Eloise Pasteur's Library tagged second →  View Popular

• Spatiality - in a three-dimensional space people can move, and use proximity and distance to each other or to objects (for example for group building, voting by feet, to 'physically' separate collaboration tasks from one another, or just to non-verbally communicate preferences). In video conferencing, all you see is somebody else's mimics. There is no concept of space at all - which is crucial, however: remember Nonaka's Ba.
• Embodiment - being virtually embodied as an avatar can augment the feeling of co-presence, the feeling of being there together with your colleagues, peers, or collaboration team, etc. Directing your virtual representation, you visualize where your attention is at every point in time. In a video conference, nobody knows if you are paying attention or just looking at a totally different application on your screen.
• Configurability and scriptability - a virtual world can be more than a container for space, physics and avatars. Realized as a reactive, interactive and maybe even intelligently behaving environment it can harbor, support, and augment rich user experiences.

'Applying it right' would mean here:


• not to use the virtual world as just a fancy chat system with some visuals in the background
  
  
• provide real interactive experiences instead
  
  
• not to make as many people as possible sit down and watch yet another 2D powerpoint presentation in a 3D world
  
  
• encourage them to use / make them use the new possibilities offered by the system (move, discover, create, modify, interact, ...)
  
  
• not to try to teach them how to use all the menus in the SL software
  
  
• rather let the interactive objects speak for themselves on a simple click (->establish new forms of 'dialogs')
  
  
• leave 2D 'flatland' (info walls, in-world powerpoint presentations)
  
  
• embrace 3Dimensionality

As for Reuters' coverage of SL, they did better than most journalists who did drive-by stories with a day or two of research in-world. The bureau lived for more than two years. Still, James Wagner Au, who writes the excellent New World Notes blog about SL said they could have done better.

"Their writers, Adam Pasick and Eric Krangel, are fine journalists, and did some great external business-oriented reports, but at the same time, I don't think they were ever passionately engaged in the medium or Second Life's community on an experiential level," Au told me. "Consequently, their reporting very much had a distanced, 'outside looking in' flavor that caused them to often miss the big picture, in my opinion."

While Reuters thinks that the story has moved on from Second Life, CNN and many others beg to differ. The broadcaster now has an even larger presence in SL. Rather than send in a reporter as a corresponent in-world, CNN relies on SL residents to report their own news as citizen journalists for its iReport site.

CNN.com senior producer Lila King said that Second Life iReporters have posted 376 stories since it launched a year ago, but that relatively small number did lead to a number of stories on written by CNN.com producers (including this one about relationships in-world). King

Since iReport.com launched in Feb. 2008, Second Life iReporters have posted 376 stories. It's probably worth noting that "in-world" iReporters actually began sending stories when the iReport SL hub launched in November 2007, but we don't have an accurate count of stories submitted before iReport.com launched. King said that SL has been more than just a story-generating tool for CNN's iReport team; it's also helped them learn to nurture an online community.

"We've started to see a new benefit of being in Second Life: it gives us a place to polish our skills in community building," King said. "Newsrooms everywhere, ours included, are trying to learn how to foster meaningful, two-way conversations with their audiences. When we hold our virtual news meetings every Tuesday afternoon (2 pm Second Life Time/5 pm ET) with the Second Life iReport community, that's exactly what we're doing: listening and interacting in real-time, offering feedback and courting new ideas along the way."

One thing that has survived the hype is the virtual economy of Second Life and other online worlds and gaming environments, where people sell virtual goods with game-based money that can be converted to real money. BusinessWeek's Hof believes that's a story that has staying power.

"The notion of virtual economies is already becoming a solid business model for many game companies, and even social networks like Facebook -- by some accounts up to $2 billion in revenues -- so that seems like a trend that has some legs, and it's one you can credit Second Life with proving as much as anyone," Hof said. "And of course, the idea of user-generated content is huge today on a number of fronts, though Second Life is just one example of that."