Taking second looks at Second Life

It seems the luster of Second Life's newness has worn off.

Now that the hype over Linden Labs's virtual world is fading into the sunset, business and journalists are starting to take a more serious and objective look at Second Life and what it means for the average user.

Wired has published an article that discusses the disappointing results from advertisers that have set up spaces in SL - the spaces are fairly deserted and Wired does an estimate of the actual number of regular SL users that indicates many people only have time to live their First Life. Wired's editor has also written a piece explaining why he gave up on Second Life. The LA Times has also published an article on how disappointing SL is to business.

Some faculty are finding interesting and appropriate uses of Second Life that have pertinent learning goals for students. (A blogger at New Scientist discusses one faculty member at Elon that has a virtual telescope in SL to prepare his students to use the real thing, for example.) However, the Chronicle of Higher Ed continues to be a rather uncritical cheerleader for Second Life and many leaders in IT still tout "virtual worlds" as the "next big thing" in education.

SL development is expensive and time consuming - I'm thinking that a more cautious and realistic approach might be more beneficial to faculty and students in the long term.

Your email is buggy

There's been a great deal of work lately on visualizing information in unusual ways, in part due to new tools for programmers that have made this work easier.

The latest is an MFA thesis that includes a Flash program; it allows the user to visualize their email as living organisms. The software checks your email folders and shows representations of new versus old messages, unread messages, and other information.

blog post at Wired.com

The buzz on Buzzword

We already have web-based word processors from Zoho, Google and others. One new entry in the race to replace Microsoft Word is discussed in a blog post at Wired.

Buzzword was built using Flex, a technology that is an offshoot of Flash, and is generating interest because of it's advanced, clean interface. It was created by a small start-up company and is in an "invite only" Beta right now, with an open Beta scheduled for the Fall.

blog post at Wired.com