There’s an article on Macworld.com (Link) that puts more meat on the bones of the comments I’ve been making for some time: piracy has a long-term price tag that ruins things for everyone, and if people don’t understand the cause and effect relationships involved, then they’ll some day be stuck choosing from old, recycled content as the best creators simply shut down or move elsewhere.

This excerpt really underscores the problem for these developers:

Destineer President Peter Tamte tells me that the difference I’ve described between sell-through and update downloads is more common than not. He said that when his company shipped its squad-based first-person shooter First to Fight last year, it found within a few weeks that more people were trying to log on to multiplayer servers with a single banned serial number than the total number of copies Destineer had sold combined.

Sad. Continue reading →

I’ve missed so much news it’s not even funny. So having caught up a bit on sleep, I’m taking a few moments to see what’s up in the world (no nuclear war? – check; no global killer virus? – check). What I have to point out here, however, is {a NY Times} article on C|Net discussing Wikipedia (Link). After reading the article, I wonder how many people are out there who have received no publicity for the problems they’ve encountered (my “kirkyan” blog entry – reLink – was picked up in a couple of places but largely passed over). From the article:

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts–one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

The piece on C|Net seems to miss that in a Long-Tail World, it’s more than just what’s highly-publicized that matters; there’s more to the world than what’s in C|Net’s or the NY Times’ viewfinder.
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This is nice. I was tracking back a hit to the MIT Adlab and noticed an entry (Link) regarding Google Earth’s move to support textures by upgrading their .klm format (see above sample). Very cool. Now everyone is going to have to upgrade their exporters I guess (I need to read Google’s announcement again to be sure I understand if that’s the case). Hopefully the folks at Eyebeam who wrote the Maya exporter I use will update their plugin if it’s necessary.

That format update might also apply to the newly-announced .kml to .x3d converter I read about over on the 3pointD blog (Link). Fun to see how the data is finally moving around in the fluid manner I’ve expected for some time. And there’s more to come. It’s going to be getting fun real soon.

Meanwhile I’d like to get back to my Second Life “protoSat” piece which definitely needs some textures in Google Earth; it looks pretty boring without them (reLink). Maybe in a couple months I can apply those new textures. Maybe.

{Image Copyright © 2006 Google}

There’s an excellent essay by Jaron Lanier titled “Digital Maoism” (Link) that’s very much worth taking the time to read if you’re all into the internet and social software and Web 2.0 technology {and even if you’re not}. Lanier’s attitude very much reflects my own – from the manner in which something like Wikipedia functions and how it’s been so quickly adopted to the the slow-to-develop business models for content creators and the aggregation of anything posted on the net sans context to the whole idea that collectivism has all the answers to society’s problems. It’s good to have such an eloquent individual address the concerns I share.

He covers a lot of territory and raises some issues the pro-collectivites are probably going to dismiss. But I’m with Lanier. The pragmatic view is to expect a collective of users to: a) do what you don’t expect and b) do what you shouldn’t have to expect. Right now I’m already expecting a lot of pretty stupid stuff. It’s the even more stupid, unexpected stuff that should have us all being a bit more wary about how all this is starting to play out.
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It’s been brought to my attention that this Science Fiction Spime Guy has posted something of relative interest (Link). Too bad he misses on a couple of cylinders.

The first thing he does is make the following comment:

For instance: how about designing some object in Second Life, then outputting it as a .stl file, and then fabbing it?

Been there. Done that. And it’s been blogged as well by a number of people (including moi – reLink 1 and reLink 2). It can actually go much further as I’ve also shown (reLink), but that’s for a bit down the road for when I have some time and a little money to waste; right now I’m swamped and not swimming in cash. But you know, if a person is going to be routinely sarcastic, they really need to avoid that kind of mistake.

The second thing is this comment: Continue reading →