Google goes 3D?

Okay, not quite… at least, not yet.

Google has entered yet another space with the launch of Lively, a tool for creating 3D social spaces on Web sites, which is now available in a public beta test.

The platform lets users create and personalize their own character, so-called avatars, and their own rooms, which is nothing new: Second Life does as much. But a key feature of the Lively platform is integration with the regular Internet. Users are able to create a room, and embed it with their web site or blog, writes Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager at Google, on the company blog.

Well, that sounds interesting, although unlike smallworlds, there is still software to be downloaded and installed. I wonder which virtual world will topple SecondLife, though?

So You Want Your Library or Organization in Second Life: A Practical Guide (SL workshop)

Please join Sonja Morgwain and Teofila Matova Tuesday, July 1st at 8:00 a.m. SLT at the Open Auditorium on Cybrary City 1 in Second Life for the third “So You Want Your Library or Organization in Second Life: A Practical Guide.” This workshop includes a short presentation, tour of a library, and lots of time for questions and answers. Also offered is a tour of available parcels on Talis Island. Presentation is in a combination of voice and text. For more information, or if you would like to help answer questions or be involved, please IM either Teo or Sonja or use email address below. Location:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cybrary%20City/124/157/24

Best, Sonja Plummer-Morgan, MLIS (Sonja Morgwain in world) & Allison Brueckner (Teofila Matova in world)”

sonjamorgwain@yahoo.com or teofila.matova@gmail.com

Second Life Shakespeare

Now this sounds coool — if only I get my avatar out of the
ocean (I’m just as clumsy in SL as I am in real life, APPARENTLY)

sLiterary, Second Life: Of shipwrecked twins separated in a foreign land, love
triangles mixed with identity confusion, and girl masquerading as guy falling in
love with her noble… The SL Shakespeare Company takes a brief hiatus from Hamlet
to pursue a full length performance of Twelfth Night—broken down into “bite-size”
chunks in a series of full-costume staged readings. The production will be
performed by a moving cast, and audience members from the last week who wish
to enlist would have the possible chance to make the cast.

According to director Enniv Zarf, “This production is an experimental way of
performing Shakespeare. But hey we are in Second Life. If we can’t try it here,
where else could we possibly try this.” Ina Centaur, Artistic Director, tells
of the visual differences in this production, “The SL Shakespeare Company is
known for our unlimited extravagance in visual adornments and animations.
Because it is a staged reading, the overall look of this particular production
will be distinctly different. The outfits will be grayscale to emphasize that
this is a staged reading, and because we have a possible shifting cast
with the same person playing multiple characters on the staged reading
stage, we may use scripted changing sculpted masks.”

The performances are from June 20 to July 20, an Act-a-Week, every Fridays at 7 PM,
Saturdays at 11 AM, and Sundays at 3 PM.

The SL Shakespeare Company is the premier professional Shakespeare performance
troupe in the virtual world of Second Life. The Company performs in a meticulously
accurate replica of the Globe Theatre (http://visit.SLshakespeare.com ). Since 2007,
it has continued to provide immersive live Shakespearean theatre accessible to
anyone anywhere in the world with a high speed Internet connection.

For more details on this and other SL Shakespeare Company productions,
please visit http://playbills.SLshakespeare.com

Second Life — Resources for educators and more

Very nice annotated list of articles relating to educational uses of second life, second life and pedagogy, as well as second life resources of a more educational nature.
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib

Another very useful resource of a more broad nature is the official second life blog;
the blog covers just about everything including lots of howtos and tutorials.
http://blog.secondlife.com/

Also, John Lester out of Linden Labs (second life’s company) maintains a resource list at del.icio.us — lots of good and interesting stuff there. If you use del.icio.us, you can add it to your network or well, just bookmark it.
http://del.icio.us/secondlife

Visualization (article)

An interesting article on visualization of ‘the net … Under socialnetworking, LastFM is mentioned a couple of times as is youtube, but fidgt is just way off of the map.

I remember seeing a LC project around 1998 or so (tied to American Memory? funny, I can’t remember!) which visually mapped parts of the collections, so that you could see the relationships between items. I’m not sure what happened to that.

Anyhow, here is the article intro :

The Best Tools for Visualization

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data.

Article in entirety
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php

Free webinars - virtual worlds & libraries

Just passing along….
—————-

Greetings!

These free, open-to-everyone online events in January on the general topic of virtual worlds and libraries were recently added to the OPAL calendar (http://www.opal-online.org/progschrono.htm). Feel free to share this information with others who may be interested.

If you want the full OPAL experience, and if you are running a version of Microsoft Windows, you need to download and install a small, safe piece of software, a link to which is available at the entry page to every OPAL online room.

For Mac, Unix, and even MS Windows users who prefer not to download and install software, there is a public beta “light” interface to OPAL that does not require special software. A link to that interface is available at the entry page to the OPAL online auditorium. You should be
able to hear the audio streaming from the room, see the text chat and any co-browsing that occurs in the online room, and be able to text chat back into the online room.

Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 3:00 Central,
2:00 Mountain, 1:00 Pacific, and 9:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

ALA Midwinter Meeting of the ALA VCL MIG

If you are interested in the work of the Virtual Communities and Libraries Member Initiative Group of the American Library Association (http://wikis.ala.org/readwriteconnect/index.php/ALA_Member_Initiative_Groups)
but cannot attend the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, please feel free to join us online via OPAL. If the Internet connection in the
hotel room where the in-person meeting will be held is good, we will be offering a live audio and text chat stream of the proceedings.

Host: TAP Information Services

Location: OPAL Online Auditorium
Friday, January 25, 2008 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time, 10:00 Central,
9:00 Mountain, 9:00 Pacific, and 5:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

Virtuals Worlds for Kids, Tweens, and Teens: Whyville

According to a recent New York Times article, 2008 will be the year of virtual worlds for kids, with rapid population growth and many ventures. Libraries and other educational and cultural organizations are exploring these virtual worlds for kids, too. This hour long seminar will
feature speakers Tom Peters of TAP Information Services providing an overview of the growth of virtual worlds for kids, Cliff Zintgraff of Whyville providing an introduction and tour of Whyville, and Kelly Czarnecki of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County talking about why it is important for librarians and educators to be in virtual worlds such as Whyville.

NOTE: This program will be repeated later on this date. See below.

Host: Alliance Library System

Location: OPAL Online Auditorium
Friday, January 25, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 2:00 Central, 1:00
Mountain, noon Pacific, and 8:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

Virtuals Worlds for Kids, Tweens, and Teens: Whyville

According to a recent New York Times article, 2008 will be the year of virtual worlds for kids, with rapid population growth and many ventures. Libraries and other educational and cultural organizations are exploring these virtual worlds for kids, too. This hour long seminar will
feature speakers Tom Peters of TAP Information Services providing an overview of the growth of virtual worlds for kids, Cliff Zintgraff of Whyville providing an introduction and tour of Whyville, and Kelly Czarnecki of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County talking about why it is important for librarians and educators to be in virtual worlds such as Whyville.

NOTE: This program will be repeated later on this date. See below.

Host: Alliance Library System

Location: OPAL Online Auditorium

free webinar - virtual worlds & libraries

Just passing along….
—————-

Greetings!

These free, open-to-everyone online events in January on the general topic of virtual worlds and libraries were recently added to the OPAL  calendar (<a href=”http://www.opal-online.org/progschrono.htm”>http://www.opal-online.org/progschrono.htm</a>).  Feel free to share this information with others who may be interested.

If you want the full OPAL experience, and if you are running a version of Microsoft Windows, you need to download and install a small, safe piece of software, a link to which is available at the entry page to every OPAL online room.

For Mac, Unix, and even MS Windows users who prefer not to download and install software, there is a public beta “light” interface to OPAL that does not require special software.  A link to that interface is available at the entry page to the OPAL online auditorium.  You should be
able to hear the audio streaming from the room, see the text chat and any co-browsing that occurs in the online room, and be able to text chat back into the online room.

Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 3:00 Central,
2:00 Mountain, 1:00 Pacific, and 9:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

ALA Midwinter Meeting of the ALA VCL MIG

If you are interested in the work of the Virtual Communities and Libraries Member Initiative Group of the American Library Association (<a href=”http://wikis.ala.org/readwriteconnect/index.php/ALA_Member_Initiative_Groups”>http://wikis.ala.org/readwriteconnect/index.php/ALA_Member_Initiative_Groups</a&gt
but cannot attend the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, please feel free to join us online via OPAL. If the Internet connection in the
hotel room where the in-person meeting will be held is good, we will be offering a live audio and text chat stream of the proceedings.

Host: TAP Information Services

Location: OPAL Online Auditorium
Friday, January 25, 2008 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time, 10:00 Central,
9:00 Mountain, 9:00 Pacific, and 5:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

Virtuals Worlds for Kids, Tweens, and Teens: Whyville

According to a recent New York Times article, 2008 will be the year of virtual worlds for kids, with rapid population growth and many ventures. Libraries and other educational and cultural organizations are exploring these virtual worlds for kids, too. This hour long seminar will
feature speakers Tom Peters of TAP Information Services providing an overview of the growth of virtual worlds for kids, Cliff Zintgraff of Whyville providing an introduction and tour of Whyville, and Kelly Czarnecki of the Public Library of Charlotte &amp; Mecklenburg County talking about why it is important for librarians and educators to be in virtual worlds such as Whyville.

NOTE: This program will be repeated later on this date. See below.

Host: Alliance Library System

Location: OPAL Online Auditorium
Friday, January 25, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 2:00 Central, 1:00
Mountain, noon Pacific, and 8:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

Virtuals Worlds for Kids, Tweens, and Teens: Whyville

According to a recent New York Times article, 2008 will be the year of virtual worlds for kids, with rapid population growth and many ventures. Libraries and other educational and cultural organizations are exploring these virtual worlds for kids, too. This hour long seminar will
feature speakers Tom Peters of TAP Information Services providing an overview of the growth of virtual worlds for kids, Cliff Zintgraff of Whyville providing an introduction and tour of Whyville, and Kelly Czarnecki of the Public Library of Charlotte &amp; Mecklenburg County talking about why it is important for librarians and educators to be in virtual worlds such as Whyville.

NOTE: This program will be repeated later on this date. See below.

Host: Alliance Library System

new things for 2008… crystal ball gazing with opensource, social networking, digital identity, and more aka the predictions.

I was poking around trying to find a better video editor, when I stumbled across an opensource project called, Jahshaka. Jahshaka is positioning itself as being a fullbodied product that can compete with such software as finalcut pro (wow!). Not sure about that, because I could never (ever, ever) get the windows installer to work properly. Maybe if I had already switched to ubuntu ALREADY…

Anyhow, I started thinking about all of the new things out there that I probably don’t know about (and some that I do) and somehow I ended up crystal ball gazing (a very dangerous occupation).

It is really amazing how fullbodied some of the opensource products are (openoffice, wordpress, drupal, anyone?) and perhaps, even more amazing, all of the online tools now available (thinkfree, etc.)

As for my thoughts on the near future on the ‘net: niche social networking, user centered aggregated content (perhaps, even some consolidation?), and digital identity. Web3.0 and semantic web? Maybe.

I think niche social networking will become even more popular (social networking sites tailored to the needs of visual artists have popped up recently). Considering how easy it is to get lost in the crowd at facebook or myspace, I can see how appealing a specialized site is. Plus, the one size fits all just does not really… well, fit. Visual artists have been advocating/begging/petitioning myspace for years to create a visual arts portal, as myspace has for musicians. Why bother with that, when there are several sites specifically for visual artists?

However, having a specialized site means another profile and spot on the web to maintain. Social networking and content aggregators are surely to be even stronger in ‘08. How else to manage all of the personal content bits floating out on the web? All of the stuff you want to read? Google reader can help, Pageflakes might be even be more useful (a variety of content, not just feeds or clipped websites), but then there is the other stuff: all of the various profiles, with logins and passwords. Social networking aggregators such as spokeo, profilactic and others, can be handy. Digital identity tools are certainly helpful, for logging in OpenID (one login for multiple sites) and in distinguishing what is yours and perhaps, more importantly, what is NOT yours (and is in no way affiliated.) Consolidation is bound to happen and a little is a good thing — unless google ends up owning EVERYTHING….

Among sites being touted as ‘hot’ for ‘08: PowerSearch (a semantic search engine) , Pownce (social networking & more), etsy (an online store similar to ebay focused on handmade and originally produced products… most of the art community that I know, do not seem overly enamored with etsy, thus far), Dopplr.com (a travel & meetup site), twitter (really? I thought we were all tired of twitter by now), children’s social networking such as moshimonsters and webkinz (if you know a tween or preteen, just ask them about webkinz), seesmic (video diaries)…

..and of course, Google opensocial, if it ever makes headway. I also like some of the projects which allow users to make a positive contribution to a body of knowledge in some way, like the steve museum project, where users assign keywords/tag artwork, identifying artists’ work, and more) and also recaptcha, which uses scanned images from books as captchas (a phrase or word typed in some sort of form, that the user must enter in a text box, which prevent spambots from automatically using the form).

..and then there is always wikipedia, citizendium, the new Google Knol, and those sorts of sites.

Other trends & technologies that have popped up in the onslaught of 2008 predictions posts/articles include:

Location based services (niche marketing of a sort), Mobile Social Networking (I keep reading about this as a big trend, but it just seems more like a means of access to me — be it a pda, iphone, laptop, desktop, psp or whatever… but freely available WIFI at most public buildings, that could definitely continue to change things), lots of chatter about Google taking on the cellphone/mobile industry with Android, Gaming, SecondLife/Virtual Worlds (OpenSL?), internet habits changing as the mobile industry & high demand downloads continue to increase, increase in usage of Linux and other opensource projects (evergreen, the opensource ILS?), and an increase in distrust in google (I love google products, but they are a corporation after all.)

Creating widgets and apps to work with much of this technology is usually (but not always, of course) fairly easy to do and can easily be done by someone with minimal coding experience. I see lots of places where libraries can be, if they want to be. I guess that is the question.

Facebook is so last year http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/24/facebook.socialnetworking

2008 Predictions http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2008_web_predictions.php

2008 Technology predictions http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2007/12/2008-technology-prediction.html

The Economists Prediction for 2008 http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10410912

Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/12/YE_10_startups

30 Library Technology Predictions http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2007/12/30_library_tech.html

..and of course, a generous sprinkling of my thoughts.

Virtually vague - secondlife, opensim, and other stuff

It’s certainly easier to pretend to make art or to speak the truth than to actually do either.

–NPR, Are we not gamers?

Although my computer more than meets the requirements for secondlife, it’s very jerky. Graphics card, maybe?

I’ve tried secondlife a few times now, the first time was when it was kind of the shiny new thing on the web. This latest time, I wandered around orientation island for a while, got really lost (I think I was standing in the middle of the ocean?) , got bored and gave up. Maybe it is that I didn’t understand exactly how to interact with the software (needed an instruction session, I suppose) or perhaps, it is just that this format doesn’t appeal to me.

In spite of all of the web stuff I do and have participated in, I don’t consider myself a gamer. It really doesn’t appeal to me (although I have played some games online or via a standalone machine -xbox, etc.). NPR has an interesting article about the diminishing distinction between gamer and non-gamer.

SecondLife feels very ‘gamerly’ to me. I also dislike the ‘real’ money involved. I don’t fault SL for trying to make money - hey, it’s their product! I am interested in the educational applications of secondlife. How are educational institutions using secondlife and other sim environments? Are these successful projects?

Are their implications to teaching, conducting research, or otherwise engaging students in SecondLife? Yes, says Michael Bugeja of the Chronicle.

When it comes to Second Life, we’re not only talking about money. We’re talking about whether you as a professor or administrator will be held accountable for introducing your students and/or employees to a virtual world that accepts little responsibility for anything that happens among avatars, including online harassment and assault.

Enter into the mix the opensource virtualworld product, OpenSim, aka OpenSL. Will educational institutions and organizations embrace opensource virtual worlds?

Will one day in the future, instead of typing into a search engine, I will virtually walk up to an information desk and ask for help? Will I be able to do that, or will I be stuck in search engine city?

digital identity

One of the things that I think will become even more important in the future, is developing and controlling your personal digital identity. In googling my name, I mostly find stuff that I have put out there at the top (I own my domain namesake), but then there are other things which are not me, too. A couple of doctors, a creative writer, various other things. Nothing too scary or potentially harming in terms of my digital identity, albeit potentially confusing. While I do write, I do not publish creative pieces online.

Anyhow, there are many digital identity management tools out there from ClaimID, Namyz, linkedin, etc. Here is a brief article comparing zoominfo to linked in.