Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America, spoke this afternoon at Beyond Broadcast about creating new business models to support social media. He noted that everyone is presenting a business model based on charity or advertising. Mark contended that social media has to be based on civil society. Distribution is not the problem, attention is the…
Pathfinder Linden speaking on Second Life
Notes from presentation on High Order Bit: Second Life and Collaborative Drama at Beyond Broadcast conference. John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden) of Linden Lab gave an overview of Second Life as a virtual world space. He noted that the fictional analogs to SL are Neal Stephenson’s metaverse and Vernor Vinge’s otherverse from “True Names.” He…
Beyond Broadcast: Community Dimensions of Media
Just arrived at Beyond Broadcast. Here are some notes I’m taking as I go along: Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing I walked into my first panel on “Emerging participatory web media services” with Paul Jones from ibiblio and Skip Pizzi from Microsoft. The conference room was packed by several…
The UN as a Massively Multiplayer Game
The United Nations recently put out a press release on the one year anniversary of the launch of their first video game entitled “Food Force.” I reviewed “Food Force” in June 2005, noting that it was actually pretty fun to play and reasonably educational. In the free-for-download game, you are assigned to a team of…
Ninjas like Net Neutrality and Hot Dog on a Stick
Ask a Ninja has weighed in on the Net Neutrality debate, presenting it as a comparison between the girl at Hot Dog on a Stick and Robin William’s brother. Not particularly intellectual rigorous, but hilarious nonetheless. Produced by Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of Beatbox Giant. Great, now I have to go get a corndog…
What I do in under 1,000 words
I have this constant problem of finding really, really interesting work that is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t work in my field. The only job where that wasn’t true was my brief stint as a 911 dispatcher in Los Angeles. Other than that, it’s been a lot of awkward pauses at dinner…
My Pal Abdi: Race and Identity in Virtual Worlds
So the other day I am hanging out at Berkman Island in Second Life, checking out the preparations for the "Beyond Broadcast" conference they are throwing later this week. I run into Ansible Berkman, the main organizer of the virtual component of Beyond Broadcast, shuffling around chairs in the main auditorium. Ansible’s avatar is a…
Net Neutrality as Seen through Halo
Those clever guys at “This Spartan Life” have created a really cute public service announcement on the Net Neutrality issue as told by characters in the X-box video game Halo. Good job, guys! As they say, you can’t fight for Net Neutrality using plasma grenades. Darn. (Originally seen on Gothamist and BoingBoing.net.)
Mediating Real World / Virtual World Events
I dropped in on the open house taking place on USC’s new Annenberg Island they have built in Second Life as a virtual counterpart to their real world Annenberg Center for Communication. (Thanks for the heads up, Hamlet.) The Annenberg folks did a nice job creating the virtual version of their center. However I assume…
I’m officially a “media blogger”
I just found out that the Media Bloggers Association has added me to their list of member blogs, despite my meanderings into cat blogging. The MBA is: a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of "blogging" or "citizen journalism" as a distinct form of media; and helping to…