Roland Legrand's blog

Jeez! This is 2008, and contrary to my childhood beliefs (way back in the sixties of the previous century) there is not only no manned Moon or Mars station, but even very mundane things, such as integrated tools to collaborate effectively using texts, documents, pictures, videos, spreadsheets, databases, conferencing tools, poll instruments, wikis and meeting environments are as yet not available as a kind of a standardized, easy-to-use and accessible solution. This was a lament uttered today by a friend of mine, an academic economist, specialized in efficiency measurement and working regularly with ad hoc international teams.

I had not an immediate answer. Of course there is web2.0, and there are many solutions facilitating several aspects of collaboration. Virtual worlds are one family of such tools. But those tools are dispersed, many creative people all over the world are constantly proposing now solutions using social tools. But a one stop solution, familiar for many people all over the world and massively used, does as yet not exist. The sheer variety of tools makes people who are not professionally covering web2.0 desperate, even digital natives are overwhelmed by the abundance of web2.0 offerings.

So where is web2.0 going? I previously mentioned some answers given by Professor Tony O'Driscoll. Now I would like to introduce social media expert Shel Israel, who has some insightful things to say about where we are going. And finally I will call Microsoft or Google to the rescue!

Based on Gartner's Hype Cycle public virtual worlds are in the Trough of Disillusionment (after the hype), but hold potential for the future. In fact, Gartner's latest predicts that public virtual worlds will see mainstream adoption within 2-5 years, so Virtual Worlds News reports on the basis of Gartner's report Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

There are signs that maybe we are coming out of that Trough of Disillusionment. The latest ones are some positive articles in important mainstream media such as The Economist and BusinessWeek, Second Life being associated with business and creativity... Even more remarkable, I discovered that projects which were once mentioned as examples of the failures of Second Life, are now being presented as interesting showcases.

Young people are doing lots of things wrong, or seem to indulge in socially unacceptable behavior, such as griefing - read on this site The Devil's Advocate by AJ Tan and the response by Prokofy Neva on Second Thoughts Why The Kids Aren't Alright.

I'll tell you another story about deviant behavior by young people, and also why that behavior, while in itself is not recommendable, can also give us reasons to be less negative about the new generation. However, educators, institutions and companies will have to adapt and we will have to help those young people.

So, how can the new generation at the same time display behavior that is very promising for business and the economy but at the same time drives teachers and older folks mad?

Lots of people think about a better user interface (UI) for Second Life these days. There are the folks at Linden Lab, who are preparing, as CEO Mark Kingdon explained, an expandable interface, which grows with the experience of the user. There is Dusan Writer, who organized a User Interface Design Contest. The winner will be announced at a special edition of the Metanomics show. Prokofy Neva spoke out on his blog Second Thoughts in No, It’s Not Really About the User Interface, stressing the importance of the Search (or, more appropriately, the Find) function.

I felt reluctant to speak out about these issues, I am not a technologist. I do believe however that among the greatest assets of Second Life are the communities and sub-communities in that world. It seems obvious that changes in UI helping people to find communities and groups of people sharing the same passions, are crucial to increase the appeal of Second Life. But this does not only depend on the people of Linden Lab. Maybe more avatars should come out of the closet and unveil the identities of their real life typists, even to the point of giving detailed insight into what those typists are doing.

What makes the avatar tick? Is the avatar a rational being, a homo economicus, meaning, as explains Wikipedia, a rational, perfectly informed and self-interested actor who desires wealth, avoids unnecessary labor, and has the ability to make judgments towards those ends?
I thought this over when I listened to a presentation by Stephen Prentice, VP of Gartner, earlier this week.

I doubt that the concept of the homo economicus is very useful to analyze the behavior of avatars and their real life typists. My guess is that psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers have more insights to share. Desire and recognition by others may seem to be fuzzy concepts, but at the end of the day explain far better what really goes on in virtual worlds...

Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts of Dancing Ink Productions were last Monday on Metanomics to discuss the roles virtual worlds can play in global diplomacy and business. Discussing cultures is never easy, especially when it involves talking about God, so Rita explained. However Dancing Ink Productions ventures into projects such as Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds. It seems that virtual worlds can bring us a degree of mental liberty which makes dialogue between cultures more easy.
In yet another example of discussion across borders volunteer Jane2 McMahon of Netroots Nation talked about what this progressive politics organization does in Second Life. Jane is Canadian, but this does not prevent her from participating in discussing US politics.
These discussions reminded me of the concept of virtual citizenship, which I discovered in a paper written by Cory Ondrejka, the former Chief Technological Officer of Linden Lab. Maybe at some time in the future it will not only be possible to run virtual corporations (incorporated in the state of Vermont), but also to become a real "virtual citizen"...

I started exploring Second Life about a year ago. One of the main reasons I decided to stay was Metanomics. The show also helped me explain to colleagues and friends why Second Life could be interesting: creating platforms for cosmopolitan intellectual discussions, a place where cultures can meet, a place for concrete collaboration.

At first I just watched the show, passively. After a few times I could not resist the temptation to use the backchat to participate in the live commentary by the audience.

The inevitable happened: after a while I started to talk privately to other members of the audience, only to discover Metanomics is not just a show, but a community. I got acquainted and befriended to quite a few avatars, but I was in for a big surprise...

Last Monday I had the opportunity to bring the Connecting the Dots item for the Metanomics show. I decided to connect one of the main themes of the show, global diplomacy and relations between cultures, with my own experiences covering the opening of the Swedish Embassy in Second Life and with my fascination for the "deconstruction"-technique which I learned from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

[Note from the editor: Don't let the mention of Derrida put you off. As I said to Roland after the show: Congratulations on being the first one to refer to Derrida on Metanomics, and one of the few in any forum to do so, and still be intelligible! --Rob B.]

Last Monday Manpower celebrated its first anniversary in Second Life with a virtual conference about The Virtual Workforce. Archives and links for this event can be found at on this site. It made me wonder about the state of the virtual labor market, all the more so because Chairman Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab said that the price of labor in Second Life seems to move upwards.

So, what supply and demand factors determine prices on the virtual labor market? I use a number of elements of the Manpower conference, adding my own observations and thoughts.

Virtual worlds are all around us these days. Google launched its Lively virtual environment (yes, Metanomics has a room there), Metanomics will cover the Rocketon world and there was the Linden Lab-IBM interoperability announcement. Avatars were teleported from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server.

While M Linden (CEO Mark Kingdon of Linden Lab) did not focus on interoperability in his recent letter to the residents, avatar Zero Linden (vice-president Joe Miller of Linden Lab) unveiled some of the ambitions of his company regarding interoperability and the metaverse in a Reuters' interview. In the story it is said that:

The Linden Dollar, with a years-long reputation of solid financial backing, may be positioned to become the gold standard of virtual currencies.

A great ambition for the Linden dollar, which for the Linden Lab officials and the Terms of Service is just a product feature and a fictional currency.

Five years after the Tax Revolt in Second Life issues concerning the residents' rights are still being passionately debated. At a moment in which enterprise applications of virtual worlds in general and of Second Life in particular are becoming serious business, these issues have an even broader commercial relevance. One can establish a Virtual Corporation and use Second Life as platform for the virtual headquarters, but what rights does an entrepreneur have in Second Life, how well protected is she against arbitrary interventions by the owner of the world, Linden Lab, and did Linden Lab finally made up its mind about the very nature of their project? It seems those issues are still very much in doubt.

Forums, chatrooms, blogs, wiki's in 2-D or in 3-D can all be collaborative tools. They help people to interact and to produce stuff for business, art, research, software development or just for socializing and entertainment. But at a certain point, successful collaboration needs governance rules and a structure to pool the resources and revenues. Legal scholars try to work out such structures which are suitable for the collaboration era. One of the most exciting examples is Do Tank, which develops a framework for the virtual corporation. Their ideas have been applied in a Bill which has been approved in the State of Vermont. Kudos to James Wagner Au, it was reading his blogposts on GigaOm and New World Notes that I learned about this development.
The Virtual Corporation Project is an effort of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School where Professor David Johnson takes the lead for this project.

Wat is the Virtual Corporation Project all about? The Do Tank site explains: (click 'read more' below)

ArcelorMittal is quite some company. It is the world's largest steelmaker. Lakshmi N. Mittal, the Indian London-based billionaire industrialist as Wikipedia says, acquired and merged steel companies all over the world, until now with great success. However, there is a point of concern: who wants to be shareholder of the company? Young people are not interested, so it seems. Can the company seduce them using Second Life?

The company has its share of institutional shareholders (like investment funds, banks, insurance companies). Companies do also want to have individual retail shareholders, say people like you and me, who often help to stabilize the performances on the stock exchange. It is regarding the individual retail shareholders that the company seems to be confronted with some challenges.

This is the first day of the Summer season of Metanomics. The show has a lot of new features and the site is getting more than a new look.

I took the opportunity to start a blog here about business and collaboration in Virtual Worlds. I will try to give a European perspective on these issues. In what is strangely called "real life" I live and work in Belgium, where I am in charge of the Internet and New Media operations of Mediafin, the publisher of the business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo.

I run a personal blog about virtual worlds, business and philosophy (I studied economics and philosophy), MixedRealities. On that blog I tend to report a bit faster about business developments, but the posts are more like personal notes published in public, reporting about a certain development in a number of posts, in function of when additional information comes in.

Here I will try to bring more comprehensive stories. In the first one I will write about investor relations in Second Life, using the example of ArcelorMittal.

Roland Legrand, in Second Life: Olando7 Decosta