I recently read John Battelle’s account of the rise of Google in his book Search. Battelle tells the story of how the confluence of search technology and commerce have led to a restructuring of how we conceive and navigate through the web and increasingly physical space. If we have a question, we assume the answer…
Author:
Vega vs. Vega: Is is live or is it Second Life?
Last night’s virtual concert by folk artist Suzanne Vega has made me think more deeply about the potential of internet-mediated and virtual music performance. I have been to my share of live concerts and attended a number of in-world Second Life concerts and open mics. The last time I saw Suzanne Vega live was in…
Suzanne Vega live in Second Life tonight!
The talented folk musician Ms. Suzanne Vega became the first major recording artist to perform live in Second Life tonight, wowing the large crowd of residents who packed the Infinite Mind auditorium this evening. Part of the series of in-world shows that the public radio program The Infinite Mind is recording in SL, this was…
Vega, Vonnegut and Rheingold live in Second Life!
Tomorrow night is the first of a series of live tapings of the public radio show "The Infinite Mind" in Second Life. Given the show’s emphasis on science, health and technology, doing a live show from with the virtual world of Second Life makes a lot of sense. Their in-world shows will feature a plethora…
Internet Celebrities united to defend Net Neutrality
We Are the Web is a delightfully wacky site that brings together a number of "internet celebrities" united to defend the principle of Net Neutrality. Starring "the Tron Guy" (my personal favorite), the somewhat alarming Peter Pan, and trashy diva Leslie Hall of Gemsweater.com, the site features a surprisingly slick and silly music video promoting…
The Second Life Do-Gooders Tour
Those cool cats at Tech Soup have created a super-helpful directory of non-profit organizations who are active in Second Life. It’s been up for awhile, but I just now got a chance to check it out. An interactive bulletin board at the Tech Soup HQ enables residents to flip through the directory, where they can…
Pamphlets: the Blogs of the 17th Century
Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker has a neat piece on the challenge of blogging and other new media to traditional journalism called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists." One of the most interesting bits compares the rise of blogs to the growth of pamphleteering and periodicals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Based…
A poet, and you didn’t know it
I was digging around the archives of my computer and came across a bunch of poetry I wrote in the 1990s. Some of it is cringe-inducingly bad. Several have not aged well, particularly my "cyber" series. But a few stand out as interesting at least to me for various reasons. They all remind me of…
The future of tour guide technology, Part IV
This is the last in a four-part (I, II, III) exploration of guided tour tech. In Part One, I mused about the potential for using ICTs to connect experts in particular disciplines with tourists visiting a particular site on an ad hoc basis. Apparently this coordination problem has been somewhat solved by combining iPods and…
SL book signing with Play Money author Julian Dibbell
Today Julian Dibbell did an in-world book signing and Q&A for his new book Play Money. In an interesting twist, Julian not only is selling a virtual version of his book in Second Life, he also has a two-for-one deal to get both the virtual and real versions of the book for 6250 Lindens (about…