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
Monday 19 May 2008
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
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
Wednesday 14 May 2008
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
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
Sunday 4 May 2008
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.
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.
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