Well, it’s one week away and I thought now would be a good time to mention the Metaverse Roadmap Conference (Link). For the sake of publicity, here’s the intro:

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When your avatar becomes your blog, your desktop, and your online agent?

What happens is the metaverse. Taking its name from the immersive virtual world imagined by Neal Stephenson in his visionary novel, Snow Crash, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is the first public ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts. Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, digital mapping, artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade.
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Funky. I’ve gotten a couple hits alerting me to a new entry on wikipedia for my “kirkyan” neologism (Link). Now I’m worried though. What if people start thinking deeper than I have and ask me questions about the concept I can’t answer? I guess it’s too late to pull the “Don’t look at me, I’m just a designer” thing. Can I claim I was just on a neologismic joy ride?

Damn. This blog is going to make a (bigger) fool of me yet.

{Update: How cool is this: it’s already up for deletion! Believe it or not, this is awesome. This confirms something I’ve suspected and which I was testing by coining the term. This is actually better than I could have hoped.

Let’s say I’d coined a term for the RadTag back when I’d come up with the idea. Let’s say I decided to call it a “blogject”. When I discussed the concept among a number of people, almost no one understood what I was describing. It was doubtlessly “nonsense” and “drivel” to most of them. Yet now it’s not drivel at all. In fact, the topic is red hot, and there’s lots of “research” on it and conference meetings to discuss it and people getting all excited about it. And half those people (at least the one’s whose bios I’ve checked) don’t seem to have a technical bone in their body.
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With all the Google/SketchUp buzz, I thought this was worth mentioning: a very cool (interactive 3D global information data visualization page (Link). Here’s what the people behind it say:

Global-i is a 3-dimensional interactive globe that displays information about the world in your browser. The Earth can be rotated and inspected and displays can be changed to see information in the most appropriate form.

Global-i has been described as “A Global Marketer’s Dream” but it is not just for marketers or ecomomists. It is for anyone who wants to learn about the world and what makes it go round. By viewing this information in context, the world makes more sense. At present the emphasis is on economic data and there is plenty of other information too – health, infrastructure, energy, military………..and more – from present day back to 1960 and we are adding to this list all the time.

I only played with it for a few minutes so I don’t know much about it. However, this reminds me of another Flash-based 3D globe I surfed through previously. Maybe they’re related.

via information aesthetics

Just something cool I found over on Interactive Architecture (Link): a mechanoid elephant traveling to London. And it’s partially made of wood. Very steampunkish.

{Image Copyright © 2005 Mairie de Nantes}

No surprise. I predicted as much to some people I know and posted a more conservative comment on at least one website (Link). Why bother blogging about this now? Because I just surfed over to Technorati and noticed that SketchUp is suddenly on everyone’s search map. Some are even now beginning to realize what Google is doing. Took them long enough.

Is Google planning on using Google Earth as a kind of 3D Adsense? Of course it is. That’s what Google does.

Has Google been laying the groundwork to get content into Google Earth that ties into advertising? Why yes, they certainly have (reLink).

Is Google going to link their virtual Earth with the real world and deliver localized advertising using a mesh network? Count on it. And as I posted over on Blogspotting (Link) a short time back, that network will look similar to those inside Second Life. Real or virtual, 3D coordinates are the same.
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