DAY 3 - SlideShare. Glenn Fisher, the Marketing Director at Linden Lab, talked about how SecondLife's 3D world helps create stronger communities than those of the traditional 2D variety, but his talk has turned me 180 degrees in my own hopes of using SecondLife as an educational tool.
Glenn Fisher, the Marketing Director at Linden Lab, talked about how SecondLife's 3D world helps create stronger communities than those of the traditional 2D variety, but his talk has turned me 180 degrees in my own hopes of using SecondLife as an educational tool.
He quoted some research that showed the distances avatars (people's online 3D images) stood apart in SecondLife was identical to the distances humans stood apart in real life. This made people more likely, he suggested, to create a genuine community, a genuine market and economy, where individuals could create goods for sale - this includes the kids we teach, in theory.
This month marks the 2 millionth SecondLifer with over 10 million objects created in the world, and around 900 events held there every day, including university classes and rock concerts. There are over 7000 companies plying their wares there, too, turning over around $87 million dollars this year. 43% of Second Life members are women but the median age is 32 - not exactly the younger end of the internet market, is it?
But don't let these figures tempt you into believing that SecondLife is the next place we as educators should concentrate our efforts. Of those 2 million only about a third, it would appear, will have interacted in the past week. For me, that's not highly sticky and certainly not as sticky as podcasting production, say, is for our kids. Or sharing photostories, films, animations, blog posts, opinions... the stuff some of us have been doing for years.
So far the offerings in SecondLife, which crashes in the simplest of scenarios, even when it's the Marketing Director having a play around, are nothing short of an inefficient mirror of what we have at reasonably good quality and download speed on the web.
As some educators seem to get excited about being able to view blogs, YouTube videos and PDFs in a jerky, boxy environment, I just want to get hold of that information quickly, assess its usefulness, bookmark it or throw it away. If SecondLife is going to be nothing but a really slow filing cabinet that often falls over, then please, no, take it away...
Better still, if I want to play a game I'll go online and find that or, better still, use my xBox to play with folk from around the world without jerking around every time I want to move. At a push, the one big difference between SecondLife and World of Warcraft is that I'd probably be more likely to go for fun and play in WoW than SL. In WoW I am playing a game with real human interactions and the presence of a learning environment is happily missing ;-) Kids get stuck on WoW because they can, as Jonas says, allow them to be someone they are not - and how many kids wish they could be something else than the 'pain in the neck', the 'weak learner' or 'quiet child' of the classroom?
While I have been advocating that we need to appreciate changing viewpoints of the worlds we live in (virtual and offline) and consolidate these viewpoints in the way we teach and learn, I'm not sure SecondLife is yet in that vocabulary as a specific platform. I would love to hear more about what Wim Veen had to say about SecondLife in particular in his talk on the matter last week.
In the meantime, Jonas sums up why SecondLife as an educational tool is perhaps more out of place than we have first thought. I've paraphrased - read all of his post:
Second Life is not a game in that it does not have environmentalchallenges and progress within its ecosystem.
which follows - Second Life can not and won’t have the retentionand draw games like Halo2, World of Warcraft, DaoC, and others have. Frankly, I believe for a glorified 3D chat systemwith build-your-own backend, SL isn’t all that bad.
Second Life lacks internal rules and controls which will comeback to bite Linden and its users in the hiney. Already we see issuesof disappearing (expensive) virtual property and Linden Labsdisclaiming any and all responsibility to preserve or restore suchproperty, citing the “we just run the servers” excuse.
which introduces a host of legal issues with regards toproperty, ownership, andliability.
The LeWeb3 was one of the most professionally produced conferences I have attended in several ways.
The video projection was the best I have ever seen and the audio quality was top notch with very engaging musical intros.
I also liked the schedule with lots of time for networking in the coffe and lunch breaks. The lunch offering was a totally staggering buffet of french gourmet cuisine at it best. A two hour lunch break with hundreds of small dishes makes it easy to relax and network!
Le Web 3
Loic LeMeur and his wife Geraldine, organizers of LeWeb3
Most of the speakers were very inspiring and I liked the mix of key notes and panel discussions. But the conference format was still 1.0, (OK, more like 1.4) it is now time at least for internet conferences to live like they preach and move to 2.0! (See my separate blog about this.)
Some of my notes from LeWeb3:
Hans Rosling
his presentations at TED have made him world famous, don’t miss them!
“Storytelling works! There are 10 000 watchers for every clicker”
“Just putting facts on the internet does not work, storytelling does!”
Panel: The Internet’s impact on design
This was a somewhat confused panel discussion, as it consisted of very different types of peope that did not know anything about each other.
Rafi Haladjan, the creator of the smart online rabbit Nabaztag (rabbit in Armenian). This rabbit is much more interesting than it looks, since it is a good example of an important trend: EVERYTHING will be internet-connected, not just computers and mobiles. The moderator missed this trend and Rafi should have demoed the rabbit. (I have just ordered one to get the feeling)
Panel: Monetization in the Web 2.0 world
A trio of entrereneurs presented their models, it showed just how difficult it is to come up with ways to earn real revenue.
A successful blogger mentioned that he made $25 last month from Adsense ads on his blog…
Another entrepreneur reported having bought a Facebook ad campaign with 1 million impressions that generated just 3 (three) clicks.
My conclusion: Nobody knows what will be the keys to monetization, but ads as the only revenue model is not working now and probably not in the future either, as the competition for ad dollars increase tremendously.
Panel: making things personal: investing
Morten Lund, Danish entrepreneur and investor
“I believe in revenue and profit” (applause from the audience).
“I don’t invest in porn and entrepreneurs that are assholes”
“I go for stupid things that make real money online like nails, eye glasses, socks”
Another investor gave the tip: “Don’t invest in companies selling to big companies, since big companies never buy anything! They have like 18 month selling cycles…”
Why Enterprise 2.0… isn’t
JP Rangaswami from British Telecom Design was very inspiring:
” I don’t worry about Google’s policy of letting their employees use 20% of their time for their own projects.
I worry about the other 80%! Why do they still have the punch-clock thinking?
At my office, we focus on the output rather than the input!. What do I care when or where my people are doing their work?”
Evolving entrepreneurship
Martin Varsavsky came on stage with the message that there are indeed investement opportunities also in Europe, and that our 22 languages can be turned into something good. He also mentioned that 17% of Googles total revenue comes from the UK market alone!
His blog is a must fo everyone interested in internet-related entreprenership and international business.
The Future of TV
This is my own favourite topic, excellently moderated by Jeff Pulver, http://pulver.com/ a very energetic and typical American (Hawaii shirt and all)
“TV got the idea of Web 2.0 first and they have corrupted it! Using audience phone-ins and user-generated content such as American Idol…”
Also in the panel was the experienced blogger Robert Scoble, his videoblog at http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/
Other interesting video services that were mentioned:
Asterpix, a new, highly interesting video site reviving the old concept of “Hypervideo”, (interactive video). There are clickable areas in the video that lead to notes and links. You can also see annotations in a list and use them to navigate inside a video clip. Very smart!
http://www.blogtv.com/
http://www.kyte.tv/
http://dotsub.com/
Janus Friis
(co-founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost) made one his his rare appearances. Being an unusually shy Dane, he gave an inspiring, laid back and personal tale of the serendipity of his entreprenurship, from Kazaa to Skype to Skype. He and Niclas have disrupted the music industrcy and the telephony industry and they are now re-inventing television, not a bad feat! See also his blog
Also interesting is the fact that they have invented nothing new, they “just” saw that nobody was using the existing technologies to make really simple solutions and then market them. When Skype was launched, it had been possible for years to talk via MSN chat, but Microsoft had not realized that this possibility could be used to replace telephony.
But Joost is a more complex service, since it depends on offering good content and therefore deals with hundreds of programme rights holders around the world. But the biggest obstacle to overcome before Joost is a Skype-like success will probably be to make people more active in their viewing habits. Coach-potatoes are more common today than the stats show, even among the young!
Also, there is a link missing that can enable us to watch Joost on our big-screen TV in company of our friends and relatives. I see two ways for this:
1. come up with a simple Joost set-top box that connects to the TV (or have Apple integrate Joost in a smarter Apple TV model)
2. Integrate Joost into the digital cable TV offering from the triple-play operators.
Leweb Login
The only mishap at LeWeb3 was the strange ending. The last two sesssions was somewhat disconnected from the conference topic and the speakers suddenly found themselves alone on the stage. One of the speakers that I wanted to hear, (David Weinberger) was inexplicably dropped from appearing on stage. All this caused the energy in the room to drop at the end and people left the conference with a feeling of anti-climax.
A grande finale session with uplifting foresights into the future was sorely missed!