Goodbye Lively...

Google Lively posted this today http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html

I have to say, despite my issues with what they chose to do and how they managed telling their user community about it, that I think it's a pity Google have chosen to close lively.

Whilst it wasn't the revolution that we were all hoping for, in my opinion it did have it's niche.

What I would hope is that this isn't the end of Google's interest in virtual worlds. We need another big player to step in here and create some diversity with a decent budget behind it, and no, in my opinion that doesn't mean we need another mirror world. What we need is something that can realistically compete with Second Life. Something that can encompass user created content (from within the VW engine), with rights management and a workable economy, and better media and web content integration.

In my opinion there are only a few companies capable of doing this. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the larger games companies.

Google: please don't let one failed project keep you out of this sector for long, and if you want some advice on how to position your next offering ...

The Customer may be right, but I can't deviate from this procedure, sir.

I'm no longer an advocate of XBox Live. We had a disagreement. It ended badly.

The thing that I noticed most during the hour I spent arguing on the phone wasn't something that's exclusive to one specific company. There's a new trend... agree with the complaining customer, but cite the procedure that must be followed at all costs ... so sorry, nothing I can do ... and yes, I am the most senior supervisor in the UK and there isn't anyone else who can actually make a decision other than to follow the procedure to the letter.

Something about this doesn't feel right to me. Despite the 'fixed' procedure, there is always some scope for movement, even if it is subtle. The mobile phone companies are very good at this and understand the need to retain customers and that the value of one retained customer is in the peer recommendation that goes with it.

The converse is also true. Just like this. The customer you didn't keep is just as vocal and your detractors have just as loud a voice. Except there's something unique to human nature - we tend to remember the negatives more so than the positives. Your lost customer will probably do you more damage. This is borne out by the 'net promoter' scoring metrics.

From a PR point of view it's much better to make a small concession and keep your customer than to lose them.

Mandriva Linux on EeePC 900

I've been quite vocal about my appreciation of OpenSuSE 11.0 and how well it works (after a lot of fiddling) on my EeePC 900.

Well, the few bits that didn't work started to annoy me, along with the fact that it didn't take advantage of the faster FSB and effectively ran the access to the memory slower than the hardware was actually capable of.

So I had an idle look on www.distrowatch.com and then did a little surfing for EeePC out-of-the-box compatible distros. I saw that Mandriva have just released their 2009 version and it's supposed to be 100% compatible.

Long story short: it is.

Downloaded the .iso file and burned a DVD ROM (external usb DVD drive - very useful) this morning, and after only about 3 hours of effort, most of that waiting for things to copy, here I am blogging this, from flock, on my EeePC 900, over wireless ... you get the picture. It all just worked.

I've even gone as far as getting Compiz working fine, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Second Life client is in the full sources set of the repositories. Installing that was quite telling: it runs a good deal faster on Mandriva than on OpenSuSE.

That's it. I'm sold. Faster AND easier? Perfect.

Not on linked in? Why not??

Linked In is a social media website built specifically for business networking. The list of industries is over 100 and covers a very broad range.

I've been making much more use of Linked In recently and have had a number of briefs, meeting and new, interesting contacts come from this activity. If you aren't registered, give it a go and feel free to add me to your network!

Now, that's a whole 'nother channel right there....Part 2

I'm a bit of a geek. That's probably come over in the postings that I've made here. As such, I have stickers on the lid of my EeePC for a couple of things and want to add my favorite social media, virtual world and technology brands there.

So I did the obvious thing and emailed 6 companies: blogger, second life, linked in, twitter, opensuse and flock. Guess what? *None* of these companies have stickers.

I said it in my last posting, but it's work repeating: stickers are great because the allow other peoples personal possessions to act as a vehicle for your brand. This is very, very cheap advertising to market segments that may well be interested in your product, and quite possibly don't know it exists.

One of the stickers I have on my EeePC lid is for skullcandy. Why? They make great headphones and were smart enough to include *two* stickers in the blisterpack with their product. I have had dozens of conversations with people who ask what the sticker is for .....

Now, that's a whole 'nother channel right there....

I contacted the people at OpenSuse with a fairly mundane request: do you have any stickers to fit on the lid of my EeePC? You know what us geeks are like about stickers. Turns out that this is an item that they just don't have.

This got me thinking about how important it is when planning the small tactics of your marketing campaign to be able to get a good fit with your existing as well as potential customers. It's your existing customers that will preach on your behalf and tell all their contacts about the quality of your product or service, and providing the right tools for them to be able to do this is key.

Whether it's providing a brochure showing the details of your clients new project, so that they can show ot off in the office, or stickers for geeks with laptops, you'll only benefit by helping your customers to sell your products for you.

Let's face it: I think OpenSuse is a superb OS. My EeePC is on my lap on a packed train for 2.5 hours a day and ends up in a good mix of meetings ... having your logo on the lid of my EeePC will give you quite wide a range of people. Now, that's a whole 'nother channel right there...

Vollee Beta Mini Review

Vollee (http://www.vollee.com) offer something entirely unexpected: Second Life via your 3G mobile phone. Sound impossible? Well, actually, no.

Vollee take the innovative approach of remoting all the processing of the Second Life client and the 3D rendering of the image itself, by running this as a shart on a remote server. What the Vollee client does is recieve a video stream of the resulting image, and map your control responses back to the remote server.

Sounds like a complex solution? Maybe. Does it work? Absolutely! I have to say, having shown this technology to a number of colleagues, this is a bround-breaking solution to providing a real answer to hi-fidelity content on mobile devices: process it elsewhere and stream the resulting display.

I have to add that I am using the Nokia E61 version of the software on my Nokia E71, and it's working fine, if a little sluggish and not supporting the phone's WiFi connection (only working with the 3G internet).

So please hurry up with an E71 version, Vollee!

Vollee mention in their press content on their website that they are interested in using this as a technology to allow access to any persistent-world type game from your mobilephone ... so this could be a future where you can play WoW on your mobile.

Now, what would be really interesting is to see if anyone gets ahead of this by launching a VNC client for PC and Mobile Phone that allows you to do this using any application of your choice and manages the image resizing (or even a panning virtual desktop) for you and maps your controls appropriately....

The Curse of WoW

I was just nosing through one of the MMO news feeds. It's a dire state if you ask me. It's either WoW or nothing. There seem to be so many MMOs failing at the moment and the feedback seems to fall into two categories, either a) why play this when WoW is so much better, or b) this is just copying WoW, so we might as well just play WoW. Sheesh. Time for something new please!

Nokia E71 Mini Review

It's taken me an age to choose a new mobile. It all comes down to what I want to use it for - as much as a computer as a phone - and I get stuck with the combinations of input options.

I didn't want a mobile with a standard keypad and predictive text - in my experience it makes a nightmare out of typing a URL or an email address. I also, for a variety of reasons have no interest in a Blackberry or anything by Apple (a company that I feel is as cynical about it's users as Google seems to be).

So I was happy to discover the Nokia E71. A phone with a decent 320x240 screen, a full (and usable) keyboard, mini SD card memory expansion (this one came with a 1GB card), WIFI and the usual camera options.

As a basic phone, the E71 does everything that you'd expect from a Nokia phone and does it with ease. The numeric element of the keypad would be a little tricky to dial a number whilst running for a train, but other than that, works fine (and I don't have small fingers).

It also manages all the additional software and connectivity that you'd expect and makes it easy to install additional application software - skype for example.

I have to say, one of the things that really makes this phone a pleasure to use (other than the keyboard) is the Nokia-ness of it. It works as easily and consistently as any Nokia phone and with the same reliability. There's no phone crashing and needing a hard reset here!

The E71 basically is the perfect internet ready 3G phone, for everyone who doesn't want blackberry or apple.

Pale Heretic ... As seen on SLMen.com

In keeping with how I started in Second Life, I have just launched two new mens suits.

The fashion industry in Second Life is a significant part of it's economy - given the opportunity to look like just about anything, there is a roaring trade in just about anything.

That said, the market does make value judgements about all the new products that are launched. For men's fashion items, the standard I measure my work against is http://www.slmen.com a site that is owned and operated by long-standing Second Life resident Ben Vanguard.

With SLMen, Ben consistently delivers insightful reviews of the new fashion lines as they are released, which is exactly what he has done for the latest two from Pale Heretic. Read the reviews at http://www.slmen.com?s=pale+heretic

Google ... where did all the innovation go?

Google has been hard at work in it's application developments recently. We had Google Health, then Lively and now Chrome. Google Earth was innovation, as was Google Health. My concern is that Lively, and now Chrome are Google essentially reiterating existing applications, with no obvious sign of the innovation or insight that I'd expect them to display.

Both Lively and Chrome add new applications into already heavily populated application genres. From a marketing perspective I'm struggling to see the real UPS, from a perspective of differentiation, producing applications into competitive genres - Virtual Worlds and Browsers both seeing a lot of growth over the last couple of years - effectively dilutes Google's presence, unless they can launch what becomes the leader in both of these genres. And that is no mean feat.

This is the thing that seems to be lacking from Google at the moment (and the thing that would make some sense of this sporadic application development) is a public statement of Google's view of th future of the Internet, it's service and application provision, and how that will fit into our personal and professional use of computers and the internet.

Then just as I finish writing this I see Dennis Howletts Post on the Google Chrome ELUA over at ZDNet and I can't believe that they actually think that this is acceptable behavior.

Oh, and at the point Chrome launched, Google's own plug-in for Lively didn't work. The there's the DoS vulnerability.

Google: time to sort it out and lead the future of the internet rather than seeming to treat your applications development with a lack-lustre attitude, and your end users with a significant amount of contempt.

Google Lively ... gone a little quiet?

Over a month ago now, Google sprung Lively onto the virtual worlds scene to a mixed reception, but certainly a lot of discussion.

Now, things don't seem to have moved on very much.

I was expecting Lively's launch to be rapidly followed up but some direction and commitment from Google explaining their intended direction, time scales, goals. This just doesn't seem to be the case.

We know that content creation tools are somewhere in closed beta, but have no idea when that will end. I do know that Google hasn't yet finished deciding on either rights management and copyright ownership for content creators, or plans about monetizing that content. Conversations with people at Google lead me to believe that those issues are being discussed at the moment.

The "Lively is only 20% complete" is an interesting stat that I'm not sure has ever been coroborated. What I'm more curious to know however is: how long will we need to wait for the next 20%?

The one thing Google Lively has over Second Life...

The number of blog posts about Lively seems to be increasing at a healthy rate, and some common themes are emerging.

A significant number (and you can count me in this group) are disappointed with Lively and what it offers. Some are glad to see Google enter this sector of internet communications and others are picking up on distinct aspects of Lively and it's emerging user base.

One of the themes that I've seen picked up in a number of places is the rate with which the sex/porn industry and it's fan base has jumped into Lively. There's no doubt that within the first 24 hours the first Lively cybersex rooms had been set up.

It's a bit of a sorry state of affairs, but lets face some facts about the history of the internet here: without pornography, games and file-sharing the internet that we use today wouldn't be anywhere near as developed and mature as it now is.

The same is true for virtual worlds as a whole, but one key factor is the relative youth of the virtual worlds market compared to the internet / world wide web as a whole. I think of virtual worlds in the same way I remember the internet about 7 years ago - more chaotic, more randomly mixed (with pornography popping up in the most unlikely of places and seeming to be 50% of the results from any web search). Second Life is a good example of this. Wonderfully creative content designed by all sorts of people and leading to some amazing experiences. Scattered in between is the virtual world equivalent of all those random sites I used to bump into on the web.

Something I noticed recently was that they seem to largely have vanished. The web seems like a much cleaner, nicer place to explore now. This is a change I'm waiting to see happen with the virtual worlds. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that there isn't a place for sex in virtual environments if that's your thing, but what I don't want to have to worry about is who's going to buy the plot of land next to my Second Life office and if they are going to build a brothel on it.

A suggestion for Linden Labs: wouldn't it be nice if anyone running an adult site in Second Life (was required to) set a flag on their land specifying that their site fell into that category. Then in my client application, I can set an option that says "don't show me adult content" and then my client simply doesn't render any avatars or objects that are within that piece of land? Seems like a simple process and would certainly make it much easier to promote Second Life as a business and educational tool. The only problem I can see with this approach is that it lessens that need to buy an island in order to get some control over what is around you, thereby reducing Linden Labs land revenues.

This is the one thing that Lively has over Second Life. No neighbors. My Lively room is a component on the homepage of my website. If I want to direct people to it, I can send them straight to my website, straight into the room. This is a branded experience and I have control over all the elements of it.

Second Life, until something changes, will always have the risk of someone erecting a 50m tall photo-textured penis right next to my office. Oh, and that isn't a challenge by the way. My current preference is still definitely for Second Life - just or the amazing scope of what you can do and (all things considered) how well it all works. But if Lively's artist tools are as good as they *could* be, and the rumor that they are they are only 20% through their development turns out to be true...

Installing OpenSUSE 11 on an EeePC 900

I've made a few posts over the few weeks about my EeePC 900 and my experiences choosing an OS to run on it.

Xandros didn't last more than a few days, and after a fair amount of trying various things out, I've settled (and been running for a few weeks now) OpenSUSE 11.0.

This is the process that I used to install it.

Before you get started, you need to download and burn to disk the OpenSUSE 11 live CD from here

You also need to put two installers required to make the Wireless networking operate on to a USB memory stick. The files you need are:
madwifi-kmp-default-ng_r3366+ar5007_2.6.25.5_1.1-1.4.i586.rpm
madwifi-ng_r3366+ar5007-1.4.i586.rpm
which can be downloaded from the Appleonkel repository here

1. Install from the OpenSUSE 11 live CD (using a USB external CD-ROM drive). The installer is very easy to use and the only things that I specifically did was to set the partitions up so that there was only a system partition on the 4GB SSD and to mount the 16GB SSD into /home. All relatively easy to do with the partitioning tool that's built into the OpenSUSE installer. Make sure you remove the swap partition - it'll help your SSD last longer (although how much longer no-one really knows).

2. Modify xorg.conf in line with the changes listed in OpenSUSE on the EeePC - openSUSE

If you (like me) have a 900, you'll need to modify the 1024x768 entries in xorg.conf to read 1024x600. You will also need to run yast from a root commandline and modify the system >> sysconfig editor >> desktop >> display manager >> displaymanager_randr_mode_auto value and change it to:
1024X600_60 48.96 1024 1064 1168 1312 600 601 604 622 -hsync -vsync

There may be another way to change this value but this is the only method I have found that works.

If you're planning to use Second Life on your EeePC, remember to turn 3D acceleration on and set to 24bit colour depth.

3. Use the USB stick with the Madwifi / Drivers RPMs and install them with the package installer. You should then be able to configure your wireless and things get easier at this point. I have to make one point here though: lock these two packages in the installer and stop them being updated. For some reason the updates break the wireless and you'll need to uninstall / reinstall with the original Appleonkel versions. Anyone knows why, then please let me know!

4. Add the Appleonkel, Seife, Schmolle 1980 and Rusjako repositories as detailed in the 10.3 wiki entry (linked above - see step 2). I also added a few others at this point: packman, vlc, mozilla, gnome stable, wine - but that's personal preference.

5. Add the eeepc packages and you should find you have a working system after the reboot.

I think a full install takes about 1.5 hours to get to this point and worked quite well. The only thing I don't have working yet is the webcam, but I'll keep you posted if I find an answer.

A little more Lively?

You may have seen my previous (and somewhat disappointed) post about Google's new web-based virtual world, Lively.

I was bemoaning the lack of an apparent strategy or any solid information about the future of Lively or the kind of service into which it may grow.

Not being one to give up on new technologies straight away, I emailed Google about becoming one of the content developers for Lively and tagged a couple of additional questions on to the end of the email.

The reply that I received from Danny on the Lively team at Google did provide a little more detail (I'm omitting Danny's surname so that he doesn't get a surge of emails from people guessing his email address).

On the subject of content development for Lively Danny replied "Content creation for Lively is in closed beta right now, but I put your name on the list of future developers. We are planning to release the artist tools soon and we'll let you know when we do."

Now this is promising. Comprehensive content development tools for Lively would make it much more interesting as a virtual worlds tool.

I also asked about plans for a Linux version of the Lively client. Danny responded with "We're trying to bring Lively to as many different operating systems and browsers as we can, but I don't have any details on when they'll be available."

That sounds even more interesting. Following a less-than-harmonious experience with my previous laptop, I'm very happy with my EeePC 900. This of course is running Linux (OpenSUSE 11 to be exact) and I'd much prefer to be using Lively on this, rather than resorting to a PC.

I hope that this information is the start of more detail being provided by Google about lively and it's place in their online strategy. I hope to continue my dialogue with Danny and will let you know any information as I get it.

How do I look in this?

One feature common to many Virtual Worlds is the ability to change your virtual self (your avatar's) appearance at will. But your options probably go further than that: you have the scope to change your face, shape, gender, even species, and to do so with relatively little fuss. I can't think of another environment where re-inveting yourself has quite such broad possibilities.

So, the questions that spring to my mind are: what's wrong with experimenting? what will everyone else think?

Firstly, there's nothing wrong with experimenting. Try everything out. It's an interesting experience.

More issues surround the second question, and the answers will differ depending on the environment and your relationship to the people with whom you are interacting.

I'm going to use Second Life as an example in this, but (to varying degrees) I have seen parallels in a number of online game environments.

One of the simplest ways that people will identify you as new to Second Life is your appearance. Looking like one of the default characters usually means that you simply haven't yet discovered the options to change your appearance or the ability to change your clothes. Looking new in SL seems to have a couple of effects - people (especially other new residents) will be more likely to talk to you, where as more established residents may be less likely to spontaneously engage you in conversation.

The converse, is also true. If you look like you are an experienced long-term resident, you will seem to be one of the elite to a newly registered user and they will be more likely to address a question to one of their peers. Ironically, appearing to be non-human (if your chosen appearance isn't scary and doesn't have negative associations) may actually make you seem more approachable. Wearing a cartoon chicken suit certainly stops anyone seeming threatening.

When choosing your appearance, whilst the freedom to express one's self is great, it is worth remembering that the medium is jut as important as the message ... and in this context - that of a dialogue taking place, your avatar IS the medium. Sounds like stating the obvious, but given the number of people I have recently seen pitching Second Life, in-world, to a group of very new users whilst dressed as something very obscure / disturbing / inappropriate I think it's well worth pointing out. And the best bit? This is Second Life. You can change your whole appearance as easily as you would change your clothes. Choose a suitable appearance for the people you need to address. You can always change back into the avatar of your choice as soon as the meeting is over.

Google's Lively ... a missed opportunity?

A couple of days ago I started spotting the press-releases about Google's new virtual world offering called Lively.

I have to point out that this is a Beta and so we can expect some fairly major changes before the final version.

Lively, however, seems to fall somewhat short of the expectation put upon it by headlines like "Google's challenge to Second Life" which appeared on the BBC news website. Linden Labs really don't have much to fear from what is very much inline with my expectations of Virtual Worlds a few years ago and reminds me a lot of Adobe Atmosphere.

Coming from the company that brought us Google Earth, this seems miss-targeted and limited in it's conception. The concept of a 'virtual island on your webpage' is quite interesting as a nice extension to your website or blog, but the execution of it will I think type-cast it into a younger / teen market.

The other omission is the lack of any apparent developer or content creator support, or a roadmap for the plans associated with this. Given that Second Life has somewhat set the bar in this I would have expected Google to have attempted to address the developer community about what they can expect to get from Lively over the next year.

One final point is platforms. C'mon Google. Asus launch the EeePC and cannot make them fast enough to satisfy demand. Acer, HP and MSI (and possibly others) are all producing similar platforms. What do these all have in common? They all run on a Linux based OS (although a few do offer more expensive / less well spec'ed MS Windows versions). Launching a plugin like Lively and not thinking about a Linux version (the Lively site only mentions a Mac version in the future) seems to be cutting off a significant part of your target market. To make the example - I can easily run Linux Second Life on this EeePC 900. Lively? No.

So, Lively is on my things to watch list, but is something I hope will grow into something that I can use, because it falls short of my expectations at the moment.

Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web.

Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web. Second Life is a wonderful experience once you have acclimatised to it. Integrating it with your web presence is a little more tricky. The next release of the client will include the ability to integrate websites more closely with your parcel of land - more on exactly how that works when it's been released.

There are however other options for getting traffic flowing between SL and your website, tying your website more closely to your SL presence. SLURLs are a key component to this as they allow a web page URL to point to a specific SL location. This means that you can link to an SL location of your choice from your webpage. Thats a good start, but we can go further than that.

www. twitter.com is an increasingly popular mini blog (posts are limited to 128 characters) that has been designed to talk about what you are doing right now or give brief news updates. These is also a feature on the Twitter site that allows you to include your top 5 posts on your website simply by pasting in a little javascript or a small flash movie.

This makes for an interesting combination, when you add to the mix the fact that you can script a SL device that allows you to complete a twitter post from inside SL simply by typing a command into the local chat box. This is something I have been working on and I will be producing a small item that has some useful functionality packed into it. The effect is that you can blog to your twitter account directly, and easily include things like SLURLS (I have added some code that will create a SLURL for your current location) in your post so that people surfing your website or your blog can easily find the location about which you are posting. When I have a fully packaged device I shall post and let you know how I'm gonna make it available - I may charge a small amount and sell it, but think the price will be www.tumblr.com provides you with a perfect solution for blogging your experiences and the media that goes with them.

EeePC 900

I don't have a huge amount of luck with laptops. I spend easily 6 hours a day (sometime much more) using mine and I guess I expect quite a lot from it - high performance, long battery life light weight small footprint. You know. The things you pay an absolute fortune for. Only I refuse to pay and absolute fortune for a laptop. I guess £800 is about my maximum. Let's face it, if I go and buy a £2000 laptop and around about half-way through my third day of ownership, I'll drop it.

So that's why I chose my HP Pavillion DV2000. 14.1 inch, 3 hours battery, powerful enough, looked nice. Two years happy computing later and the hard drive finally dies, which was only to be expected really as I commute for between 3 and 4 hours every day, which means may laptop gets thoroughly shaken about.

New hard drive, take the plunge with Linux (Ubunbtu then OpenSuSE) and all is good. Then last Thursday I turn my trusty laptop on to the sound of random crackles from the speakers and nothing else, no bios messages, nothing. OK. Time to do two things: replace my laptop with something temporary, repair my old laptop.

A number of people I know have bought (and are universally happy with) eeePC 701s. Given my recent switch away from MS Windows and onto Linux the idea of a small Linux based laptop is very attractive. The screen was a bit of a sticking point though. A little small. But not on the 900 series. The other fact that sold me on this was the solid state disk - 20GB, no moving parts (so less prone to breaking).

One shopping trip later, and for the quite reasonable price of £329 I'm the owner of an EeePC 900, Linux, 20GB.

The initial OS runs in tabbed 'wizard' mode. I have to say this was a little uncomfortable as it makes the eeePC as easy to use and accessible as mobile phone, but makes it hard to get beyond the default set of applications. A quick search of web gives a number of pages that provide access to relatively (assuming you know a little about Linux) easy methods for switching to a standard KDE window manager referred to as 'advanced desktop'.

One thing that I did try was installing an alternative Linux distribution. Installing OpenSuSE 10.3 went rather easily, and worked exactly as you would expect it to. Drivers were easily available for just about everything, and the experience and Gnome (my preference over KDE) worked fine.
One reason has made me reinstall the default OS and use the KDE advanced desktop: speed.

A boot under OpenSuSE was taking nearly 2 minutes. I've just timed a boot and it's taking only 28 seconds to get to the point where the OS has finished loading and is offering me a dialogue asking me how I want to open the 4GB SD card I have in at the moment. That kind of speed difference seems to be consistent across all the applications starting up. I don't know anywhere near enough about Linux to be able to say why that might be, but it is enough to make the eeePC easy to use for the 1 thing I want to look up quickly, rather than waiting an age for it to boot. If I wanted to wait, I'd go back to MS Windows!

My one issue exists because I installed OpenSuSE. The 20GB solid state disk appears to be made up of a 4GB onboard unit supported by a 16GB secondary disk. I have no issue about the fact that the two are separate. My problem is that the recovery disk provided with the eeePC doesn't reconfigure this disk for you. As it stands, I have only the 4GB internal drive configured. The solution to this problem is trickier than I expected - I have created a partition, used fstab to say what it is and can now use mount /dev/sdb1 to mount it. But these doesn't seem to be any way to get it to automount. Even setting two linux gurus that I know onto the problem hasn't yielded a solution. I'll post one when / if I find one.

The eeePC offers a good enough screen and enough performance that I can do the image, layout and web based work I always have done. The screen is a little small but at 1024x600 pixels is just large enough to be usable. Gimp and Scribus work fine (if a little cramped). Even the Second Life client runs fast enough to be usable when all the settings are turned down. Thunderbird and Skype are already installed and Flock works well and is easy to install.

Oh, and battery life is over 2 and a half hours. Long enough, and longer using less taxing applications.

My next task is to find out if my HP can be repaired and how much / how long that will take. In the mean-time, I'm happy and productive with my eeePC.

Alan

Second Life and Healthcare

I've spent some time looking at Second Life and I'm left wondering: where are the Healthcare companies that should be in here, and where is the organised public health education?

There are a couple of health sites - the NHS is a very good example, but it's role is to demonstrate and gather feedback on new ways of deploying health care to the public. It doesn't provide health or disease related information. Healh Info Island has more of an informal feel to it, and while it provides a large volume of content, the the arrangement of it and its level of ineraction seems somewhat limited.

My interest in health care in Second Life is as a precursor to the next age of Second Life and Virtual worlds as a whole. I think we have now passed through our first age and the technology is now established, the user base is built and the first wave of corporate projects have entered and the majority has left. Some key corporates remain and make successful use of the environment - IBM, Cisco, Reuters and a few other are the leaders in this.

The trouble is, that for the majority of other businesses in Second Life, what happens in Second Life stays there. The in-world economy is booming. It's fashion and entertainment industries continue to expand. What is lacks is real cross-over business that has significance both in-world and in real life, and establishing these types of business will be key to Second Life (and virtual worlds as a group) moving into their new age.

I see healthcare as a key component of this. The internet is having a revolutionary effect on the public's ability to research their own health care. From access to disease area information, to details of products and the experiences of other patients the public have access to a huge amounts of information.

Second Life offers great scope for patient education, peer support and sharing personal experiences ... these conversations are already taking place in the web, but it seems that (in the UK at least) the health care industry isn't part of them.

Of course, if you think that I'm wrong and there's something I've missed please post it here!

Alan

Found inspiration

A key element in my creative process is being aware of what is possible. Some of this comes from experimentation or re-working elements of previous projects, but just as important is seeing what everyone else is doing. It's always a great inspiration to me to see other people doing great stuff. It encourages me to raise my game and new ideas get incorporated on all sorts of levels.

This is my top list of sites that I watch for inspiration (in no particular order):

1. www.styleboost.com - One of the best sites I know of that lists the best-of-the-best websites from a design and interaction perspective.

2. www.newwebpick.com - A great design portal that both indexes great websites but also sells (at a very reasonable subscription) a great Flash based magazine - and they also give away a free version that has about 20% of the content from the full version. Well worth a look!

3. www.conceptart.org - This is an all time-favourite of mine and is the home of some amazing resident artists as well as a busy forum that covers both 2D and 3D, digital and analogue artwork. It's a great place to see a lot of amazing work, get help and feedback.

4. www.juxtapoz.com - An interesting selection of works from modern artists. Always a lot going on and covers a good range styles. Covers launches and gallery shows.

5. www.plasticandplush.com - Like toys? Like character design? I love this site, it's an amazing source of fun inspiration.

6. www.eatpoo.com - One of my long standing favourites amongst the main art forums, because of the high standard of the artwork that gets posted here and the quality of the people that make up it's uses. Much more focused to 2D artwork than 3D.


There are a few more sites that should also get a mention just for being so cool or useful:

1. peaceloveandhappiness.org - A really great site 'free software for art, music and personal creativity'. You will find things like fonts and images in this site as well. Very useful!

2. www.morguefile.com - A great source of community generated hi-rez photography, most of which is free to download and use, as long as you check the licence for each image and credit where necessary.

3. www.pdf-mags.com - If you are stuck for something fresh to read, this is a great place to look - lists all the latest released PDF magazines. Very handy.

4. www.colourlovers.com - Sometimes the thing that I get stuck on is designing colour palettes and colourlovers is a site dedicated to just that - great colour palettes. Very useful, well worth a visit. An the palettes can be downloaded as a variety of formats including photoshop palette files.

5. www.tokyoplastic.com - This site has been around for a while and is just stunning. The best example of content = interface = brand that I have found.


Alan

Social Computing at Work

Roo Reynolds at IBM has the job title 'Metaverse Evangelist'. He's also very switched on about social media, networks and virtual worlds and on a recent post to his blog he has posted the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

Reading through these make a lot of sense and since I have had some rather dire, sensationalist junk (surface) mail over the past few weeks that is advocating draconian policing of (and even banning of access to) social networking in the work place, I think it is about time we tempered this approach with a little common sense. And that's what you'll find in the IBM guidelines. By the bucket load.

For any business organisation of any size, don't kid your selves, they are covnersations taking place on the internet about you. Your best approach should is to be an active, open and transparent part of these conversations and to use your educated and informed staff to do this. Ignoring the conversations is a lost opportunity to reach out to your customer base.

Social media used as an open channel to your customer base helps you to do something that I advocate as an essential element of any business communications strategy: be in your market the same way your customers are.

PH

Getting back to Second Life

I've more or less been away from Second Life for the past few months. This has been while I have focused on other things - new website, artwork, blogging and open source on the desktop.

My focus is now returning to virtual worlds and Second Life in particular.

Second Life has been getting a lot of press recently - some good, some bad. This is oddly familiar, and is a pretty common theme through-out the adoption cycles of social technologies. Think back to the first few years where the Internet and the World Wide Web became available - a lot of the same comments and condemnations where voiced then, but now we have adopted the technology and are extensive use of it through business, education and entertainment.

I fully expect to see the same from virtual worlds as a communications technology. A lot of people now understand why skype is such a good technology - multi channel (text, voice, video) personal communication, with the ability to conference call and exchange documents. Virtual worlds offer this interaction plus an interactive environment in which to hold the discussion.

Some press has been given to documenting criminal activities in Second Life. I can't deny that these elements are there, but at the same time I think it is also quite likely that there are criminals out there who are using mobile phones and sending emails, and the fact that they are will not prevent me from using either. Again, this is consistent with the adoption of the internet. The criminal elements need to be dealt with and we all need to see the technology for what it is, and not allow it to be tarnished by the actions of the few.

Second Life has uas reecently updated to include a couple of siginificant technology milestones: VOIP (Voice Over IP) and Webpage-as-texture. This may not sound that dramatic but they are of the final elements that I've been to glue your second life onto the rest of your internet communication strategy. What this also means is that in-world information can be managed and updated from outside, and this can be done using the tools that your content managers are already used to.

Second life is now able to become a serious content delivery channel, integrated with and displaying common content from your existing web presence.

PH

Going Open Source - Part 4: The Pale Heretic Way

To put it simply: I have found a solution for Linux on my Laptop that works for me.

An important fact about me (and therefore my approach to this) is that I'm not a systems administrator, but I do have 15 years experience working with computers as a designer, new-media developer and animator. I don't use Linux in my day-to-day work. I've just had enough of MS Windows (and never got on with Macs) and want an alternative. So what I need is something that works more-or-less from the point where it is installed and that my limited knowledge will allow me to cope with any things that I need to configure or fix.

The laptop I use (every day) is an HP DV2130ea.

Having left Ubuntu a few weeks ago when the new version decided to forget all about my hardware, I proceeded to try out a range of distributions, quite rapidly, to see if I could find one that managed to identify my hardware (critical requirement was it had to find and configure both my Intel WIFI and Nvidia Graphics Adapter). PCLinuxOS and Dream Linux both looked interesting but failed to work for me.

As part of this I discovered a very useful site: DistroWatch. A great site that lists most of (if not all) the available distributions and provides links to reviews, community sites and download locations. They also provide a hot-list of the most viewed distributions on their site – a good rough indicator of usage / popularity.

It was from this that I found OpenSUSE. A linux distribution funded and developed by Novell.

It got my interest from more-or-less the third screen of the installer, where it correctly identified my Wifi card and Graphics adapter and also managed to cope with the fact that my laptop has a widescreen display.

The rest of the installation was exactly what I had hoped it would be: uneventful.

OpenSUSE itself is easy to work with in the same sense that any of the Linux versions you choose to install are just about similar to MS Windows that you can find the application / control panel you need. The interface is clean and the pre-installed set of applications covers most things that you'd need, with a good range of applications available from the application installer with a minimum of fuss.

The list of applications that I'm running includes Open Office, Flock, Skype, Second Life, Blender, Thunderbird , Vmware, Remote Desktop.

The installations for all of these was relatively simple, as was creating menu icons for those that didn't do this themselves (seems to be a common thing in my experience).

Even the installation and configuration of VMWare Player wasn't too tricky and made much easier by a good walkthrough that can be found on the OpenSUSE website here.

So what I now have is a laptop that works, with the software I needed and so far (on the limited sample of 2 weeks) It's been reliable to the point where I can forget about it and just work. You can see samples of the graphics that I've produced below.

An that I guess was the biggest wrench – leaving the Adobe suite of applications behind. Despite their high cost, they are a great set of applications. What is encouraging is that the open source alternatives are very good and nearly offer all the required functionality.

A brief note to the GIMP community – can we have vector objects (multiple in one layer) and layer folders please, because these are the only things that I have missed having moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and that says something right there.

Right now, I'm on a train to meet a client, and I will be demoing some bespoke MS Windows applications in a VMWare virtual machine on this laptop. That's about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.

OpenSUSE has a new version 11 out in about 30 days. I'll let you know how the upgrade goes.

PH

Origins

People occasionally ask how I chose Pale Heretic as a company name.

A few years ago, close friends and I used to play the MMORPG Lineage 2. Now, this game is incredibly labour intensive and the amount of effort required to progress increases almost exponentially. This got so extreem that we all opted to start again, so we could re-experience the fun of being a new player, rather than the incessant grind of higher levels. Our first guild (a way of creating a team of players) had been called the Dark Apostles ... so I chose the Pale Heretics as the next generation. I've loved the name ever since, and when I sat down to name this company, I found a lot of synergies.

In Pale Heretic I wanted to create a company that could explore concepts that went against what industry dogma dictates (heresy is always defined by the dominant religion). The name also has impact, is memorable, the domains where available and as a name is almost entirely un-used.

Pale Heretic is a concept innovator, unorthodox, creative, independent. We are eagerly exploring the long tail of design and interaction.

Going Open Source - Part 3 update

I'm going to keep this short, because I want to go into the details in Part 4.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron proved impossible. No wireless and no graphics card driver was just enough of a problem to make it really annoying. A complete clean install didn't fix it so I decided to try some other distributions - www.dreamlinux.com.br : as slick as using a Mac, same wireless + graphics problems, www.pclinuxos.com :Even more problems. Then I tried openSUSE 10.3 www.opensuse.org Amazing stuff - everything worked first time. Wireless was working from installation onwards, NVidia make drivers for openSUSE specifically for my graphic card.

In the next part I'll run through my first week's experences, but so far? Wonderful!

Going Open Source - Part 3

I spoke too soon. I've found the first pot-hole on my road to open source nirvana.

Ubuntu release their linux distributions on a fairly regular basis. I was working with 7.10 'Gutsy Gibbon' and have just upgraded to 8.04 'Hardy Heron'.

I did this by hitting the friendly little button within the update manager that said something like 'there is a new version click here to upgrade'. How cool is that? Nice and easy, click, wait for the download, off we go.

Not.

Having got the files required for the upgrade downloaded, the updater failed to work. This was rapidly followed by it telling me I had something like 930 updates waiting to be installed. It also politely noted that there was something wrong, and so it wouldn't be able to install all the updates but I could do a partial update.

No.

Turns out the failed upgrade had left my laptop in a state where no updates could be installed. Some forum hunting later (on a handy Windows machine) and I discover that quite a few people have had this error in one form or another. By starting the update from the console I was able to understand that a circular dependency in the Audacity plugins libraries (one of the bits of audio editing software that comes included in Ubuntu Studio) was causing the updater to fail. OK. Un-install offending libraries at the command line and hey-presto the updater works perfectly. OK, so this isn't what I'm used to for what is the equivalent of installing what Microsoft Windows users know as 'service packs'.

Still, it's installed now right? Back to the happiness!

Nope.

It's installed all right, but that doesn't mean it's going to boot.

Boot into recovery mode, reset x-windows client. Laptop boots, moans that the login screen theme it was expecting to load is missing and thankfully shows me the login dialogue. Great. I'm in.

It turns out that the NVidia display drivers that are required to make reasonable use of the graphics hardware in my laptop don't work with 'Hardy Heron' despite working perfectly well.

The next step form here is fairly obvoius – download the updated version.

You guessed it, no.

Where did the wireless network go? I can see it in the network manager dialogue, I know the right values are in here so why isn't it working.... back to the forums and I find that there are a lot of posts about this. Apparently there is something up with the version of the hal (hardware abstraction layer) that means the network manager fails to work with a good range of common wireless cards.

Great.

Now please bear in mind that this is stuff that was working before the update. It also becomes apparent that this was a bug that had been picked up during the beta test stage. I also found that there is a work around. It basically involves winding the version of all the bits involved with with managing the wireless network and the HAL back to the versions from 'Gutsy Gibbon'. The process to to this I am piecing together from a number of forum posts and I'll let you know how it goes when I manage to get it to work. It's surprisingly hard to fix your network when it breaks, because the one thing that makes it really easy to fix the problem is having the network.

I guess, all in all I've spent about 3 hours so far to get from 'Ubuntu broke it' to potentially working, but it's going to have to wait until I can get to a cabled network line I can use to actually try this out (the download the files onto a USB memory stick version of the fix just didn't work).

I'm still trying to fix this. If anyone knows either how to make it work, or how / why this happened please post it here!

Going Open Source - Part 2

It's now been 3 weeks since my laptop munched it's hard disk and I took the (long overdue) opportunity to try and take all my studio functions onto an open source platform.

The install went well, most things worked with little or no tinkering.

Now we come to software. There is a set of software applications that I need to find open source alternatives to, because if I don't then I can't work.

My list of essentials is:

• Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Director and Dreamweaver, all by Adobe
• Blender, Open Office, Flock, Skype, Thunderbird and Second Life
• Some decent fonts

First let me say that the latter all come with Linux versions, Blender and Open Office are either pre-installed with my chosen distribution (Ubuntu Studio) or are available via the inbuilt application installer service. Easy. Worked first time. Apart from one annoying thing about blender in that it doesn't recognise my ALT key, so some of the key combinations don't work properly.

Originally I was planning to find a solution for the Blender / ALT key problem and post that in part 3, but thanks to Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org I now have an answer to this and a mostly working copy of Photoshop.

For the ALT key problem: Go to System >> Preferences >> Windows, and under Movement Key, pick "Super (Windows Key)" instead of "Alt". Worked perfectly for me.

Flock and the Second Life client are both worth noting in that whilst they were both very easy to download and install, the hardest part (ironically) is the process for making a desktop icon for each application. This involves writing a short text file in the following format:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Second Life
Comment=Second Life Linux Client
Exec="/home/alan/secondlife/secondlife"
Icon=/home/alan/secondlife/res-sdl/ll_icon.BMP
Path=$HOME/secondlife
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Second Life

This example is taken from my Second Life desktop icon, but the format is the same for any. The file itself needs to be saved in the root of your home area and needs to be named appname.desktop where appname is replaced by the name of your chosen application. I'd be very interested to hear if someone knows of an easier / point and click way of doing this?

Finding replacements for the assortment of Adobe software that I use has been a trickier task, compounded by the fact that some of the technologies are proprietry and won't be available from anyone else. My experience of finding replacements is something like this:

Photoshop: this is the hardest one of the bunch and also the tool that I use the most. There are a number of packages out there that give up to about 70% of the features available from Photoshop. Gimp and Xara Extreme are both high on my list, and Paint.NET looks to be very promising if I can get it to work (no success yet).

Again I need to credit Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org for pointing me to their Wiki page on running Adobe Photoshop under Wine. Which after a complete removal and reinstall of Wine, worked perfectly apart from two things. First, I'm installing from Creative Suite which includes all the Adobe software and comes on 5 CDs. Problem is that the installer fails to recognise when you change from disk 1 to the next disk. Thankfully, Photoshop is on disk 1. The second problem is that the Activation and the Updater both fail. The activator throws an error exclaiming “not enough disk space available to run this program” and promptly closes, but leaves Photoshop running, and the updater just sits there and does nothing. Neither are exactly catastrophic problems – the software works just fine.

I'm still going to try and get Paint.NET working though. If there is an option to use native Linux, opensource alternatives then that's my preferred solution.

Illustrator: Inkscape pretty much has this one covered. It's fairly easy to use and is similar enough that finding the equivalent tools in the software is not too much of a problem. This piece of software came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Indesign: Scribus is on first glance (and I haven't made much use of it yet - just a simple A5 flyer layout) a good replacement for indesign. Again, this application came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Flash: To be honest, Flash is what it is and I wouldn't attempt to find an alternative. Flash 8 installs fine under Wine. Works exactly as you would expect. Installing Wine is very easy, as it can be found in the application installer service.

Director: I use director for a lot of CD-ROM based materials and a fair amount of legacy stuff. The installer worked fine, but I haven't yet managed to get the application to start. I'll update on my progress in Part 3.

Dreamweaver: There is an alternative – Quanta Plus. It's available via the application installer service. This one isn't as good a fit as the other alternatives. Whilst it has a good functionality and includes templates, site management and all the usual stuff, inluding an in-window preview render of the page, that preview is not editable. Personally speaking, I use dreamweaver because of the ability to chop between editing direct into the rendered representation of the page and the underlying code at will. This is why Quanta Plus doesn't work for me. Not because it's a bad piece of software, but because it isn't a fit for the way I want to work. This is also compounded by the fact that Dreamweaver 8 installs and works perfectly under Wine. So for web page work, I know which one I'm choosing.

BUT (and this goes for any of these applications) if anyone has a recommendation for any alternative applications, or ways to make things work then please post them here and I'll follow up on them in Part 3.

And I suppose it's worth making a point about that too: there will be a part 3. I've been using Ubuntu Studio for 3 weeks now. It's not perfect. I still spend time sorting things out. Making odd things work that really, just ought to work. I have yet to finish with printers, fonts, laptop mode and drivers for things like my MP3 player and Wacom tablet. But despite this, there is a very solid alternative to anything by Microsoft and I have no desire to go back.

Pale

Going Open Source - Part 1

For a few months now I have had the idea that I would force myself to spend some time and see if it was yet possible to replace all my software with open source equivalents and get to a state where I could work as I normally would. Now, I've had this idea for a while but never quite managed to get round to it.

Then my hard disk on my laptop decided to crash the heads on the disk right into all the files that it needs to start Windows. OK then. Faced with the choice of reinstalling Windows, and the opportunity to try something else, I seized the moment.

To make sure that I can actually work, though, I am allowing myself a get out clause: I can use MS Windows software, but on the condition that I can get it running on my Linux installation (and not in a virtual machine either).

Next comes the choice of which of many flavours of the Linux distribution to use. This is a hard choice: there are a lot of good distributions now which provide for easy installation and a good user experience.

I have some experience with Ubuntu Linux distributions (I have my backup service running at home on an old PC with a lot of disk space under Ubuntu) and was interested to see that they now have Ubuntu Studio – a distribution aimed at creatives and packed with graphics, audio and video tools.

The download of 800MB went smoothly, as did burning the image onto a DVD-R.

I assumed that this wasn't going to go smoothly. I thought that this was going to take more than one go. I guessed that I would end up with a mostly working laptop but things like graphics drivers, remote control, web cam, maybe even audio would not be working right.

I'm amazed to say, 2 days after doing the install, that everything works. And more-or-less from the moment it's installed.

Now, there are a few differences between a Linux install and a Windows install that a habitual Windows user (that would be me) will find interesting.

First and foremost, you don't have to answer 40 or so questions to get the install completed. I went with the defaults and opted to configure the network elements later. All went smoothly first time.

Secondly, because of the wealth of open source software available for Linux, the operating system comes with its own application install manager that already knows about a large proportion of the software (and drivers) that are available and can just go ahead and install it for you.

My wireless network card was automatically identified and installed, and my NVidia graphics card was identified and 'safe' drivers used. All I had to do was ask the application installer to add the drivers for my graphics card, and hey presto, one re-boot later, working graphics.

Audio needed no attention and worked straight away.

Then it came down to applications. Ubuntu studio comes with a huge amount of software: 3D modelling and animation, 2D graphics, print document layout, audio and video editing to name just some of the things that are catered for.

My problem is that I love Dreamweaver. And what I am still struggling with (and will take any recommendations for) is a Linux native web page design tool with a good interface and site management and ftp tools built in. This is where my get out clause comes into effect: until I find an alternative I want to use Dreamweaver.

Windows software on a Linux OS? Yes, with the help of a compatibility library called Wine. This is available via the application installer and allows Windows software to be run under Linux. Essentially, you just run the installer from a terminal window, and the application installs, icons appear in your application menu and it just works. Amazing huh?

So, where I am right now is writing this, in Open office Writer, I have Flock, Second Life, Thunderbird, Skype, MS Remote Desktop client and Dreamweaver all installed and working.

The most important thing for me is to find a good graphics package that is as close as possible to the way Adobe Photoshop works. Photoshop is probably the main tool that I use because of it's versatility. Then I need to sort out fonts and printers. To find out what happens, watch the Pale Heretic site or blog for part 2.

Pale

Let the product speak

I recently took a look at the websites for two 'super cars'. One is the Audi R8.The other the Koenigsegg CCX. I'm not sure that I saw what I expected, or experienced what I was supposed to.
But a quick word about the cars – they couldn't be more different.

The Koenigsegg is the baby of a Swedish man (Christian von Koenigsegg) who got bored with the import industry and decided that what he really wanted to do was build a sports car. So he did. The first version of which boastes some 650 + bhp and a staggering top speed of 230+ mph. Later version have taken the power output up to 980bhp and untested top speeds. Possibly urban legend, but this car holds the record for the fastest speeding ticket ever given, at 243mph. The car has some real lateral thinking about it, from the way the doors work to the way that the cylinder block of the engine is a rigid, reinforcing component of the chassis.

The Audi is different. Developed from the Le Mans super car then tuned down to something for the top end of the domestic market, it is a design that whilst holding true to the Audi brand style, looks at least as good as the Koenigsegg. The performance, whilst not being quite as extreme is to 200+ mph and given that if doesn't carry the £600K + price of the Koenigsegg this seems like a fair trade off. The Audi is the technological marvel you would expect, from the engine to the aluminium space frame chassis.

This is where something strikes me as funny about the marketing and the way the websites are done.

The Audi micro-site for this model is amazing. The level of interaction and just plain cool it provides is very high and it allows easy access to lots of information about the car.

The Koenigsegg website is not as advanced, showing you information in a common, tested and slightly old fashioned format.

The difference is that with the Koenigsegg website, I found I was looking at the car, and with the Audi site, I was too busy playing with the cool interactions. The upshot of this is that I was left feeling like the koenigsegg was a more honest website with less about the marketing message itself and more about the product in it's own right.

The message I took away from this? Something that echoes an odd request from a client a few years ago who asked us to design them a marketing powerpoint that looked like they had done it themselves. Don't make the website cooler than the product it's trying to sell... and too much glitz and gloss just makes the message look untrustworthy...it's all about balance.

Pale

Blogvertising

Last week I did an internal awareness session on the (mis)use of Social medial to deliver brand/product advocacy and advertising messages. The concept that companies may be crowd sourcing the writing of this kind of copy into blogs, forums and other social networks – including those that aren't your own - was met with some scepticism and a (healthy) amount of disdain. Then I happened to buy a copy of the February 2008 edition of Wired magazine and found an article by and about someone who does exactly this: is paid by advertisers to blog (positively) about products and services. You can find it on page 58 entitled ' Hawker Media: Advertisers paid me to blog about them. Is that so wrong?' See. Told ya!

Pale

The narrative of now

Whilst a colleague and I spent 3 hours on a tube journey to and from a client meeting that never was (that's a whole other story on why you should virtualise project meetings...), we got into a discussion about car based games, and specifically about licensed vehicles.

It's fairly standard practice that if you make a car based computer or console game, and want to use a real-world car you must pay a significant (tens of thousands of pounds) licensing cost to be able to reproduce the shape and detail of the car and the brand identity of it and it's maker. This practice is understandable from a brand control point of view – you don't want your car brand associated with a game that's going to give you negative publicity. It's common practice for the can manufacturers to insist that no damage is shown on their vehicles, regardless of how they are driven , so that they always appear in pristine showroom condition.

A side effect of this is that it effectively shuts the smaller developers out of a this sector of the market for one simple reason: games that don't have licensed real-world cars just don't sell anywhere near as well. There are a few notable examples of this, the Burnout series being one.
This led the conversation to the obvious next question: Why does it matter is the cars are copies of real world ones?

My opinion is that society and the media does a very successful job of fostering materialistic desire for unobtainable things in most people. For example, I would dearly love to own a Ford GT. I know this will never happen – they only made a hand-full of them and even if I did have the money, I know there is a long list of more rational and immediate things that the money would be spent on.

As I've mentioned, I play games. One of them being Test Drive Unlimited by Atari. It's a driving game with some really unique elements, but the relevant fact it that one of the cars that a player can save hard-won in-game cash for is the Ford GT. When I eventually had enough cash I bought the car and it was a great pleasure to own and drive.

The question again is: Why?

My theory is that this all comes back to something that is innate to all of us, since a large amount of our communication is based upon it: stories.

From the way I describe to you now, what happened on the tube train yesterday, to how I might explain the fall of the Roman Empire or how an alpha channel on the surface of a nerve cell contributes to that nerve firing, each is encapsulated in its own story, described from the 3rd person.

This brings me to immersion and player emotional investment in games and social environments like Second Life. I'm invested in my virtual Ford GT, on it's virtual island of Hawaii. I worked hard to earn the cash, it's a wonderful design and it out performs a lot of the other virtual cars in it's class. It satisfies the desire for the unobtainable, and is a significant milestone on the story of my experience in an environment that, lets face it, isn't real. But I do have to say when talking to someone who plays the same game, the discussion about what's in our virtual garages is exactly the same as if everything where real. We project ourselves into the virtual, willingly adopting the parts we play in the game, comparing our progress, our status in an imaginary world.
I find it very interesting how easily people settle into a text based social environment. Just looking round at the people I see working, tools like Skype have gone from being relatively rare a couple of years ago to be on the majority of desktops now. Then there's SMS.

When conversing in these types of environments, we begin to insert narrative elements where they are missing to complete the experience. LOL is a prefect example. I may have laughed out loud, or just thought it, but in the shared narrative of the conversation, from your point of view, I laughed. This evolved from early text chat users adding in descriptive elements to replace the missing visual and tonal cues about their emotional state whilst chatting. These then where reduced to acronyms for ease of typing.

This becomes more apparent in visually represented worlds like Second Life or MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People having conversations in it find that the conversation becomes more and more embellished with narrative detail, echoed by the animated gestures of the avatars. This isn't just the stuff to provide the missing social cues, but additional narrative. This all leads towards better immersion, more emotional investment, a better conversation and the people in that conversation retaining more of it for longer.

These are the stories of now. Narratives communally written about what is being discussed right now. Adapting to changes of focus and projecting the emotional state of the co-authors.

I think that these stories exist and work because they are presented in textual form. The medium naturally encourages the reader to use their imagination as they read each line. But here comes VOIP – Voice over IP ... a relatively new technology being deployed to allow users to chat using microphone and speakers to hear the voices of the people they are conversing with.
This has two effects. Firstly, making it harder to break the bond with reality and become immersed in the world with which you art interacting (finding out that the eight foot tall Orc you have been adventuring with has the voice of a twelve year old American kid, doesn't help the suspension of disbelief). Secondly it adds back in all the social cues that have been missing in the typed conversations, making for a more genuine social experience.

There are other considerations in this that I won't explore here ... one is the ability of people using text based chat to hold a number of parallel conversations, often with a number of people in each conversation. The fact that the communication is typed text allows this to happen. I also read a something on a blog recently that was saying that people using a virtual environment like Second Life, and VOIP so that they could hear each other talking, found that they got a better sense of being somewhere together than using web cams with VOIP to have a video conference.

Text chat will I think continue for quite some time alongside technologies like VOIP – it offers too many features that are not available with spoken communication. Just as it suffers from the things that are missing, but I think we are very good at finding ways to fill the gaps and immerse ourselves in the virtual environments we use.

Pale

The magic first half-hour

Over the years I have spent quite a bit of time (probably a little too much) playing computer games of one type or another. The experiences from them vary widely, but there is one common element that in my view either makes or breaks that experience and will set a lot of the tone for the next 100 hours.

'The magic first hour' is the experience of how a new game – a new world – caters for your arrival, manages the suspension of disbelief at the same time as explaining to you exactly what it is you are supposed to be doing.... and does this in a way that makes you want to continue.
Car race games don't need to make a great fuss about mechanics and controls at this point and have the freedom to focus on backstory and plot. Fantasy games and MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games) in particular have a much more complex player interaction as well as (usually) a deeper and more convoluted story. It is this type of game that offers us some of the best examples of how to bring a new user to an environment that can be difficult to master.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of a good strategy for doing this. They player starts and makes as few permanent choices as possible and well placed in-game pointers and pop-up help continually adds new information and help for the player. As the player progresses, in-game characters reveal more information, choices and instructions. This ensures that the player starts with a relatively small amount information that they need to retain, and that this is expanded in line with their growing experience of the game. Both the plot and the geographical area that the player is exposed to grow in the same manner.

It's the start of this learning period that I'm calling the magic first half-hour.

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of the number of free-to-play MMORPGs that are available, and I have played a number of them. Some follow a model similar to WoW an lead the player in, carefully expanding their knowledge and experience, helping at every stage. Some however don't. It's all to common a sensation to be dropped into game, with little clue how to use the game or what to do first. It's these games that I don't go back to and are right on the top of my 'things to un-install' list.

The message I think is true beyond just games - either progressively help the new user or risk losing them very quickly, regardless of how good your product actually is. If they don't feel supported and don't engage with it, they won't use it.

I also think that the actual duration and format of this exchange varies. For a web site, the duration is down to below a minute. The exchange is subliminal – a good, well presented design makes it apparent which elements of the site are navigational, or projects the right air of intrigue that the user will feel encouraged to explore the interface to find the content and navigation for themselves.
When first starting to use a new application or device such as mobile phone or mp3 player, the interface is critical to your comprehension of how to use it. For the majority of users of this type of technology (ones that have used something similar before) a well designed product should be intuitive. And these days it's pretty well true – use one mobile phone you can use them all, some fairly minor trial-and-error. But think back 10 years to how easy it wasn't to set the timer on your VHS recorder.

I'd also apply this to things like Second Life, which does a reasonable job of starting you on the path to learning how to use the interface, how to interact with the world itself and your avatar and how to communicate. Having introduced this technology 20 or so people in the last couple of months, they almost all agree that what happens next is the problem. You complete your training, know how to go places and chat with people and are dropped off in-world with little guidance of what to do next. It's an experience a bit like showing someone who has never seen the World Wide Web before and and sitting them in front of a web browser and saying “here you are .... go explore”.Providing starting points would be a great idea.

The same is true for visiting some new locations in Second Life. Bad design leaves me feeling unsure as to where I'm supposed to go, where my introduction is, what I should expect and what this place is all about. The next thing that usually happens is I move on and explore somewhere else – the poor arrival negates my desire to explore: if the start is uninspiring will the rest be any different?
Don't forget the new user experience. I've worked on a lot of projects where the induction for new users is one of the last elements to be added in – often because it relies on the finalisation of all the other elements. The key is not to rush this, to think about the range of your target audience and how to lead them into the experience you have crafted for them, in a way that they will readily understand.

Pale

Why put your business into Second Life?

Second life, the internet virtual world operated by Linden Labs, has enjoyed growing exposure in the press over the last year, every week I seem to read either a book review or an article on it. This is reflected in the continued growth in the number of people registering a Second Life account - now numbering over 11 million, with a minimum of 35 thousand of them logged in at any given point in time.

So what is Second Life? It's official website is at http://www.secondlife.com . Second Life is a virtual world whose content created by the people who use it. Every building, object, item of clothing ... when Second Life launched it was a blank rolling countryside. It is now populated by all manner of buildings and creations from offices to shops, space stations to beaches. The thing that makes Second Life unique is it's approach to copyright: the users who create an object, what ever it is, retain ownership and copyright of that object, and can sell their object to other users for currency that can be easily converted into US$. The same is true for the land itself: it can be bought, owned and resold by the users – Second Life has it's own property market.

Driven but this built-in concept of user ownership, Second Life has an expanding economy and over US$ 1.2 million changes hands every day. I have recently read that the economy in Second Life has been estimated to be worth US$1 billion.

The world is displayed in 3D on your computer using a viewer application that is available free from Second Life's makers, Linden Labs. Registering an account to use the world is also free, although features like land ownership require a higher level of account that has a subscription fee.
Second Life offers a lot of the features that you would expect to find in any real time communications tool – text based chat tools, in-built VOIP (Voice Over IP – essentially the ability to talk and be heard over the internet), user profiles, the ability to exchange landmarks (like bookmarks, but pointing to a specific place in the virtual world) and comprehensive search tools.
Having said that, a business starting up in second life should not expect to immediately find a new revenue stream. The biggest benefits of virtual world technologies is as part of the social networking mix and they present and opportunity for a business to communicate with it's existing and potential customers in a new way that offers an experience that is not readily offered elsewhere. Your business can also benefit from the increased exposure and marketing that you base around your new adoption of this technology.

Translating your business and your brand for use in a virtual world may need some adjustments to the kind of voice you use. In the same way that writing for a printed publication differs from writing for a website, the content that you choose for use in Second Life must be adapted to suit the way it is going to be presented.

One key concept to remember, and this is something that was missed by some of the first businesses entering Second Life, is that having a Second Life office is not the same as having a website. Websites are a part of the communications mix that is still very much a solitary, user driven experience. As a representative of your business, you probably have no current data about how many visitors are viewing your website right now, or a mechanism where you can start a conversation with them.

Virtual worlds offer a more social way to browse information and to share the experience, both with a representative of your business and with other customers. Offices in Second Life are much the same as real world offices in this respect – they benefit from being staffed. It is also worth noting that there is a difference in the way that people will interact with your virtual office compared to your website. It is well documented that a new visitor to a website will remain for only a very short period of time (less than a minute) and will be unlikely to explore any links from that page if they don't quickly see something that sparks their interest. People visiting locations in Second Life tend to spend longer exploring, especially if the location has been well designed, and tend to retain more of the experience.

So what should I actually use Second Life for? Second Life is a tool for communication, collaboration and shared exploration. Uses include:

• as a venue for conferences, seminars and meetings where the participants are geographically separated
• as demonstration environment for collaboratively exploring 3D mock-ups (for example, taking a client through a replica of the show apartment in a new development)
• as gallery and exhibition spaces that offer a similar experience to their real world counterparts
• as explorative spaces (for example a fitted kitchen company could use the space to offer a try before you buy experience for it's customers and allow them the ability to switch units and groups around to see which options the prefer).

Are there any other worlds? The future seems bright for virtual worlds when you consider the total number that are in use every day. When you include all the games, like World of Warcraft, that are being played (essentially themed virtual worlds) the the total number of registered users is in the 100s of millions. Soon to launch for Sony's Playstation 3 is Home. A social networking environment designed for players to meet, interact, share experience and start on-line games together. So far, however Second Life is the only world to offer user generated content and content ownership.

Second Life is not a replacement for your website. It is a key part of your communications mix, in the same way that email newsletters and using myspace.com are both valuable channels for reaching clients. Second life also provides a unique user experience which can be tailored to carry your brand and your message which can be reinforced by direct interaction.

Pale