Big Blue has been cheerfully reiterating its commitment to the metaverse as the platform of the future by crewing its Second Life based Business Center with full time attendants. However, you may want to avoid the area for a while – the union that represents Italian IBM employees is somewhat peeved at a recent pay restructuring package, and has called a strike to picket in SL instead of meatspace.
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Keep watching the skies!
I’m late to the party as far as announcing the arrival of the new Google Earth features that let you explore the sky as well as the ground, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Once the excitement of roaming the real stars has faded, however, you can skip on over to Galaxiki – which, as the name suggests, is a wiki-based community that is building a fictional galaxy by describing the star systems within it.[BoingBoing]
I quite like the idea of being able to create my own solar system … for one thing, I’d make sure that I avoided picking a sun that does freaky stuff to its planets with low-frequency waves. We’re all doomed! Possibly. [Image by jesiehart]
Mixed messages: Wired in two minds over Estonian “cyberwar” story
For me, the most interesting thing to come out of the so-called cyberwar DDoS attack on Estonia back in May this year is the different ways that different media have approached the story. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Wired; the magazine ran a long and beautifully written piece that completely overstates the issues for the sake of sensationalist warnings about potential risks to the US, while blogger Kevin Poulson cheerfully dissects and deflates all the hyperbole while sitting in an office at the same company headquarters.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that bloggers are inherently less prone to sensationalising a subject … but I’m increasingly finding the web is a better news source, precisely because I can get a broad selection of angles on a story with ease. How about you?
UK women spending more time online than men
A survey suggests that, as a demographic, British women in their late twenties and early thirties actually spend more time online than men of the same age group. I wonder what effect this will have on the sort of adverts we see deployed on popular sites, especially as it’s becoming increasingly plain that television is losing its former status as the preferred media platform for many people? But if further evidence of this ongoing trend is needed, I humbly submit the phenomenon of people registering domain names for their children long before they’ll be old enough to bash out their first blog post.
A plague on both your guilds – researching epidemics in World of Warcraft
We’ve heard about the street finding its own use for things, but here’s an example of the opposite occurring: epidemiological researchers are in discussion with the makers of World of Warcraft to arrange a for a contagious virtual disease to sweep the multiplayer world, so that they can observe how people react to various social countermeasures like quarantining. Brings a whole new meaning to bugs in the code. [Image by Rance Costa]