By luck I happened to surf through O’Reilly Radar early last week and catch a number of interesting posts (he had a good week). One in particular, “The Significance of Threadless” (Link), needed more attention than I could give it at the moment and so I decided to return to it (I’ve been watching Threadless for a while and have previously posted about it – reLink). In the meantime I noticed that the Mass Customization blog also noticed it and responded (Link); and also points to another couple of relevant posts.

So having now gone back and reread both entries, here’s my rather long response posted on O’Reilly (with a couple of minor grammatical corrections):

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While I find what Threadless has done interesting, it’s a long haul from 2D graphics to articulating 3D forms. And while my own blog is very much about the collision between real and virtual product design and development (due in large part to RM), I’m not so sure there aren’t some potentially difficult speedbumps along the way. Here are a few to consider:
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There’s something really odd about the idea of Pontiac donating the proceeds from sales of its virtual Solstice in Second Life to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as reported in Pontiac’s new Motorati Life blog (Link). I mean, Second Life’s economy functions almost entirely because of the integrated Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools. Circumvention methods (e.g. CopyBot) have made that sufficiently clear. Meanwhile, many EFF supporters usually take the position that all DRM – not just some of it – is bad.

So what exactly is Pontiac doing? Is GM seeing the error of their conservative, profiteering ways? Not likely. My guess is that this is an intellectual property embrace akin to Cronenberg’s metal-n-flesh moments in “Crash“: it doesn’t make any sense, but at the moment of impact someone got excited.

Via Raph Koster’s blog I made my way over to Venture Beat to read his contributing piece (Link) discussing CopyBot (reLink). As I said earlier, this has been a nice mess. It’s good that people outside the circle of virtual world navigators get a sense of what’s happening. That way, hopefully, when rapid manufacturing takes off and economies begin to shift and settle, there will be some better understanding of the potential problems. I’m all for people understanding the issues now because to me this isn’t a technology issue anymore, it’s a social issue.

I had a feeling it would be one of the major appliance manufacturers that would take consumer-level products to this stage. They have big, boxy shapes which are great for online use, and they’re the next step down when going from architecture to interiors on the “environmental models” list. So it’s not a surprise to read over on 3pointD (Link) that Whirlpool – by way of a press release (Link to Forbes; Whirlpool news section isn’t available atm) – has announced that they’ve started stocking models to Google’s SketchUp 3D Warehouse.

We’ve now entered the equivalent of Henry Ford’s garage.

{Image composited from Whirlpool source material}

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. A number of people including myself have for weeks and now months been pointing out the errors in mainstream media reports concerning Second Life. I mean, I like SL and think it has a lot of extraordinarily interesting things going for it, but c’mon already. If it’s worth writing an article then it’s worth getting the facts straight. Yet the MSM screw-ups not only continue, they continue to get worse. What’s triggering this post is actually something else I read that leads me to the conclusion that most people writing for online MSM are basically clueless.

Yesterday I caught an entry on the WorldCAD Access blog titled “Fool, Indeed” (Link). What that entry is pointing out is a shockingly uninformed piece by Tom Taulli writing for The Motley Fool. I couldn’t have made this up and kept a straight face. Here’s the unbelievable excerpt from this apparently well-regarded analyst’s assessment of Autodesk’s technology: Continue reading →