In the past few years, there have been web programs similar to Second Life which have flourished at times. However, much of the reason Second Life has grown , according to those interviewed, is that this world offers a level of freedom that the others (up until only recently) don’t.
“ It’s a distinct thing to understand because Second Life is all user-created content,” Au said. “Some of the land and houses were created by the company, but 99.9% of everything you see in there is created by users. ”
Heider added, “People would go to The Sims Online and they would create their own little role-play that EA did not want and people did it anyway. But Second Life encouraged those same behaviors…a lot of people came to Second Life from The Sims Online and There.com because they felt there was more freedom in Second Life .”
Linden Labs also lets Second Life users keep the intellectual property rights to whatever they create inside the virtual world.
Second Life celebrated its fifth birthday in late June , although it has only started to garner the majority of its registered audience in the past couple years. Though a toddler in human years, the virtual world has already been around long enough to make a significant impact in many careers and in the way people interact worldwide.
Don Heider, who has been researching Second Life for three-and-a-half years for his forthcoming book Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds (Release Date: September), originally stumbled across Second Life in the Austin-American Statesman while on faculty at The University of Texas.
“As a social scientist, it blew my mind,” Heider said. “It’s like the world’s biggest Petri dish…a very interesting social experiment.
“There’s no goal, there’s no game. It just exists to create and socialize…Any social scientist would like to put 100 random people on an island and see what they’d do, and this is what (Second Life ) was.”
Wagner James Au , whose Second Life alter ego is Hamlet Linden , also studies many of the sociological aspects of the virtual world. The co-author of Second Life: The Official Guide blogged for Linden Labs and freelanced stories for other publications from SL ’s early days until he left L.L. in Feb. 2006. Though he has been busy working independently on the Making of… novel (See: last Everywhere post ) since then, Au said he typically spends “anywhere from a few hours to 20 hours” a week logged into Second Life .
“From a social engineering standpoint, you can rate people, either through their behavior or their avatar behavior,” Au said. “Instead of going around killing orcs, you just go around being yourself.
“It’s always been a job for me, the most fun writing time I’ve ever had, but what made me stay was the unlimited amount of creativity that people are allowed to bring into the world. Also, the way people rip off each other’s creativity and feed off each other.”
One of the most direct influences for Second Life and programs like it, according to Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, is the concept of a “metaverse”, an idea pioneered by “cyberpunk” author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash that describes a “user-defined world of general use where people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.”
Don Heider , associate dean and associate professor of the College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, thinks that chat rooms from the Internet’s early days played an even bigger role in the development of programs like Second Life than video games.
“In terms of the way graphics and avatars move, games like World of Warcraft were more directly influential,” Heider said, “but early in the history of the Internet, people would log onto the Internet and use MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain, or Dimension) as gathering places to talk about things like Dungeons and Dragons.
“(These were) multi-participant bulletin board chat rooms where people would come together and interact that just used text but described their environments in such a detailed and complex way. I think these chat rooms probably played more of an influential factor, set more of a historic precedent than any of the current MMO RPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games).”
However, the evolution of video games also played a large role as well, especially since many of the technological-social concepts in Snow Crash were not practically applicable upon the book’s release in 1992. Around this time, computer game series such as SimCity (The Sims series) and Civilization were starting to gain popularity for their strategic PC simulations of urban and anthropological development. Early role-playing video games, such as the Final Fantasy series , were also evolving.
During the second season of the late, great Chappelle’s Show, Dave produced a skit about how creepy and uncomfortable the Internet would be if it were a real place. People were mobbing a “free downloads” music store like it was a Calcutta soccer riot and a glamorous woman he began talking to eventually took off a mask to reveal an annoying spammer.
In the changing climate of modern media, the Internet and different kinds of “conveniences” we consume are becoming not only progressively more personalized and customized to the average user, but the technological convergence in these mediums is already becoming more sophisticated. Like Chappelle’s skit, the Internet is becoming more “real” in that it is making shopping and working increasingly more accessible and convenient; letting us control more with the click of a mouse.
Through Internet programs like Second Life , and Google’s just-launched LIvely, users are able to customize their own virtual lives in a virtual world using “avatars”, or the graphical representation of an Internet user. For the equivalent of roughly 30 (real) dollars per month (although registration on Second Life is free and available to everyone), average people from across the globe are able to escape into this existence and lead a fairly comfortable life, as they use “Linden dollars” (the Paypal-supported equivalent of real dollars on the game; named after creator company Linden Labs ) for transactions in Second Life , expenses that some users say would otherwise be spent on everyday escapes like movies and CDs.
More than just a virtual escape, Second Life , which launched in 2003, serves as much more for its users, from a social experimentation device to a recruiting tool to a cyber-conferencing tool. Media convergence components available in Second Life include visual animation, video, audio/voice and text. Linden Labs has even more recently introduced its own business networking Second Life sub-world, Second Life Grid .
For this market research (”Bizookipedia”), I interviewed several different media-related experts, each uniquely tied to this 3-D virtual world in some way, in order to shed some light on the inner workings and larger impact of this fairly new cultural phenomenon. Additionally, I conducted broad research on some of the existing literature (feature articles, blogs, etc.) for Second Life and spent some time on my own perusing this Internet world. The result is an insightful projection for the future of the Internet and how humans interact. [Bizookipedia begins...]
- Facilitate internal communications on specific topics
- Put forth ideas and solicit opinions
- Solicit comments
- Bolster creativity”
Read more…
Mark Zuckerberg launched an online empire from his dorm room at Harvard. Now four fellow students say he stole their idea.
Why? Efficiency is key to a business operation of any size. The comfort of that plaid sofa in the family room may be a factor as well.
Reports on homeshoring cover the networks of customer service representatives who work in their U.S. based homes for corporate titans like 1-800-FLOWERS, JetBlue, and Office Depot. But let’s not forget the 20+ million freelancers who are working wherever they can find free Wi-Fi access. They too are keeping talent local.
The workload is spreading, period. Floor 67 on Wall Street is moving to 301 Marysville Drive. Jobs move offshore to Mumbai on one day but are back the next. This fluctuating global market demands a strong ability to compete with consideration of opportunities that contribute to global society.
By the numbers:
50,000+ — customer service agents currently working at home in the U.S (DataMonitor)
20,000,000+ — independent freelancers in the U.S (Small Business Trends)
100,000,000+ — independent freelancers in China (CBIZ)
85%+ — of all businesses in the U.S. that are sole proprietors (SBA)
31% — employers who anticipated work with freelancers in 2008 (CNN)
In order to understand market trends and get a better grip on where the greatest team-building and networking needs will be, the Bizooki team talks to the experts. Recently, Bizooki sat down with Mike Rapp, the Franklin, Tenn.-based president at founder of Generator Network, a newly-launched music packaging platform for independent artists.
Originally from Toledo, Ohio, and an Oral Roberts graduate, Rapp worked on Music Row in Nashville for over 20 years in a number of different capacities for record companies, from cassette/CD package design to art directing photo shoots. Since then, he has also managed his own graphic design company, Gear Inc.
In 2003, Rapp became co-publisher of a Rivals.com affiliate site, VandySports.com. For this site, Rapp has served as the chief photographer and columnist, covering multiple NCAA Tournaments in various sports, the MLB and NFL entry drafts, and has extensively covered sports recruiting. Rapp says he has learned many of the business concepts he has instilled in Generator Network from the Rivals model.
Bizooki: What is the purpose of your company?
Rapp: We provide an online business platform that helps artists and authors connect directly with their customers. We also give them the tools to monetize that relationship.
The artist pays us a design and development charge based on the demands of their site. Most of them pay us a la carte for many services including design consulting
Bizooki: Why did you seek to start Generator Network? What voids did you see that could be filled in the music industry?
Rapp: The music publishing business has always been a physical products business. When digital manufacturing began to happen, in conjunction with what was happening at Rivals (digital publishing of online sports content), it seemed like a natural evolution. What we do eliminates 80 percent of the costs in publishing. Regular publishing companies don’t have the infrastructure to do non-physical distribution.
For us, when I saw Rivals.com go from fairly fledgling to a powerhouse, I began to see something the record companies had no experience in, which was non-physical product information. I spent 20 years designing CD packages. Now almost everyone that made a living doing that is out of business; there’s almost no money to be made making physical products.
I saw the Rivals model as the polar opposite of the traditional record business, but I saw it as much more in line with what the fan wants. The fan does not want a relationship with the record company (i.e.-paying exorbitant prices for albums and traditional packaging), they want a relationship with the artist.
Rivals teaches you how to build a community, how to listen to fans. What we do is very similar to Rivals except that we have e-commerce and live event marketing.
In our blog posts so far, we have talked a lot about how Bizooki’s goal is to help workers in cubicles around the world, as well as the ones sitting at home waiting for the right call, connect with each other in unique ways; comfortable means of communication which allow our users to facilitate the virtual teams/opportunities they had in mind when they signed up with us in the first place.
But what about the people who do actually "build stuff" for a living: the construction workers and foremen of the world? Actually, Bizooki’s mission is equally geared towards our more blue-collar, down-to-earth work force.
Any ways in which Bizooki can become more of a hard day’s night, replace-the-dude-who-up-and-quit, team-building home and socializing tool for members of our most grassroots professions, the better. As we’ve said before , Bizooki aims to be the virtual team-building and networking (on both local AND global levels) what Facebook has become to social/school networking .
In a continually slumping economy, an increasing number of our young citizens, whether they have a high school (or even college) degree or not, choose to make their livings through landscaping, roofing, gardening, demolition, painting, insulation, installation, plumbing, and other vocational ventures that pocket them money at the end of the day with a renewable base of clientele.
And why not? They’re working for themselves, in part because the economy and job market have let them down. America is full of young men and women starting their own such companies and working with and within their network of friends, downing a few beers and swapping a few jokes after 12+ hour days.
Bizooki, at the end of the day, is a networking site for independent contractors. Of all kinds. If we want to be successful at all, this is our base, and we hope you feel comfortable coming here, constructing and renovating new and existing relationships.