Living in a digital world

Will Second Life be a long term success?

Will Second Life be a success in the longterm? Could it even fulfill the science fiction concept of the Metaverse? An interesting article in TCS Daily and a recent(ish) discussion on Slashdot suggest that it might not be. Second Life has a few issues. TCS Daily makes the comparison with the early days of the Internet, where AOL, Compuserve and AOL dominated. These closed communities were quickly overtaken by the open Internet around the time Netscape released its first browser and kicked off the Internet boom. The walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and MSN were made irrelevant by the open nature of the public Internet – anyone could publish content and users could access content from myriad providers rather than those sanctioned by the owners of the walled garden.

Are we likely to see a similar pattern with 3d worlds, where a decentralized system enabling everyone to run their own servers triumphs over a walled garden approach?

A contributor to the Slashdot discussion points out another fundamental problem with the current Second Life model. The architecture of Second Life is designed in a way that limits the number of users that can access a parcel of land at any one time, this is normally 100. If we are to see the vision laid out in “Snow Crash” (of tens of thousands of avatars interacting at the same time) become a reality, this architecture will need to be fundamentally revised.

June 29, 2007 Posted by robertjenkins | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Best of B3TA

Bit old now, but still very cheering, and all the work of one warped designer:

June 28, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Website Top Trumps

Ever wondered how much traffic a particular website is getting? Or wanted to play top trumps with two competiting website? Well, a site that we use often use in planning to provide some light on the subject has the answers. Alexa is a company owned by Amazon that allows you to download their browser plug-in usingwhich you can measure the sites that you visit. You can access the aggregate analysis of this information, which acts similarly to a research sample.

The blue line is the daliy reach of www.findmadeleine.com. The khaki line (who picks these colours?) is www.justgiving.com. And the brown line is www.nspcc.org.uk.

Firstly, the sad situation with Madeleine McCann has clearly had a significant impact on the actions of the public. But that impact is extremely difficult to maintain over a longer period of time – hence the decline in reach since the first week. Secondly, this dwarfs the reach of Just Giving, which in turn dwarfs the reach of the NSPCC.

When you have got 10 minutes, go and experiment with Alexa and play with the traffic stats. Also take a look at the related links page that illustrates which other websites the users visited. And if you have any questions about this, please give me (Simon James at WWAVRC) a call.

June 27, 2007 Posted by sijam | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Own the club, pick the team

Have you ever dreamed of running your own football club, not just a fantasy team in the paper or a management game on your console but a real live football team?

Then check out myfootballclub who are looking for 50,000 people to pledge £35 each to be put towards buying a team, giving them £1.35 million to spend. They already have 40,000 people signed up (including me).

Not only do you get to own part of the team, the real genius of this idea is that each part owner will be able to vote on team tactics, formation and selection every week before a game. Even though a coach will recommend what to do, the actual decisions rest with the 50,000. Nobody knows whether the “wisdom of crowds” can be applied to football management, but it will be fascinating to see what happens.

And one thing’s for sure, if the team loses, the fans can’t blame the manager.

June 26, 2007 Posted by robertjenkins | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Party, party, party.

The last time I went to a big digital bash it was 2000 and people were chucking money at digital like there was no tomorrow. It’s been a while since those gold-rush days, but digital fever seems to be growing stronger by the day as more and more clients shift their marketing budget into more measurable digital channels.

So the time for the return of the digital celebration (read mass piss-up) is ripe. Good job Chinwag 07 is on hand to satisfy the appetite of the digital sector for long-overdue good times after the misery of the dotcom crash.

Chingwag claims to be offering ‘a soiree of supersize proportions’ that ‘celebrates the return of the digital sector as a sustainable growth industry’.

It’s a free party (thanks to partners Adobe, Agency.com, Channel 4 and Purple) and there’ll be a BBQ, drinks, mingling, drinks, DJs, drinks, 5 themed rooms, drinks, a posh quadrangle and drinks. The party takes place on Thursday next week (July 5th) at the 2,000 capacity, Imperial College Union in Kensington, London.

The free tickets are apparantely going quick, so if you fancy it book now at the chinwag website.

June 26, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a much used and misunderstood phrase. Very often it means different things to different people causing confusion, or irritation at another cringe-worthy marketing buzzword. The phrase Web 2.0 has been taken to individually mean social networking, user generated content, AJAX and even by some people the use of white space and unusual names.

To understand the phrase we should go back to the article that originally coined the phrase – What is Web 2.0 written by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media. In the article O’Reilly discusses the themes of a new generation of web applications such as Gmail, Flickr, Wikipedia etc. It’s well worth a look.

However, if you don’t have time to read the whole article here is a bitesized version condensed from 15 pages to a couple of lines:

“Web 2.0 is the move to the internet as platform, and an understanding of the rules for success on that new platform. First among those rules is building applications that harness network effects to get better the more that people use them”.

A great example of the idea of internet as platform is everybody’s flavour of the month – Facebook. This article explains why the Facebook platform is such a great leap forward.

June 25, 2007 Posted by robertjenkins | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Virtual strawberries anyone?

For anyone not particularly into music festivals and so not rushing-off to the Secondfest virtual festival in Second Life next weekend (read post here), how about relaxing with some tennis at IBM’s Second Life virtual Wimbledon?

Following testing on a private Second Life island in 2006, this year any interested spectators in Second Life will be able to see matches being played by avatars using real Hawkeye ball position data from Centre Court. They even have virtual rain and virtual covers to protect the virtual courts. If you’ve got a Second Life account then you can take a visit.

Alternately, if tennis is your thing but Second Life isn’t, then you can see video from Centre Court and No. 1 Court, as well as highlights, interviews, and archive footage at Wimbledon.org.

June 24, 2007 Posted by Bryan | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Secondfest – wellies not required

Those who braved the rain and mud at Glastonbury this weekend should just about have dried-out in time for Secondfest, a three-day virtual music festival in Second Life – running from 6pm GMT (10am SLT) on Friday June 29th to midnight GMT on Sunday July 1st.

Organised by The Guardian and Intel, the festival will feature live music from both offline and online performers, plus theatre, ballet and cinema. The ‘offline’ headliners are Groove Armada and the Pet Shop Boys, while the line-up of SL performers includes Doubledown Tandino and Slim Warrior.

For more information, you can take a look at the festival website – complete with the usual blogs, downloadable festival map, and ‘survival guide’, plus some tragically unsubtle promotion of the latest Intel processor. You can also find a Secondfest page on MySpace and sign-up for live festival tweets from the Secondfest twitter feed.

June 24, 2007 Posted by Bryan | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Facebook lending service passes $100,000 in under 4 weeks

Less than a month after launching its app. on Facebook, Lending Club, the person-to-person online lending community, has just announced passing the $100,000 mark in loans issued to Facebook members.

Currently the most popular ‘Money’ application on Facebook, with some 9,500 installers, Lending Club uses a proprietary technology called LendingMatch to bring together lenders and borrowers using connections established through their Facebook social networks.

Such person-to-person lending enables borrowers to get a better rate than they would from a traditional bank or loan company, while lenders can invest in a pool of loans at higher rates than they can get through savings accounts. Risk-management is based on all borrowers being credit-checked and risk-assessed, and lenders spreading their money over multiple borrowers.

Person-to-person or ‘social lending’ is a rapidly growing market, with one of the best known players being London-based Zopa – which recently won an international Webby award for best banking website.

Lending Club has some way to go to catch Zopa, but its extremely rapid growth certainly does re-affirm the potential of Facebook as a platform for social network-powered sales and financial services activities.

While the whole social lending phenomenon is another great example of how digital communications can bring people together in previously unimagined ways – and thereby potentially transform traditional business models beyond the reach of the traditional players.

June 22, 2007 Posted by Bryan | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Cannes Direct Lions ’07 – The year of free media

In this year’s direct lions, if a campaign didn’t have a dimension to it that used viral or pr to generate free media, it didn’t stand a chance.

It appears – this year at least – there is an increasing trend for big ideas that increase clients’ return on investment by using traditional media as a springboard to create significantly added value.

The Grand Prix is a great example of this. While not perhaps what we would traditionally call creatively brilliant in its execution, there’s no denying the power and effectiveness of its creative use of media.

Here’s the idea: When a Spanish football pundit and ex-goalkeeper fainted on live TV, there was lots of speculation as to why, and the clip was an overnight youtube phenomenon. So the agency produced another film which ‘revealed’ that a prompt guy in the TV studio had been holding a board with an amazing savings account offer on it. Press, email, direct mail and radio were used to drive people online to view the film. They even named the savings product after the unfortunate presenter.

So, is this the way marketing will be from now on? Should every one of our briefs be about how we get free media for our clients? Or will consumers, if they haven’t already, quickly learn to see through the use of viral and PR as another way of big corporations trying to hoodwink them into spending more?

Rory Sutherland, the Chairman of the Direct Lions jury quipped that perhaps clients should consider giving half of their traditional media budget to creative departments and see what happens. Only history will tell us whether this was simply a cheeky joke or an amazing prophecy.

Author: Barney Cockerell

June 21, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment