WSTC – the reading list

I’m about to head over to Amazon to order a bunch of the books I browsed through on the conference book stall.

• “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (Malcolm Gladwell)
• “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” (Malcolm Gladwell)
• “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” (Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams) – still haven’t read it!
• “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable” (Seth Godin)
• “Blog Marketing” (Jeremy Wright)
• “Google Power Tools Bible (Bible (Wiley))” (Ted Coombs, Roderico DeLeon)
• “Second Life: The Official Guide” (Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham) – nice to see a SL book at a WebSphere conference

Technorati Tags: books, conference, Google, IBM, reading, Second Life, Wikinomics, wstc, wstc2007

What’s my point?

I had lunch with a couple of friends at the Hursley club house on Friday, and spent much of the time discussing Second Life. Fridays seem to have become a day for me to play the role of “totally unofficial metaverse evangelist-lite” - in the past fortnight I’ve spent quite a lot of the time presenting on SL on Fridays, both formally and informally. This was one of the more informal sessions, and an interesting discussion… although I’m not sure either of my colleagues were convinced.

I was pleased to hear that both Lee and Rich are readers of my blog. One thing that they said that puzzled me slightly was when they made the point that “all you ever seem to post about is SL”. OK, so after some discussion they modified this to say that I must spend a lot of my time messing around in SL - or at least that’s the impression that comes across very strongly from my writing.

It’s a fair point that my writing hasn’t consistently focused in one particular area. If anything, the blog has probably tilted towards photography and away from technical WebSphere-related topics lately. I’m very excited by the possibilities presented by virtual worlds, but I’m involved in that area strictly as a volunteer, and I don’t intend to give the impression that all I do all day is run around a 3D environment getting excited by virtual musicians. My day job as a WebSphere consultant is my primary focus.

I’d already noticed that I hadn’t been posting quite so much about my day-to-day activities or the technologies I work with, so I’ll try to do some more of that. However, the tagline of the blog says it all, as does the About page - there is still going to be a mixture of topics to read about.

Second Life IS work

Had a couple of days of Second Life-related activity.

I spent yesterday in the company of the exceptionally cool Roo Reynolds, one of IBM’s Metaverse Evangelists. It was great to learn more about our thinking in terms of virtual worlds… and I even introduced him to Mugshot and Windows Live Writer, so I like to think I had an impact on his life, too.

Today, I helped a colleague present on virtual worlds and Eightbar to an internal audience in London; and this afternoon I gave my own presentation to another internal group in Canada. Both experiences were very enjoyable – there’s a wow factor when you move from presenting a set of slides, to zooming around a three dimensional space, to showing off some of the stuff that we’ve been building on the IBM Island Complex.

Back to more usual activities next week.

Technorati tags: Second Life, IBM, virtual worlds, presentations, Roo Reynolds, eightbar

Lotus makes Connections

… and on the day I can’t make use of my normal connectivity, comes the news I’ve been waiting to talk about!

Ed Brill is the first blogger I’ve found who mentions one of the major Lotusphere 2007 announcements: Lotus Connections. This is a culmination of a lot of the work we’ve been doing internally around collaborative “Web 2.0″ tools such as blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks (I talked about it briefly before, in a post about Ventura).

The International Herald Tribune likens the release to MySpace for corporations. Some people might feel that MySpace is a bit frivolous, and I’d agree – in my opinion, it is largely aimed at teens. However, the technology and trends that it (and other social networking sites) represents are enormously important to business, and several of us have been evangelising this message for some time now. When I’ve talked about it with colleagues, I’ve sometimes encountered the reaction “where’s the value?” or “surely this is all going to eat into my time…” – both perfectly valid points, but I think they are answered quite straightforwardly.

A recent BBC News report mentioned that over half of American teenagers were familiar with social networking sites. The next generation of workers are already beginning to absorb these technologies into their lifestyles. Businesses can now start to build these kinds of networks internally, and there is real value in doing so.

If you’re not sure about the power of these kinds of tools within a company, witness my own blogging network. To pick individuals from my blogroll at random, without having an internal blogging platform, I simply would never have communicated with people such as Ed, Per, Cesar or Dan… or worked with Hannah, Andrew, Chris, Kelly or the eightbar crowd. These tools have transformed the way that we work, and the way in which I see the world.

More links:

• IBM Validates Social Networking for the Office
• IBM to introduce workers’ networking software

Incidentally, there’s a Lotusphere location in Second Life, too… again, I’m unable to go and check it out for myself right now due to connectivity issues. See Per’s post for more. I’ll be online later.

Technorati tags: Lotus, IBM, Lotusphere2007, Orlando, Ventura, Lotus Connections, blogging, Second Life, Lotusphere_07

IBM, the Australian Open, and a virtual world

In case you don’t follow eightbar… and even if you do… Kelly Daly has just posted to her blog about the amazing new Second Life build that she and a group of other IBMers have created for the Australian Open tennis tournament:

for starters, we have built the stadium. And a large section of the surrounding grounds. The build currently includes Rod Laver Arena, Margaret Court, Garden Square, Australian Open Shop [...]

Smooth movement of ball by converting point data to position and velocity vectors and then utilising the Second Life physics engine.

It is one of the best builds I’ve seen, and the amount of work and attention to detail that has gone into it really make it stand out. I think it may be closed or oversubscribed at the moment (I just tried visiting again, and failed to get in to the sim), but be sure to visit when it is open to all.

Screenshots on the eightbar post, and in epredator Potato’s snapzilla stream (you’ll also find the slurl there).

Technorati tags: IBM, eightbar, Second Life, tennis, Australian Open

IBM Second Life evangelist on BBC Newsnight

Ian has already blogged this over at eightbar… this week’s series on technology on the BBC Newsnight programme features some coverage of one of our internal discussion groups, plus footage of IBM Hursley and a short interview with Ian himself.

There’s a video (skip to around 7m30s in) – or else look for The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace here. Alternatively, you can watch it on TV tonight (Wed 10th January, BBC2, 2230 I think).

I thought I’d post a couple of screenshots from the meeting, since there wasn’t a huge amount of in-world footage. Click through for larger images.

We started off inside the house, and discussed some topics around identity and virtual worlds. I’m on the right, near the front. This was early on in the session, before everyone arrived.

Later on, we moved outside for a more free-form discussion. That’s me on the right with the red hair…

Technorati tags: IBM, Second Life, Hursley, BBC, Newsnight

Second Life news updates

Two noteworthy Second Life newsitems, today.

Firstly, IBM and Sears are partnering on a new build on the IBM island complex. The idea is to allow customers to explore the Sears product range in a more immersive environment than is currently possible with an online store. Mike Rowe gave an interview about the Sears build to 3pointD, and it is worth reading.

Secondly… a little snippet… the Second Life client has been released as an open source project! This is extremely cool. Hopefully it puts an end to the need to play around with libsecondlife – it will be interesting to see how that project goes forward now. Actually I’d only just posted about libSL to eightbar, when Roo posted the news about the full client – which kind of negates my post…

Lots of coverage, including Reuters actually referring readers to eightbar; and IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger being quoted by Fortune.

Things I’d like to see:

• a stable Linux version with capabilities to match other platforms;
• a more lightweight update process that

doesn’t leave 25Mb installers in my temp directory;

• more HTTP integration to enable better interaction with the outside world, preferably with the ability to grab image files via HTTP;
• some kind of in-world XML parsing capabilities.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this all develops.

Technorati tags: eightbar, Second Life, open source, Linden Lab, Sears, libsecondlife, IBM, Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Trying to make a start with libsecondlife

One of my diversions today has been investigating the use of libsecondlife. I’ve got quite a specific use case in mind at the moment – automation of some administrative tasks for a project I’m involved with – but it was interesting to dig around in the code in general.

First of all I have to say that the project website is kind of short on help for beginners… there is no obvious starting point, and little or no documentation on the API. I downloaded the latest build, which gave me some interesting GUI and command-line demos to play with that enable you to look at group memberships and so forth. In order to really get to grips with it, I had to take the source out of SVN and look through the C# code – reading the comments and code is far better than playing around with binaries that don’t do what you want in the first place.

If you are coming at libSL new, it may be useful to know that if you have SharpDevelop, the whole of the source tree can be opened very easily as a single solution, and I had no problems building some of the examples. I did have some issues trying to run them, though… but maybe I’m just driving them wrong. So far, I’m still at a bit of a loss as to exactly how it all hangs together – but some of the examples look very useful.

Via the forums, I did discover that there’s also a Java implementation. I think I’ll take a look at that too…

Technorati tags: Second Life, libsecondlife, C#, SharpDevelop

IBM’s new SL presence in pictures

The BBC News website has a nice short piece on IBM’s new 12-island complex in Second Life.

If you thought that was interesting, check out the full picturific post on eightbar.

On missing HackDay, and IBM in SL

Since I’ve been away this week, I missed two gala events – HackDay 2, and the news about our new islands in Second Life.

Can’t wait to see what HD2 has brought, so I’ll have to check that out on Monday when I get back to the intranet. I just sneaked a quick look at IBM 1 and IBM 8 in SL, and it all looks great. I’ll have to explore properly next week.

Technorati tags: IBM, HackDay, Second Life

2D Internet in 3D Internet – or better APIs?

During the Virtual Worlds Think Tank last Thursday, I got to thinking about what the 3D Internet may mean. I was considering some of the limitations of Linden’s current engine, which is one of the technologies that may move us in the right direction.

Linden have stated that they want to put the Mozilla engine (Gecko) inside Second Life. This is potentially a great move. Right now, in order to display a web page on a prim or surface, you have to take a snapshot of the page on some proxy outside of SL, and then grab and render the image inside SL. By putting the browser inside the engine, you potentially have access to all the richness of the browser as an application platform.

But, let’s wait for a minute and think about how useful this is. I’m a 3D person in RL, sitting at a 2D computer interface which enables me to deal with information. Now I start using Second Life or some similar technology, and all of a sudden I’m looking at a 3D representation of myself moving around a 3D environment – a 3D Internet, if you will.

So, if we just put the browser inside that environment… don’t we have a 3D person in RL looking at 2D screen… which contains a 3D person in SL looking at a 2D screen?

You can already perform an HTTP request from within LSL (the scripting language of Second Life). This is great – standards-based integration, providing a way of getting data from the rest of the Internet into the environment, to enrich any objects that are built there. Our own epredator Potato and colleagues have been using this to get data from various external systems, to great effect.

The problem with llHttpRequest is that once you’ve got the response, you have no easy way of parsing it. There’s no XML parser in LSL – you are back to good old-fashioned string parsing. This makes SOAP/HTTP calls cumbersome to impractical; it’s a good argument for REST-based services, but even then, if you are getting back anything more than a tokenised string, it can be a pain to deal with.

To me, the point of this exciting new environment is that we can present information in an entirely new way. Once the current stability issues are sorted out, I’d really like to see LL make it easier to deal with the information that we can pull in from the outside world. An Embedded web browser would be cool, but I think it (partially) misses the point.

Technorati tags: Mozilla, Gecko, Second Life, Linden Lab, REST, XML, SOAP, HTTP, API, browser, metaverse, 3D Internet

More on Virtual Worlds

Roo has posted more detail on today’s event over at the eightbar blog (which I think is the closest blog there is to a “spiritual home” of IBM and Virtual Worlds, given that both of our Metaverse Evangelists started out there).

I was delighted to be able to play a part in the day. I think we’ve been doing some amazing stuff, particularly in terms of our use of social networking tools, and it was great to engage with people to discuss our use of blogging, social networks, and virtual worlds.

I thought I’d post a few additional shots of the Think Tank session that Roo mentions.

We split into two groups to make the conversation slightly more manageable. Timeless Prototype’s magic table and chairs were put to good use!

Algernon Spackler moderated the discussion group that I was in. All our base are belong to him!

As well as journalists, we were lucky to have luminaries from across the Second Life community join us to participate in the conversations:

The event was held in one of our conference domes. The virtual Hursley build can be seen in the background.

 

Footnote: I spotted another Second Life reference in coverage of another event that is underway at the moment, the SWG Analyst Briefing in Stamford, Connecticut.

Technorati tags: IBM, virtual worlds, Second Life, think tank, conversations, Roo Reynolds, Ian Hughes, Rob Smart, Holly Stewart, Andy Piper