SecondLife

After posting an amusing video on Facebook that is about the reality of Twitter that balances a lot of the social media turbocharging of itself, an Uncle asked me an interesting question.

The video, for your amusement:

And the question that my Uncle posted:

I was wondering.... So it's sorta like second life, but shorter and faster, right?

My Uncle is in no way unintelligent. He knows I am/was/will be involved with Second Life, having even been published. He also knows that I stay on top of technology, though these days it's more of a reflex than an active interest. He knows I've dealt with the underlying technology of Twitter (and the group even got interviewed by the BBC). It's something that I grew up doing, and as it evolved so have I. So while those that know (or more appropriately, think that they know) the differences, my Uncle just doesn't spend a lot of time dealing with the loads of technology mankind births. He's got other things to do.

And in a way, he's right. We'll get to that last.

The Differences Between Second Life and Twitter { Read more }

On the Digital Divide discussion list, the mobile phone versus PC discussion came up again. Despite how much I hate mobile phones (a funny thing considering how I have been involved with them), the truth is that I do not hate the phones themselves - I really hate are things that people do with them. That said, they are the technology platform that will make the most significant impact in the next 5 years. Why?

Quite simply, everyone has them. A few of us have noticed this and have said this in the past - and where once we might have been seen as a cult, we're mainstream religion: You can talk about the Ten Commandments of the PC, but we offer you the Sermon on the Mount from Users.

The argument can and has been made that the mobile phone will never replace the PC. This is not a great argument to have - instead, the discussion should be about what users need - and most users need something that they can walk around with and which does things that they find useful. A PC has uses if you're tied to a desktop or feel like lugging around something that doesn't fit very well on your belt or in your purse. { Read more }

When I first saw this book on Amazon.com, it was hard to control myself. The name is an obvious rip-off of Asimov's 'I, Robot' - and yet the rest of the title did seem of worth. I sent off for it and have just finished reading it.

This was a difficult book for me to review. The author starts off explaining his own experiences in AOL chatrooms which, if they were not annoying to other users, were certainly bordering on trolling. Of course, he didn't call it that, but that's exactly what it was, at least to some degree. The whole Pighed persona seemed more like insight into troll behavior rather than any sort of early comparison to a virtual world. The bad news is that anyone who has been around in cyberspace long enough sort of knows that, but the audience of the book might think that the behavior of Pighed in the AOL context was socially acceptable. In that way, I thought it irresponsible and even a nice way of defending annoying behavior on the Internet.

But I read the rest of the book anyway.

Anyone who has read my own thoughts on Your2ndPlace.com would probably understand, after reading Meadows' book, that he and I don't agree on some things - but here's the funny thing. I found it to be a good book for people, other than the unashamed announcement of the author's roots in trolldom. { Read more }

My abstract for the Prato 2008: ICTs for Social Inclusion: What is the Reality? has been accepted - so I'm trying to get everything together to head to Prato, Italy for October 27th through 31st. I'm hoping I can spend a little extra time exploring Europe, but that has a lot to do with finances and scheduling - both of which are on an upswing but are a bit unpredictable at this point.

My paper, Inclusion in Synthetic Worlds, will deal with inclusion issues in (you guessed it) synthetic/virtual worlds that affect participation and determine how the worlds themselves are used. The abstract, which was accepted: { Read more }

An interesting video posted by Annie OK , shown at left, is funny for people who actually participate in the synthetic world of Second Life and could be taken too seriously by people who are unfamiliar with Second Life - or other virtual worlds.

The video is exceedingly well done - and there are highlights of it that really tease out some of the problems of real world sweatshops. There is a grey middle area that the video neglects - purposefully, I am sure. The virtual sweatshop in the video isn't really practical for some obvious reasons. Paying someone 90 cents per hour may be a corporate dream, but the reality is that anyone with the broadband access and so on would have to be making substantially more if they are paying their own real world bills. Electricity, internet costs, food, water, shelter... even in the developing world, it is unlikely that working in a virtual sweatshop would be anything but a net loss for an 'employee'. But who cares about the employees, anyway? That is, after all, an implicit callousness that creates what we would call a sweatshop.

In November, 2006 I wrote Virtual Sweatshops Or A Digital Solution for People in Developing Nations? - pointing to how China, for example, is using synthetic worlds to employ people in the real world to create virtual items. In worlds other than Second Life, this is generally known as farming.

Farming, in and of itself, is an area of great debate. Edward Castronova accidentally started the glorification of farming before he wrote Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. He simply noticed something and wrote about it. Authors such as Julian Dibbell later came along and, in a seemingly purposeful way, glorified farming. The trouble some have with farming is that in MMORPGs, farming can destroy the very context of the environment. References to RMT (Real Money Transactions) being bad for such games are easy to find - the basis of the criticism is fairly solid: If you can just buy improvements, then what reason is there to do tasks required to get the items? Of course, this may simply be a matter of people who are unwilling to do their own tasks and are willing to pay others to do them. The premise of farming is built on that. { Read more }

Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, by Benjamin Duranske (VirtuallyBlind.com) is now available for purchase from the American Bar Association.

You can find it here. If you missed my review of it, you can read my review of it here.

It is one of two books that has scored a 10/10 on the KnowProSE.com scale - and not as a book for lawyers, but as a book for users of virtual worlds.

My review is even quoted below that of Edward Castronova, who had this to say:

Ben Duranske hits the mark again and again with this clear, straightforward overview of legal issues in virtual worlds. All of the main arguments are here, in a single source, allowing the reader to balance the claims of contract law against those of property law in regulating the toughness of the magic circle. Woven together, these arguments constitute a desperately-needed consensus, one that recognizes the inevitable influence of real-world law on the future of this critical medium, but also its limits.

It is cool to have a quote from myself near one by Castranova. Poor fellow must be thinking, 'There goes the neighborhood...' :-)

Virtual worlds have survived their initial success and have become more grounded in the minds of the increasing number of people who use them. As such, it makes sense that businesses, ,non-profit organizations and even governments would be interested in how to leverage these synthetic worlds to their own purposes.

There are many lively weblogs to read on the topics of virtual worlds. Some are fan sites, and some tease at the importance of aspects of virtual worlds as diversely as the authors approach them. This can be very confusing to follow for someone who may not have time to follow the google or yahoo of hyperlinks scattered across another synthetic world of perspectives propped up with observation and opinion of many authors. There should be an easier way for someone unfamiliar with virtual worlds to get an idea of what is important for them to know.

Enter Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide.

As one would expect, the synthetic world of Second Life® occupies a large portion of the work - roughly half of it. This is because, at this point, Second Life is the leading synthetic world when it comes to business - some say that this is even to the detriment of Second Life, though whether that is a widely accepted opinion is different to gauge. Many residents do not actively participate in discussion on the Internet, and so their own opinions may be lost in the flotsam and jetsam of opinion tossed out into the blogosphere by those, such as myself and others, who do. { Read more }

4/10/2008: The book is now available here.

I was fortunate enough to get a review copy of Benjamin Duranske's Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, which is available for pre-order at this time. Since the author has been following Law in more than virtual worlds at VirtuallyBlind.com, it is written by one of the very few intellectual property attorneys actively involved in this new method of entertainment, business, education and communication. Being someone especially interested in Law as it pertains to technologies, I was very happy to get the review copy.

To give this all context for those unfamiliar with virtual worlds, here are a few things that have happened over the last year:

• The first trademark of an avatar has happened.
• Pseudonymity of an avatar was verified through payment information subpoenaed from PayPal and Linden Lab in a case of copyright infringement enacted in a virtual world.
• The Terms of Service of a virtual world service provider were ruled a contract of adhesion in a lawsuit that was later settled.

That is a very small taste of what has happened in the last year within virtual worlds - and these only relate to one virtual world. Obviously, despite what many people who use virtual worlds may think or hope, Law is playing an increasingly significant role in synthetic worlds just as much as it does on the Internet - if not more. Since this is the first book on Law as related to virtual worlds, it has a lot to live up to.

On to the review.

The first chapter, Introducing Virtual Worlds and Virtual Law, explains virtual world to those who may be completely unfamiliar with virtual worlds themselves, and introduces 'Virtual Law'. As Benjamin Duranske writes (Chapter One, 'What Is Virtual Law', p 14.):

Virtual law is like "Internet law," in that it refers to a wide body of generally preexisting law that is applied somewhat differently in a new context. In fact, much of what we think of as "Internet law" applies to virtual worlds. In sum, virtual law is the statutory and case law that impacts virtual worlds and the application of that law to these spaces. It also refers to the internal governance structures that are beginning to appear in some virtual worlds...

... Virtual law includes aspects of civil procedure, constitutional law, contract law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, patent law, property law, publicity law, securities law, tax law, trade secret law, trademark law, international law and Internet law. In each area, questions similar to those that arise in relation to real-world activity arise when law is applied to activity that takes place in virtual worlds, though with different, sometimes surprising, implications.

Therein lies not only the premise of the book, but the promise of the book. { Read more }