Fast Company is carrying an interesting if rambling piece penned by Tom Kelley (of IDEO fame) and friend. It’s a book excerpt though, and as such it feels incomplete. Makes sense I suppose. The idea is I should now go out and buy the book. What ever happened to the Idea Virus? Reading the last line:

Adapted with permission from The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman, to be published October 18 by Currency Books, a division of Random House Inc.

gives me the impression that we won’t be reading a free downloadable PDF on the 18th. There’s a disconnect here to which I need to give some more thought.

Wired has a story, “Cuban to Launch DVD Label?“, that isn’t such a big deal as it contains a comment made by a Hollywood industry big-wig (at least it’s not a big deal to me). Newly-appointed Disney CEO Robert Iger apparently made the following comment to a group of analysts:

All the old rules should be called into question because the rules of consumption have changed so dramatically.

He is of course referring to movies and how they’re distributed via “windows”, but in general I think that quote is becoming increasingly relevant to a broader range of industries. I’m documenting it now so we can find it in a few years when some other industry CEO finally comes round and makes the exact same comment.

According to an article on BusinessWeek, the still young videogame industry is growing. Bigtime. From the article:

Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the video game industry that is expected to be the fastest-growing component of the media sector worldwide. Double-digit growth is expected to be propelled by sales of the upcoming next-generation consoles, online and wireless Internet access spending and online advertising.

Most of those expected gains appear to be in China and India, with the U.S. showing the slowest average annual growth rate. And of course to be expected with the new wave of console platform releases, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report also predicts PC games to continue declining.

I just finished (partially) attending the Architecture Panel held at State of Play; “partially” because I stumbled onto a panelist giving his presentation from inside Second Life, and that presentation was part of a webcast originating from the real world site (the virtual panelist was shown on a video screen behind the flesh-and-blood types).

Most of the presentations were interesting, but truthfully none of the comments were a surprise. For the most part, they danced around one major issue and that was: SL’s architecture and design (and the focus did seem to be on SL even though there were other platforms) is for the most part extremely conservative (aka “boring”) and fails to take advantage of how the space operates. But that’s to be expected I think. People build what they know (and some can’t even do that). Should we expect anything else at this stage? And they seemed to understand that.

What I don’t think the panelists fully appreciate is that the people using these tools are so far removed from the kinds of people who populate the architecture or design or mixed media fields so as to be a different species. People constructing these virtual spaces aren’t academics or professionals, they’re factory labourers and postal workers. They leave their security guard job or the stressfull household they manage and immerse themselves in something that removes them from their real lives. If anything, they’re stretching some sadly neglected creative muscles. And they almost never have training of any sort to make that effort easier; many even have trouble grasping the concept of a Cartesian coordinate system. Add to that, many have never used a software tool to create something… anything. They’ve never used Photoshop let alone a 3D application. Yet here they are trying to figure out tools that are really not much different than the first CAD tools that entered the professional fields 15 or so years ago and which many established professionals don’t even use (as mentioned in the discussion, the hotshots give the grunt work to interns). A fair amount of what’s in SL are the first efforts of people learning the tools. Until someone spends time trying to teach these people to use these tools (and I’ve done quite a bit of that since March), I’m not sure they can really understand how important there real life situation is to what they create, because it does go beyond just making what you know.

I believe Anne Beamish did manage to make the point in the end that this is a kind of “cyberspace” 1.0, but I wonder if she or the others who agreed with her consider that it’s not the cyberspace version but the people version – avatar 1.0 – that’s the primary determinant here; and that the people are a product of educational systems that either awaken their curiousity or train them to perform tasks.

Nick Yee posted on Terra Nova that he’s updated the PlayOn blog with an entry showing social network maps derived from “World of Warcraft” data they’ve been collecting. I’m curious to know how this aligns with real life organizational social maps (you can read my comment over there). Interesting stuff.