While reading something yesterday concerning marketing in virtual worlds I resisted the urge to comment. Last night and again early this morning, I further resisted the temptation to post something here regarding what I’d read. And I’m now resisting the urge to slip something in. I won’t.

The only thing I’m going to say is that my internalized exasperation and an upcoming meeting with an old acquaintance with whom I expect to discuss the topic, really got me thinking.

Consequently, in pseudo stream-of-consciousness style, I posted some entries on Twitter to help me retain some of what was going through my mind. It’s not intended to make sense to anyone but me, but because I don’t trust Twitter to retain those entries, I’m going to add them here.

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Joel Greenberg has a blog entry (Link) worth reading regarding Suzanne Vega’s upcoming concert inside Second Life. Some of what he’s getting at has come up here before (reLink). And of course scarcity is something I’m often thinking about, given my particular interests.

What I thought an interesting coincidence, however, was that last night I learned (admittedly rather late) that alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins had played the scarcity card at least once.

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I caught an interesting article over on the Technology Review site yesterday to which I wanted to call attention. From “Unreal Meetings” (Link):

Harry designs virtual spaces that don’t look like the familiar world–his virtual meeting room looks more like a football field than like a conference room. He says his goal is to stop mimicking the physical world and start creating a new kind of space. Continue reading →

I happened across the above video of JazzMutant’s “Dexter” on the C|Net News blog (Link) last night and while interesting in and of itself a couple of things came to mind:

As some of you might be aware there’s plenty of blog press concerning Steelcase’s chair design competition in Second Life, so the obvious question is: Where are the Industrial Design blogs reporting about this competition? I can’t find any.

Meanwhile there’s currently an “Extreme Sports Equipment for the Year 2020” competition (Link) on the Product Design Forums, and Core77 is busy promoting a “One Hour Design Challenge” (Link).

Neither site mentions this competition. Neither of those competitions offers anything nearly as interesting as the Steelcase competition; regardless of whatever specific rules and guidelines come attached. And with Steelcase’s reputation one would expect student designers to be all over this competition. Apparently they’re not.

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