As you may have noticed, I invested quite a lot of time in the past few weeks exploring the Second Life phenomena.
One thing that surprised me last week at Reboot was the fact that very few peopele were discussing this topic, one that I was totally drenched in until a few hours before.
And this was even more curious because the main topic of the conference was “human”. To tell you the through there was one talk about second life and virtual spaces (and that I managed to miss), but that was the exception, and there was close to none chit-chat in the garden and in the hallways, even though SL emerged at times during conversations as part of the common technosocial background that we all shared.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, I read that the hype around SL grows, and for instance more and more Italian cities (latest is Genova) are creating a presence on the Grid, while at the “Festival dell’Innovazione” (Innovation Festival) SL has been described as a playground where democracy can meet autoregolamentation (see this article for context… and ok, it was a politician who said that but still…).
Uhm… maybe it’s just that they’re two different, only partly overlapping, worlds:
I wandered a lot through the islands of SL and met and talked to a lot of people. And many of them are really interesting artists or enterpreneurs or idealists or programmers people who has a lot to do and to tell the world… but only few of them are bloggers, too: the vast majority (at least of those I interacted with) chose Second Life as their media of choice.
And this maybe is perfectly normal, but I think quite sad if this leads to innovation effort being split in different closed circles.
I guess you’ve talked to the wrong people. There are lots of bloggers on SL. Me for instance at http://blog.mindblizzard.com and I’ve seen blogrolls upto 500 SL blogs.
If you want to know more on Second Life, real life businesses in second life or the second life blogosphere, just contact me in SL.
VeeJay: I guess maybe the post wasn’t clear enough… I didn’t mean there aren’t ANY blogger, actually many of the avatar I met had a blog (still a minority though).
But they’re still separate worlds: avatar-centric blogs talk about SL and places or events that go on the Grid, there is little (again little doesn’t mean “none”) cross-cooperation with what is being said, done and researched elsewhere, being it the blogosphere or meatspace.
It is like most avatars (and again, this is limited to my personal observations) treat Second Life as a self-sufficient universe (and thus the vertical, nanopublishing like, “chronicle” model) rather than a new, powerful media tool.
I noticed that issue too. It seems that the web is detached in some ways from the SL (virtual worlds) phenomena.
I think that there could be two causes:
1. The ‘virtual space’ is completely detached from the rest of the web. The interaction between the two worlds exists but are bad designed (technical) or unuseful (SL gives all).
2. The time is another factor. If I spend much time in SL, before knowing the web dynamics, I will get into it and live it as quite the only one way to chat, interact, socialize, etc. The web I think could be felt as ‘old’.
Just my.02€. :P
Folletto: point number 2 is the myspace/facebook (but even splinder) effect: you go there and find a community and get used to its metaphors (read: you get lazy) and feel like you don’t need anything “different”. And yes, in SL this is made even stronger by the fact that the platform is implicitly mono-task: you can’t easily jump in and out of it without appearing rude to the other avatars on the grid and experiencing a good amount of stress (my black macbook takes a few seconds to context switch between SL and other apps, much more if SL is in full screen mode).
Yes, the issue is attention management: the web encourages distributed attention, and online worlds require undivided attention. The synchronous communication with avatars cannot be postponed. An other phenomenon related to this is how often an avatar will refrain from sending you an IM if you are offline, after the first line saying ‘hello’, even if you do receive the message in its entirety, either via email or the next time you log in.