The brilliant (and smokin' hot!) IYan Writer gets it exactly right:

The alienation, caused by technology, is and was real. However, television and radio were the technologies that alienated us the most. We were passive receptacles of content, created and selected by others. But this state is not natural to us: all humans strive to change and affect the environment - that is the very definition of human (and, unfortunately, our greatest failure, as the sad state of Earth testifies). As soon as technology that promised to connect us to others was available, we grasped it with both hands, pulled and haven't let go since. And the level of alienation keeps dropping - for example, you can be alienated on a web forum, but must try hard (trolling ain't easy!). However, that is practically impossible in virtual worlds.

Second Life is not about shopping, company builds or even content, created for and freely given to community. No, it's not even about prim hair, girls. No, not wings, either, Soph ;) It is about PEOPLE. You can be disliked, but you are never alone.

Read the rest of the post for a really engaging walk through tech history!

Yesterday Virtual Worlds News released the results of a questionnaire about the coming year in virtual worlds that was sent to a bunch of industry  leaders. Aleister Kronos, shockingly overlooked by them, gave us his own and challenged us to reply ourselves.  Here's my list of answers:

1. What are your top 3 trend predictions for 2008?
1. Along with everybody else, I think kids' worlds are going to be where a lot of the action - in numbers and controversy - is going to be.
2. But, not entirely. The first sports MMOs will blow WOW out of the water and see *serious* mainstreaming.
3. There's going to be a significant shifting of the balance of power towards users/residents/citizens.
2. What business goals have you set for 2008?
1. Creating and enacting a business plan that keeps us expanding and a tiny bit profitable.
2. Within that, 15 sims by our anniversary.
3. On a monthly basis, see Board-organized events making up less than 20% of what goes on in Extropia.
3. What challenges do you expect 2008 to bring to the virtual worlds industry?
1. I got nothin'.
   
4. A number of platforms will be launching in 2008. What impacts will this have on the industry?
1. A lot of these worlds that flunk the Bury Test will fail.
2. Open source worlds and design-your-own worlds will be *much* bigger than the pundits recognize.
3. The overall quality of mainstream reporting will increase, as the coverage moves past the half-hour visitation and sex/pedo/griefing coverage, to regular beats.
5. How will the changes affect your industry segment in 2008?
1. We probably won't have the time or capital to take advantage of people's disillusion with packaged-product worlds.
2. OpenSim is a big wildcard.
   
3. There is no 3 :)

Predictions for the metaverse in 2008 and beyond:

• Kids' worlds are a natural focus for community. Kids naturally form communities, and are used to some structure in doing that: play dates, teams, and so on. Of course, there's so much money to be made from them that there will be companies willing to invest the time in community formation, and trying until they get it right.

• Once they do, watch out! Already there's a generation that fully expects the social ties of childhood and college to continue indefinitely - that's a big part of what drives Facebook. Once a generation grows up in Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, they're in synthetic worlds for the next century - forever, if we get that pesky mortality thing licked on schedule!

• Broadcast media, and "bowling alone" are dead, fading away along with all the other mistakes and horrors of the 20th Century. Just as it's been through all the rest of human history, our entertainment will be primarily social again.
  

• Government will be taken back by the people. By professionalizing creativity, the broadcast media contributed to the personal disempowerment of 20th Century society. A generation that makes its own movies, builds its own houses, tells its own stories, maintains its own communities - will govern itself too.
  

• All this means that despite the weirdly gleeful predictions (perpetuating the cycle of psychic abuse?) of a number of pundits, the frontier isn't closed. We're not about to get paved over by the old atomic-world order. If the dinosaurs don't stomp us right now - and I actually think it's too late for that - we small mammals of Digital community are just going to replace them as evolution's next big thing.
  

Predictions for our little corner (the Extropia FemtoVerse?):

• 15 sims by our first anniversary should be no big deal. If Caledon can be in the mid-30s and make money, Extropia can too. We're in remarkably the same market - positive, polite community - but we might have lower barriers to entry. There's still a perception that you have to dress and talk differently to be in Caledon, and, gods know, *anything* goes in Extropia (as long as it's positive and polite!)!
  

• Once we really connect our network with the people building the future - the groups of the SciLands in particular - we'll be unstoppable. They know building, we know community. One of the things we geeks want most is to *belong* - and belonging is what Extropia's all about. We just need to reach the nodal points that'll enable us to spread the word.
  

• It's all about a mix of social events and hangout spaces. That's hard: I've seen wonderful hangout spaces that don't draw and keep a crowd, and been to great events that get people talking to each other, but then disperse them all, with noplace to hang and chat, or to come back to and find them around. Dr Dobbs Amphiteater + Diversionarium = WIN.
  

• It seems to me - from thinking and from The Diamond Age, rather than from any experience of Caledon - that one of the attractions of Victoriana is the combination of politeness and the willingness to bust heads to maintain it. That's a hard balance, between freedom and gentility. I predict we'll have some High Drama in Extropia before we find the sweet spot.

• One anti-prediction: we're not going to go the way of the City of Rapture, any similarities notwithstanding!

• Our mission in Extropia is to enable people to build a fun, future-friendly community. But, like our friends in Al Andalus, another goal is to set an example, to show atomic-world people they don't need to settle for crappy governments, communities, livelihoods. It seems that Wired might get behind our message.

I've got 34 tabs open right now in Firefox. I'm spending the morning trying to "clean out the fridge" and make something out of all the odd bits in there. Everytime I try to do this, a theme emerges, something that's been marinating in my subconscious (what *is* it with the food metaphors?! Happy post-Thanksgiving!) and is just ready to serve up.

So, let's see what we can make out of all this social networking-themed stuff....

Expanding The Network (Toolkit): I've been working my social-networking presence this past week. I've added some more friends on Facebook (here's my profile), on Virtual Worlds Connect (that profile), on SLScout (another profile), and started Twittering (my profile there, and catch my and my friends' tweets on RSS at sophs_twitter   ). I it's brought me closer to another network node of people I really like: IYan Writer, iAlja Writer, Grace McDunnogh, Tara5 Oh, which is great fun!  *pokes John Zhaoying and Centrasian Wise for being silent on about 100 channels each*  :D

PITA: Maintaining all this stuff, even to the extent of a basic Salon announcement, is a huge PITA. Here's the Salon PR routine:

• Post to the LL events list.
• Post to the Your2ndPlace.com calendar
• Email Rik's Picks
• Post to my LiveJournal, Virtual Worlds Connect blog, SLScout blog
• Create an event in Facebook (the Salons are all in Aachen, Germany, thanks to Facebook's refusal to recognize digital events- more on that in a minute!
• Post inworld to the Digital People and Extropia Citizens groups
• That's all Monday morning. I do a follow-up post to the SL groups on Friday, and then Saturday at 11 or 12, I send announcements to those groups and most of the social networking sites.
• After the event, follow up with a post-event post to my blog and the Extropia blog.
• The annoying thing is, it's almost all the same content, yet I have to enter it over and over - grr!

And, my photo social networking is a disaster.  I've got photos on LJ Scrapbook, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket.  I take a ton of photos, but don't have the time to participate in photo social networking, which is kinda sad.  I'm living vicariously through Vidal on that front....


Bloggers, Slashers and Rezbians, or the Fannish Divide: Here's something that isn't ready to be served up yet:  the implications of choice of platform.  There was an article this week in the Wired Campus Blog (not affiliated with Wired Magazine) suggesting a class divide between users of Facebook and MySpace. It's long interested me that SL bloggers vastly prefer Blogger or Blogspot to LiveJournal.  I'd seen the former two as designed for would-be pundits, and the latter as, well, social networking.  LiveJournal has strong communities, and the Friends page (which I use as my RSS reader) makes it easy to get conversations going among groups of friends.  Yet there are terribly few active LJ bloggers. Interestingly, there seem to be a number of active Furry communities on LJ, but really nothing else beyond the main LJ/SL comm, second_lifers , which I'm not really fond of for various reasons.

There's also a relationship between choice of platform and sexual identity/interest, I think.  LJ is *very* fannish, and it's surprised me that there seems to be remarkably little overlap between fandom and SL (there's an interesting paper to be written mapping the convergences and divergences between SCA, fandom, Furs, and SL, with sexual preference overlaid on that....).  And, fandom sexuality is really focused on slash: predominantly-straight women reading and writing gay male erotica. SL sexuality, as we know, is all about what blogger Kit Meredith calls "Rezbians": predominantly straight women in lesbian relationships.  Gay male expression is virtually invisible, and *much* more so than in any comparable atomic-world group of creatives. How and why do blog choice, fannishness, synthetic worlds interest and secondary sexual preference correlate?  I need to know!!

Transmedia storytelling could bring these two lobes of creative engagement together, but it hasn't yet. CSI was an odd choice for an SL transmedia event: CSI fans seem to be very predominantly old-media passive TV watchers.  Heroes has done fantastic things with transmedia, and is a much more fannish show, despite its high Nielsens, yet hasn't taken advantage of SL.  Other fannish shows - Supernatural, Lost, the sci-fi shows, haven't done that much transmedia, and haven't come near SL.  Is that odd, or is there some real separation between fannishness and synthetic world residence? And what's with that sexual overlay anyway? 

Bimodal distributions: This came out in the "Clubbing In SL"salon a month or so ago.  There was a consensus that there are two good SL nightclub sizes: 20x20 boite, or full-sim, with anything in between really difficult to sustain. It turns out there's actually a sociological basis for that observation. You've probably heard the anecdote that the ideal group size for primate brains is about 150 people. I first came across that in Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue, an *amazingly* thought-provoking book. It's actually called Dunbar's Number, and there's more nuance to it than just the 150 figure. Grace McDunnogh, next week's Salon Spotlight Guest,explains it really well:

Chris Allen hypothesizes that that different group sizes impact a group's behavior and their choice of processes and tools. Based on empirical data from MMOG and online communities, he suggests that for non-survival groups, the equivalent Dunbar number falls somewhere between 60-90.

Allen argues that group dynamics have more than just the Dunbar number as a break point; three group size nodes emerge and Allen provides some insight into the group construct as it relates to size. Groups with too few people suffer from insufficient critical mass, experience group think, are unable to sustain conversation and the infamous "Echo Chamber" effect is evident. Read some of Eric Rice's "Echo Chamber" analysis regarding the failings of artificially small groups, aka elites. Overly large groups have far much too noise and cannot sustain an equal and unstructured trust. Cliques and inappropriate politics emerge and social contracts start to break down. From a Second Life perspective, an example of this might be the recent Second Citizen forum meltdown. Note that it's the group size that creates the breakdown of the cohesive bonds, not the "newbs". When group sizes grow beyond these normalized sizes, even the most senior members of the group can suffer the ill effects.Allen also hypothesizes that there is a correlation between group size and the level of group satisfaction in an interesting double humped graph where satisfaction peaks at levels of 5-8 and 50-70, with a devastating chasm in the middle between 9-25 people.

"Devastating chasm," huh?  This has huge implications for Extropia's growth: we're at 10 citizens right now.  I've had a sense all along that there were two and only two viable models: a small friends-and-family sim kept closed and close, or something Caledon-sized, around 15 sims.  I've been hoping to take us *quickly* to about 6 sims or 50 people.  This shows that my gut instinct was tuned into something very real.  Now just to *get there*....


Deposits and Withdrawals: I'd been frustrated with my blogging over the past month: it was *all* before-and-after event announcements, and it was even boring *me* to look at.  HorsePigCow, a *terrific* blog on online communities, analyzes the phenomenon of "social freeloading" by breaking actions down into social-capital deposits and withdrawals.  It's a terrific etiquette guideline for social networking!

The balance is a hard one to strike. I've been working at setting up the Salon lineup for the next six weeks or so, and to get there, I've got to expand my network.  I've pretty much  tapped out my first degree of separation, the people I already know, so I'm having to start working the second, FOAF, degree. But I've been leery about wheedling introductions - I've wanted to make sure I'm contributing more value to the network than I'm asking of it.  Which is hard when I'm barely keeping afloat on my own projects!


Privileging The Atomic World: I've had trouble really *getting* Facebook - what do you *do* with it?  I think it's a really atomic-world tool, but I'm not sure if that's an essential aspect of the medium, or just of built-in biases specific to Facebook.  That whole "you have to enter a city" thing for events is just stupidity, atomic-world bigotry.  But *is* there a way for Digital People to use it effectively?  If anybody's a Facebook maven, please talk to me! 

Here's another wacky example.  dandellion Kimban, among others, has had some fun blogging about the Barbie world ("Barbie Girls" and "Fear and Loathing in the Barbie World").  Here's a hilarious piece from Wired's Threat Level: 

But as an ingenious (and presumably profitable) bulwark against internet scum, Mattel only lets girls chat with "Best Friends," defined as people they know in real life..... It's sort of like an RSA token, but with cute fashion accessories and snap-on hair styles. THREAT LEVEL foresees a wave of Barbie Girl parties in the future, where tweens all meet and authenticate to each other -- like a PGP key signing party, but with cupcakes.

Read the blog comments - they're pretty interesting stuff. OK, security against predators is important in Barbie World, I get that.  But *what,* I ask you, is the point of a social networking world where you can only talk to people you have direct physical access to in the atomic world? That takes us back before telephones, pretty much to tin cans and string, doesn't it? 

I mean, isn't the whole *point* of Web 2.0/Web 3D/synthetic worlds to enable communications that *can't* be done better with old media? Facebook, sure, it's a good way of organizing a lifetime of disparate atomic-world contacts. But aren't Facebook and the Barbie Girl authenticator missing something?

Charity Begins at Home: I'm hosting Alanagh Recreant of SL Africa in the Salon in a few hours, and I'm really excited. Why, though, I asked myself this morning, when I'm usually really down on atomic-world activism in synthetic worlds? There's more to it than Alanagh being a wonderful, warm, fun person (with the most adorable tiny warthog av!).  So I picked at that till I got some answers. 

It goes back to Social Freeloading (see, synergy!).  IMO, most SL activists take but don't give.  They drain the resources of *my* world to support *their* world. Charities, politicians, NGOs, come into SL and consume resources. They take Resident time, money, attention, and remove them from the world to benefit their own causes and interests. They're parasites, and smugly virtuous ones at that. It's the same phenomenon as the wave of bad corporate presences we saw this past year: trying to take, without giving.

SL Africa, from what I've seen, doesn't do that. Their efforts run both ways. They're doing charity fundraisers, yes, but enabling content creators, working with SL creatives and entrepreneurs, and giving back to the world by expanding its reach to include people and perspectives we *need* amongst us.  They're good citizens of *this* world, not just of the atomic one.


Cherry On Top:  Apropos of nothing here, but I want to get another tab closed:  LesbianGamers.com is a *fun* site!  It's got great snarky game commentary, creative features and a fantastic sense of humor, all on a really attractive site.  "Lara Croft in 20 Years" and "Lesbionic Woman" both just cracked my shit up!  :D


Okay, that's it for today.  I've got to go do the round of Salon PR now.  But hey, I'm down to 29 tabs!  :P

I was able to catch the first panel of the Orange Island Identity Summit this morning.  Along with a number of articles last night and this morning, there's a lot to think about on this topic!

Saeya Nyanda of kyoot army was omg brilliant. She played well off Torley Linden, whom I'd never encountered before. Celebrity Trollop was the third, very thoughtful and interesting, panelist. 

Here are some highlights, first from Sayea and then from Torley:

( smart stuff )

A number of people in the audience took exception to all this, changing their tags to "Not A Brand," and expressing horror over Sayea and Celebrity's remarks about professionalism.  Which seemed to be missing the point: they weren't saying that avatar=brand, by any stretch of the terms, but if you're selling a product, and you've personalized that product by identifying yourself with it, then, yes, in public, you're working, and people will regard you as working and representing the brand whether *you* want some time off or not. 

This isn't news, and it isn't part of synthetic worlds as a new medium: *every* celebrity learns this lesson fast (and/or badly). Hollywood was built on the managed persona.  It's just that in smaller communities, we're closer to our celebrities, and more of us have the experience of *being* a celebrity than in a mass culture.

In other news, Gartner, Inc. released a report earlier this week that predicted that persona will become more important to marketing than person, with synthetic worlds in the forefront of the transformation.  There are two excellent articles following up on this at Virtual World news, here and here. Principal Analyst Adam Sarner observes that purchasing decisions aren't a reflection of who we are (as revealed by the demographic data that marketing thrives on now) but on who we think we are or want to be; those Boomers might need Geritol and Depends, but they're buying Viagra and sports cars.

Sarner has some *very* interesting comments on the tension between identity play and the push for identity verification:

"The idea of the persona is taking back this idea of privacy," he explained. "When you build personas, you're creating filters of what you want to project rather than projecting the whole thing. Rather than saying your name, address, number of children, and W-2, you're only leaving little crumbs of yourself to get what's relevant to that area. Now, if there's a value proposition and a win-win to give out more of yourself to get something, that's okay. What people hate is giving up part of their privacy with no payoff. If there's a payoff, I give out these aspects of myself to get something, I think that helps. The old adage is 'Privacy is dead, get over it.' Mine is 'Privacy is alive, get over it.'"

Some trends like Open ID and standard identification for avatars could change the way those personas operate, but Sarner believes users will almost always want to keep certain aspects separate. Instead of simply worrying about how to identify a person, he believes virtual worlds developers and companies interested in using virtual worlds need to determine where they stand in relation to personas' needs. The drive to satisfy our goals online isn't going away.

Meanwhile, Raph Koster tosses out this question about the growth of mobile phones as networking/gaming/synthetic worlds platforms:

There’s also the fact that the Net is shifting strongly away from pesudonymity and towards real identity. Mobile is strongly titled towards this side of the equation, in a way that the Internet isn’t. What does that means for virtual worlds, which so strongly reward identity exploration?

I don't understand the whole "transparency" thing:  it seems some people in SL have seized on this as some kind of business essential, and get their underwear in a bundle when dealing with Digital People or anyone who doesn't link directly to a full atomic-world identity. 

I have to wonder what their atomic lives are like - buying only fresh produce from the local greengrocer whose kids they know, banking with the guy from "It's a Wonderful Life" - and never dealing with anonymous corporations whose stock is owned by investment funds who're owned in turn by insurance companies that are publicly held by millions of individual investors. I mean, really!

Anyhoo.

This was my first encounter with Orange Island.  I'm interested and mostly impressed, and very much looking forward to future events there.

Things they did right:  It's a pretty build, and they not only have a group signup device by the stage, they *very thoughtfully* have an option for those of us whose groups are filled: one click on the sign friends an av that sends out their group notices.  Brilliant!  And their choices of panelists couldn't have been better - very impressive!

Things to work on:  The teleport point is right before what *looks* like extensive bleacher seating, but is just a ginormous staircase.  Which is unfortunate, as there are only about 20, 25 cushions spread around in front of the stage.  This led to a bit of chaos and milling around, not to mention people (quite reasonably!) trying over and over again to sit on the stairs.  They'd be better off with either enough seating for the 60+ turnout they had, or none at all. 

Also, the event was a good explanation of why I said in an earlier post that the best events encourage audience participation. The moderator of the first panel *literally* spent more time trying to get the audience to shut up than talking with the guests.  One, it didn't work, and two, the questions and comments were very intelligent and respectful, and showed how engaged the audience was. In other words, happy customers.  Telling your customers to sit down, shut up and be unhappy? Not so good for brand management, mm?

The organizers' solution to the audience participation issue was to leave an hour between the first two panels as open chat.  They didn't really make that clear to the panelists or the audience, so there was a lot of  "when's the next event starting? what are we waiting around for?"  Also, without moderation or direction, the audience got rowdy, with people vying for attention and saying increasingly outrageous and annoying things - which peaked *right* as the next panel started, setting it up to be not another closed discussion but a chaotic mess. Throw in not-their-fault technical difficulties and - I wasn't the only one who left.

Trust the audience, shape the experience. Things keep moving, and everyone goes away happy.  Distrust the audience, vacillate between lockdown and hands-off, and they get resentful, and people go away annoyed.

I'm not saying this because I think I'm some incredible expert or genius - I've just been to a lot of SL events, good and bad, and *paid attention.* 

I think the Orange Island team has a *lot* of promise, and I'm sure that experience will result in even better events to come. I look forward to attending them!

This was a meme that took on a life of its own this week!  The whole family, plus the wonderful centrasian_wise, had a hand in creating The Digital People Book Club.

vidaltripsa's going to be leading this in-world once we get facilities built, but she's started us off in Shelfari with a great set of reading suggestions!

So, join Shelfari, friend me (*winces as her fluffybunny hostess reputation takes a hyooge hit from her bookshelf contents*) (*decides she needs an alt named Fluffybunny Hostess to take up the slack*), join the Digital People group, and let's trade stories and serious stuff about Digital People and synthetic worlds!


In other social networking news, come join me on slscout, a Ning social networking site for SL!
And, friend me on Facebook!

Virtual Worlds Connect is "the community for professionals interested or involved in the virtual worlds industry."

That said, it's interesting, and turning into an active and vibrant discussion space. It's doubled in membership this week, and while there are more middle aged white American guys than I ever *imagined,* the network has been expanding to pull in a good number of Digital People, Indians, Chinese, and some people who are interesting even though they're middle aged white American guys :P

It's got a strong business focus of course, but there are good discussions on culture and politics going as well, and the VWC crowd will be joining us at the Diversionarium on Saturday for a *big* discussion on comparative worlds!

If this is interesting at all to you, I encourage you to sign up and friend me through my page there. Let's get some good Digital representation going, and get talking to our kind across many worlds!




(oh, btw, does anyone know how I can drop this code into my LiveJournal sidebar? I can't seem to find the code or setting that controls it! Thanks!)