wilson explains. “We study them all the time, […]
Read more »Avatarnomics: Avatars will soon outnumber humans
August 25th, 2007
In The Guardian, Vic Keegan discussed recent Gartner research indicating that – in four years’ time – 80% of internet users will have avatars working or playing online. Given the pace of internet adoption, and the fact that people often have more than one avatar, there will soon be more avatars than humans, at least […]
Read more »Unype’d We Stand: One View of the Future of Parallel Worlds
August 24th, 2007
I have been waiting for more developments from Unype (a free mash-up of Google Earth, Skype, and, now, Facebook) since I first read about their work several months back, and my patience was rewarded by this recent Virtual Worlds News article. In it, Murat Aktihanoglu (Unype’s founder) offers some of his vision of a platform […]
Read more »Death of Snow Crash…and the Rise of Flexible Decentralization
August 12th, 2007
Terra Nova offered a very insightful post today pointing out some of the most significant fallacies that surround much of the current thinking regarding virtual worlds. In a nutshell: “…If the ascendance of the Web and especially the changes brought by Web 2.0 sites, applications, and tools show us anything, they show us that the […]
Read more »