Octavianworld

A Second (Life) Gold Rush

Things are booming.  Nearly US$5M exchanged in January, up from  US$235k in October 2005.

With the data provided by Linden Labs linked from here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/09/state-of-the-virtual-world
-%E2%80%93-key-metrics-january-2007/

(The comments on this post are interesting, BTW)

I plotted this:

Short version:  Since October 2005, 40x more folks,  each spending 1/6 the hours, but exchanging 3x more  money per hour.

Postscript:  of course averages lie.  There are sure to be massive concentrations in spending, both in terms of who is buying (big businesses experimenting) and what is being bought (land, skins).   And these concentrations could be hints of a speculative bubble that will pop at some point, just like they do in the real world.  After all, what if big businesses buy islands and no one visits them?  They're unlikely to invest further, at least in the short term.  And what if users buy cool outfits, and still can't make friends?  Maybe they cash in those Linden dollars, buy some Ben & Jerry's, and crawl back to real world Saturday nights watching Love Boat reruns.  At least, until a Dale Carnegie for the 21st century emerges to help us with our virtual world social skills.

Perhaps in upcoming releases of such data, LL could include some of these "who's buying what" stats?  Won't be long I'm sure until we see firms cropping up that do all sorts of analysis on the SL economy.  (Related issue:  if economics is "the dismal science" in the real world, is it any cooler in virtual worlds?)

Graphic Friendships, Part III: The OpenACS "Collaboration Graph"

Gustaf Neumann, who teaches computer science at Vienna University,  has been a very important contributor and innovator in the OpenACS/ .LRN community in the past several years.  Recently he  has authored a very powerful wiki module, built with the OpenACS toolkit.  More recently he's integrated some other tools to deploy a  "Collaboration Graph" page he's published on the xoWiki instance running at openacs.org.  The tool graphs co-authoring relationships for wiki pages among OpenACS community members.  Here is an example that plots co-authoring relationships for my friend Caroline Meeks, and here is Gustaf's introduction on the OpenACS forums.

Twying out Twitter

With encouragement from my friend Perry Hewitt, I've been fooling around with Twitter to get a better sense for what all the fuss is about.  Conclusion:  it's a service that provides an asynchronous chat room for group interaction via SMS, and this has its place and time.

You Heard It Here First: "SGM"

From the Weak-Attempt-at-Punditry-Department, here's an attempt to coin a term for hot new theme to track:  "Subject-Generated-Media", or "SGM" for short.  It's inspired by Red Sox ace pitcher Curt Schilling's blog, 38pitches.com, which is simply brilliant.  I've learned more about pitching reading Curt's posts than I picked up in the past 30 years of being a fan.  Curt is a terrific writer, and he brings out the best in his friends, too.  For example, here's a recent comment on this post, by former Sox Kevin Millar, whom Curt fanned quickly in a recent spring training game:

Well I must say that Curt is right on with the curve ball talk.I have been ragging on his curve ball for a few years and today he called my bluff.

1st ab he shook 3 times and I had a feeling he was shaking to the curve ball but still didnt have the balls to sit 1st pitch curve ball on Schilling. Then, I did call time out, telling Tek “What the hell is Schill doing shaking to the curve ball?”, and bam! sure enough here came this hanging curve ball (Curt: I beg to differ, the first one wasn’t hanging) I watched for strike 1, and couldnt pull the trigger. Then schill came back with another (Curt: which I did hang) whiched I pulled foul (Curt: into the vendor selling lemonade, which for anyone sitting along the 3rd base dugout knows is no surprise, Kevin hooking a pitch foul) and yes he threw the 3rd one in a row which I layed off.

I then had a feeling he was going to throw all curve balls to me, as pedro martinez did to me the 1st time I faced him last year and i struck out on 4 in a row. But Schill caught me guessing and struck me out with a heater in.

So all the trash talking I did to him and all the text messages I ragged him with, he got me and I couldnt look at him after the AB, even though i wanted to laugh

Kevin (Curt: I can hook a fastball better than anyone but Sheffield) Millar

Bazaarvoice Reviews: Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example

A lot of marketers these days are asking themselves how they can take advantage of "consumer-generated media" ("CGM").  The knee-jerk association for the term is with bboards, and more recently blogs and wikis.  I've suggested in the past that providing such "unstructured" publishing vehicles as a starting point for productive interactions online is often not very helpful.  A more sophisticated approach offers means of contribution where what they're for and how to use them (both to contribute and consume information) are more self-evident.

Friendspammed

After a year of dormancy during which "Tom" has been my only friend on my MySpace page (set up to check out the service), I added a link to Octavianworld.  Stunned by its genius, three of the 163 million reported MySpace members sent me friend requests in the last two days. 

The Sound And The Fury: 2006 US Ad Spending, By The Numbers

Just came across this summary of 2006 US ad spending from TNS Media.  It's striking that despite all the talk about online advertising's growth, Spot TV still outgrew it on an absolute basis, and TV as a whole is still outgrowing overall ad spending as a whole by 25% (5% vs. 4%, led by Spot and by the growth of Spanish language advertising). 

Advertising on the web is great, but having seen services like Spot Runner and Visible World, and related vertical efforts, TV may not be dead for a while.  Of course, as content from each begins to flow to each, and with mobile to spice things up further, perhaps the category definitions are becoming less useful anyway. 

This is a rear-view perspective.  While 2006 may have been the year of online video on the conference circuit, the ad models for this medium haven't yet been really worked out (though there are some interesting ideas out there), and both advertisers and media players are still "organizing for digital"  buying and selling.  So I'd expect the shifts everybody's been hyping to accelerate somewhat this year.

Of course, this is one summary, among many that might report the numbers differently, and it would be interesting to compare them to each other, and with what the leading prognosticators have been saying...

Grokking Yahoo Answers 2.0

"Yahoo! Answers Adds Social Networking", writes Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal (nice demo video from the Yahoo! Answers team included).  With everyone trying to build an online community to grow these days, what to make of Yahoo's latest gambit?

SMS: Simplicity Makes Sense

Last week I attended a MITX panel discussion, "What's Now in Mobile: The Capability of Today's Wireless World".

It's the best of times and worst of times in mobile marketing.  We're at the front end of an "amazing" new age of capabilities, with video, location-based services, and so much more.  At the same time, the ecosystem's development is hindered, as Nellymoser founder John Puterbaugh put it (referring specifically to mobile video), by "dozens of content formats, hundreds of [differently-configured] networks, and thousands of phone types."

Before the presentations I had a chance to talk with Toshi Uchida, a director at Fidelity's e-business Wireless Group.  Toshi's comments before and during the talk, emphasizing simplicity as crucial to application development in this medium, provided a useful counterpoint to the  hype about mobile.  Among the insights: 

• "aftermarket" application installations on pc's are hard enough for most people; on mobile devices they're well-nigh impossible today, even on a relatively powerful device like my BlackBerry 8700.  (I've added Google Maps and the Gmail client, but browsing web pages is so slow and visually painful that I don't readily experiment as much in this medium as I'd like to.)
• unless they are highly-motivated power users, like traders, most people just will not deal with complexity in mobile application interfaces. The mobile context is just too crowded with other stimuli, time-constrained, size-constrained, and "semi-conscious" to accomodate anything higher than a brain-stem -level assumption about user focus.

This has left me wondering a lot lately about SMS and how to take better advantage of it, since everyone has the capability these days on their phones, unlimited-use plans are now cheap and getting cheaper, and it's really easy to use.  Although Pew reported last year that more than a third of US cell phone users use SMS, very few people I know seem to take advantage of SMS as a service interface, such as Google's (46645), or this impressive array offered by Bankinter in Spain. 

Looking at Bankinter's services, it occurred to me -- when was the last time I saw an SMS cheat sheet posted by a vendor in a public place?  Maybe the answer is to introduce user guides into print advertising, or billboards?  Where's the laminated, business-card-sized, double-sided helper for my wallet?  And, for vendors with whom I have an account, perhaps a refund or partial subsidy (in the spirit of pre-paid postage on business-reply envelopes) of any SMS charges I do incur in using those services?

Related:  this excellent article by Sim Simeonov on the mobile tech stack.

Mindblowing

A couple of years ago I listened to this IT Conversations podcast of an interview with the Dutch artist Theo Jansen on the subject of his "Strandbeest" project.  Unseen it was fascinating enough, but the films of his creatures are truly (and you'll pardon the pun once you've seen them) mind-blowing.  What's particularly interesting to me is that this project is implemented as a collection of real physical artifacts, not simply computer simulations.  I find particularly romantic the notion of "releasing" herds of these creatures on the beaches of northern Europe, to roam freely until solar radiation eventually destroys their plastic-tube skeletons and ends their lives.

I'm posting now, and sort-of off topic vs. the usual subjects here, simply because I find myself telling folks about this over and over about it, but not always remembering the artist's name or the name of his creation.  So, sorry to webbier friends if this is an "echo" in your aggregators, but if you haven't seen it, it's a must.

Clouded Vision

My new colleague Steven Forth, who is CTO of eMonitor (the content technology arm of Monitor Group) referred me last night to Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home), which is a social data visualization and interpretation service developed by the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group at IBM's Watson Research Center.   As the intersection of social software and content analysis is currently a high-priority professional interest, I decided to try it out. 

Among other visualization approaches to structured data sets, Many Eyes generates tag clouds from free text files.  Steven noted that in particular, the two-word view seems like a very powerful 80-20 cut at inferring predominant meaning in a body of text. 

I experimented by exporting the contents of this blog as a text file, progressively scrubbing useless Typepad artifact words and html tags that appear frequently (like "title", "breaks", "comments", and my name) out of the source file -- to do this I simply ran "edit/replace/'word', '[]'" in Windows Notepad  -- and then publishing the file on Many Eyes.  Here's the result (click on the image to manipulate the cloud on Many Eyes):

The two-word view does a pretty decent job of communicating the themes I write about, I think.  Unintended side benefit:  highlights recurring cliches and verbal tics I need to purge from my writing, like "drive higher" (argh).

This whole effort took about 30 minutes, from registration to pasting the syndication html into this post.  Two-thirds of that time was spent scrubbing the data iteratively.  This could have gone faster in one of two ways.  First, Many Eyes could provide a custom scrubbing interface where I could register multiple words to be eliminated or replaced from a text file.  Second, and better, they could allow users to share not only comments, but scrubbing filters that would be applicable to data sets coming from common sources with common problems, such as Typepad exports, or government information.

Beyond this, I can imagine a thematic matching capability -- "based on two-word 'keyphrase' frequencies, this data set seems to have lots in common with these other ones..."  Such a capability could be further enhanced by ex-post user rating,  so people could confirm whether, for any given algorithmically-suggested match, the result was actually good, a la "was this useful to you?"  This, like the "Graphic Friendships" idea I wrote about a while back, could help to make the web browsing experience more productive.

Nice job guys!