June 2008 Archives

Spent the day working on our ChatbotIF interface to Second Life for a change. This sits between our Discourse chatbot engine and libsecondlife. Worked my way through a list of things we'd flagged up over the past few weeks. Improvements/new features include:

- better point to point movement by estimating travel time for each segment
- full IM handling, including routing IM via Discourse and setting the bot to decline IMs
- full friend handling, including setting the bot to decline Friend requests
- a "fidget" function when idle to play random  animations and movements
- ability to set whether to ignore or listen to objects on channel 0
- ability to control movement from Discourse so the bot can more easily show people around
- accept teleport lure's form owner

Always more to do though!

Just spotted this in a post about the SLGOGP - the "metaverse" standard for Second Life and SL type virtual worlds:

"2) Scale the Second Life Grid architecture to support the
industry-projected situation in the next 10 years, where virtual worlds
will comprise at least 60 million regions, 2 billion users and in-world
concurrency of 50-100 million residents."

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLGOGP_Draft_1

AMEE is an interesting site that's collecting CO2 emission data on EVERYTHING and then making it available as a web service. Babbage Linden is already using it to make Carbon Goggles, an Augmented (Virtual) Reality app within SL to give you everythings CO2 emissions.

Good coverage of the DataViz panel from the Life2.0 conference in March by Gus Rosania. Gus is speaking at our SL 5th Birthday visualisation panel on 2nd July. Xanthe Oe/Melanie Swan  was/is chairing both events.

http://strategicphilosophy.blogspot.com/2008/05/doctor-who-deontologist-or.html

A post my daughter ought to read after our talks on the walk.

From Palm

Getting late, can get this to work on a new account so will use the TwitterBot for now.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Virtual-Space-Travel-Part-2-Surfing-to-Mars-63387.html?welcome=1213444242

Great post on NASA and Virtual Worlds/SL. Time to post the blog entry I wrote whilst at Being Digital on virtual worlds and space exploration.

Just a test

http://www.travelswithrhody.net/

Wade gave us a nice mention in his article for MIT Technology Review last year.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iKMcgJgp9nGYbaTofk_jpi56JpeA

http://mashmaker.intel.com/web/index.php

Not quite sure about this - putting your own widgets on top of existing pages to "mash" up data - although each bit of data appears to stay in its own widget.

A day spent at Mashup*Events' Being Digital conference at BAFTA in London.

Panel Comments

Very sterile Advertising debate (but me.jpg) and haphazard Identity panel (must start using OpenID). Will Mclnnes' Content panel was much better but took a while to get to the nub of the matter finally caught by Ivan Pope (but spotted earlier by the texters) that the debate is not about content but the role of channels vs. aggregation and recommendation services - last.tv as someone said.

On the location panel Tim Warr fm Microsoft had some good stuff about the need for better and radical new interfaces for location data (augmented reality?). Richard Wahrman's Locomatrix company sounds fun - outdoor games over GSM/GPS - be good to get them to Brum - or into SL for a mixed reality game. 'Location is ubiquitous' had to be the phrase of the day!

Retail - Brent Hobermann talked through mydeco - neat affiliate model for furniture sales through your room designs. IKEA - multi-channel customer has x2.5 LTV

Search - Jeff Kelisky talked about 3D search and Mirror Worlds (2 MS employees almost talking sense!).

Pitch Comments

putplace = youtube, not web-cen
fav.or.it = del.ic.ous
mapness=GE mash-up
mippin=bango/wapgata
kiwork=getafreelancer
phreadz=yet another cross-poster

Site Recommendations

headmap/scribed/hivemind fireeagle - location broker rummble - couple of mentions woe-yahoo-semantic location fredcavazza.net - social apps map taptu - mobile search

Overall

Lost count of the comments on Twitter outages. The need for proper semantic markup was highlighted again and again - but never discussed.
Mobile phone camera based AR driven by barcodes came up a couple of times.

Micropayments came up several times cf yesterdays Big Debate. Good SMS comment system from eventspace, again cf Big Debate - next a live wifi message board and then we can almost reproduce the SL experience in RL. Good food and venue.

In summary the whole event felt a bit like the dot-com boom re-visited. Less geeks than I expected, lots of marketing types, a few VCs, few corporate end users.

http://transumanar.com/index.php coverage of Max More's transhumanist presentation in SL at the weekend.

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=304

Some great tech related charts

http://malburnsannex.blogspot.com/2008/06/chameleon.html

Neat bit of SL Machinima

http://memebox.com/futurescanner

Interesting looking blog

http://openlibrary.org/

What a cracking project. A web page for every book, with links to amazon and libraries and google, and where available the full text.