Tag Archives: #influencers

Wired: Second Life Lessons

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Here’s a short but interesting write-up over on Wired regarding Second Life and the sometimes unexpected (but uplifting) uses to which the application is put. Having a virtual neighbor involved in one such activity has also raised my awareness of these kinds of possibilities (beyond the press clippings I’d previously read). In a world where people can don any visible appearance and change it at will, coming to terms with how I form judgements on even those obvious (mis)representations has been enlightening.

And kudo’s to Gwyneth Llewelyn, who is both mentioned in the article and whose blog – along with the news reports regarding Tringo – finally got me involved in this virtual community.

(p.s. Wired does realize they’re quoting a virtual persona, right?)

Stranger In A Strange Land

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Jellybean Madison

As mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been spending some time exploring Second Life’s virtual world. One expects that objects, graphics, animations, physics and the rest improve in this corner of cyberspace just like they do most everywhere else. That’s just technology, and videogames have certainly been showing off some amazing things lately. But what I’m finding interesting is how real people interact with – and through – this virtual world.

Take for example the above image, “sittin’ at the crick…”. For lack of a better description, this is a “photograph” snapped by an SL “resident”, Jellybean Madison. She (apparently) posted it online from within the SL simulation using a third party tool called Snapzilla. I’ll let them explain it:

Snapzilla [is a] new feature from SLUniverse that allows everyone in Second Life to share their snapshots with the world, directly through SL. Downloading snapshots to your hard drive and then uploading them is hardly spontaneous. With Snapzilla, you just click the Snapshot button in Second Life and choose Email Postcard and you are on your way to sharing your snapshots.

An image posted and given a caption? Emailed to others? Shared? Why? I don’t know exactly because I’m too new to the experience. But I have noticed that there are other, similar tools in beta which send images to sites like Flickr, possibly the best known and most popular image-hosting website on the net. So these snapshots will be seen by a large audience; many of whom have never been inside a virtual reality sim. Furthermore, in as much as all images online are really nothing more than colored pixels, these “photos” are as real to the strangers who view them as the “real” photos taken in meatspace using a 35mm. And when the graphics improve in years to come, who’s to say what’s valid and what isn’t?

But it doesn’t stop with photos. I was checking my email yesterday and discovered that an “in-world” message had been forwarded to my real world email. Lines blur. It’s one thing to know of this interactivity and another to experience it. And even more interesting are the number of independent projects coded by residents for doing things like tracking virtual world assets (which have real world value in many cases) outside the simulation. Now that sounds like the kind of thing Microsoft should build into their Xbox 2 feature set.

Influencers and This Designer

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I’ve been spending alot of time utilizing Yahoo Music to feed my aural appetite. For what it’s worth I’m currently labeled a “Fanatic”, having rated a total of 2,408 items (songs, albums, artists) over about two months (the marketers/trend watchers/statisticians/etc at Yahoo doubtlessly love me). What I haven’t done is made “My Station” public. At first I thought,”Hey, why bother? I don’t use this email address they gave me (as part of my ISP account) so no one will be able to give me feedback anyway; and I won’t use it because getting email from strangers doesn’t seem particularly prudent when the net is incubating newer and nastier viruses by the nanosecond.” Now there’s some logic to this position. Except it’s a pointless point. If I don’t read the email people might send me, there’s obviously no danger. So why is My Station still private?

I suspect it has to do with a little feature Yahoo has which they call “Influencer”. Here’s Yahoo’s definition of “Influencer”:

An Influencer is another LAUNCHcast user that you select to influence the music played on your station. When you select an Influencer, songs he/she rates highly will be more likely to play on your station.

Now on the “My Station” webpage there’s this big squarish block labeled with a tab declaring “MY MUSIC INFLUENCE”. Inside it (in bold) are the declarations “I’m influenced by:” and “I influence:”. As a person who, by occupational definition, is an “Influencer”, this feature is a bit unnerving. No, I’m not a music critic; I design products. But my ego makes me reluctant to readily admit being influenced by just anyone (“Hey, I’m a designer!”) and even more hesitant to face the possibility that I influence no one (“Hey, where’s all the glowing email I should be getting?!”). This can’t be a healthy attitude. And although I read online comments about the products I’ve designed, I wonder how much I listen. Something I need to consider. If I react this way about music, how open am I to design criticism? Maybe not as much as I think.