Disappointing, but not surprising

It appears Second Life recently caught a case of ring worm.

The beauty of the Internet is everyone can get into the game, the downside is "everyone" includes some troublemakers.

Alice update

Random House is going to pay Alice Cooper $500,000 for his memoirs.

At least the book market sees the wonder that is Alice :)

Mind-machine interface

While the gear pictured in this article is far from stylish, and very likely to improve (one would hope), I wonder if indeed we are within five years of a profound new way to interact with the digital world.

A future with less blackberry-thumbing, mouse sweeping, tablet inking... sounds nice.

Wanna write a book?

Join some of your closest friends at Wharton and MIT and co-author the next big book on business use of social networking.

http://www.wearesmarter.org/

I bet they'll pass on my e-mail quota chapter.

Stay calm. The camel will eventually stop

I came across a great pair of sites that show the pros and cons of lower barriers of entry to publish content broadly... eHow and its sister site wikiHow. eHow contains vetted information, while anyone can publish at any time to wikiHow.

For awhile, my favorite wikiHow moment related to "How to have a fireworks show"... the tip - "wait until it is dark".

Then I read this jewel:

How to regain control of a spooked camel

which includes the pearl of wisdom: "Stay calm. The camel will eventually stop".

Score one for the vetters :)

Meet Ms. Dewey

I have no idea if the search results are useful, but I have fun trying them out

Ms. Dewey

Second Second Life

Just a bit more on the commerce in Second Life. Maybe I need to set up a foulballguy t-shirt stand there :)

Second Life

I have barely dipped my toe in the water on Second Life, but there sure seems to be something going on.

As mentioned in this article, Linden Lab, Second Life's publisher, estimates that the total amount of content being created by its users is equivalent to the output of 5,100 full-time programmers. You Tube is a movie factory, blogs a writing factory, podcasts a broadcast factory, and now this in Second Life:

• IBM is holding virtual meetings here
• Reuters has opened up a news outlet within the world
• and LOTS of commerce is going on

I still think Halo is a better platform for interacting (and resolving business disputes in a more... ummm... direct manner) -- as evidenced by the interviews conducted in This Spartan Life

Slow but sure

I have been working to get all my old posts moved over from my previous blog to this new location. Fairly tedious work. Hope to wrap this up in a week or two.

Go Bears :)

Memories

A long time ago, on a PC far far away... Start Me Up

More pointless fun

Sometimes the simpliest things can waste the most time....

http://www.florito.net/Wind_generators/applet/index.html

Four great Internet phenomena

Based on the purchase price of You Tube, I think it we would have to add it to this list, but here are four other VERY successful simple ideas that got over BIG TIME.

Raply - Browse and chat

Raply is an interesting tool to let you chat with other Raply users viewing the same page. Free, easy, and only mildly confusing :)

This is brought to us by the gang at Numly. Numly, along with docly and writely are all worth a peek when you have the time.

And the Web 2.0 winners are...

Not MySpace!

Wired has provided a list of their cut on Web 2.0 winners and losers. Interesting read. Minor quibbles from me on this list. Digg is not in the top 5. and MySpace is in the bottom 5. While I totally agree with their assessment of MySpace's shortcomings - especially the design trainwreck that nearly all sites display - I can't see how this is not still considered the 600 pound gorilla.

Who is even close to the user base of MySpace? If social networking is all about people... don't they kinda win??

Search party

New search engine out there that blends community with the search tool. Interesting.

www.chacha.com

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - an unlikely blogger

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his own blog. Once I clicked on the small, mildly defaced, American flag I was able to read his first (lengthy) post.

He also had a poll for readers to vote yes or no on America's intentions to start a world war. I am pretty sure the next poll wont be "who is you favorite Backstreet Boy"... but I will check to make sure.

The site even offers an RSS feed. Since Iran has the most sophisticated internet censorship systems in the world, not sure how necessary RSS is, but who am I to judge.

Personalized home pages

I still stick with the figure that only 10% of people will ever bother to personalize a home page. As Yahoo, Google and others develop their widgets to drop on your desktop, this seems to offer a carrot to get people to spend a bit of time providing basic information to better personalize content and apps.

So, does life begin at your browser default page or your desktop in the future? Desktop methinks. Eventually.

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/09/programmed-personal-homepages.html

More useless fun

Digg is becoming a very effective way for me to waste far too much time.

This was a fun discovery...

Ragdoll and Spikes

Dark matter... ummm matters

Read a good article that explained the universe is made up of about:

• 25 percent dark matter (matter does not absorb or emit light)
• 5 percent ordinary matter (planets, K-Fed,and basically everything else with mass)
• 70 percent dark energy (the force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate, maybe K-fed fits here too)
  

My e-mail inbox seems to be overflowing with dark energy lately.

Poor Pluto

In a move that will undo the ruler-based nun training I received at a tender age, looks like we are moving from 9 to 12 planets. Pluto was on the bubble, but instead of hanging with the jock (Classical) planets, it now must live with being ranking member of the geeks (Plutons).

I bet UB313 is the first to get a swirly.