Chapter 42

Google Unplugs Lively as Hype Fades Over Virtual Worlds

Although Google’s entry into Second Life’s market gave many of us .edu-dev-type people the sense that maybe there WAS something to this virtual worlds thing, it looks like that was a short-lived experiment.  From a Reuters article cited in the above:

It’s hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life’s hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let’s not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my “beat,” I’d get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I’d right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

Although I’ve expressed my skepticism about virtual worlds in higher ed before, I do feel sorry for those colleges out there that can’t afford to redesign their viewbooks this year because their budget is tied up in the maintenance of a Second Life island.

Tags: overvalued 1980s technology, second life, virtual worlds

… is Pixlr.  And despite the silly Web 2.0 name (what is it with these people?), based on a quick review it seems impressive.  Of course, those of us who depend on Photoshop are likely to be so deeply ingrained in the basic workings of PS that it would be torture to change; in my review of Pixlr I realized that I don’t know how to fill a selection without keyboard shortcuts.  But I can see a lot of ways it might come in handy… say, you can’t connect to the internet on your laptop, and have to make a quick change to a JPG comp from someone else’s computer before a meeting.  Who knows?  But it’s neat. Via 37signals.

Tags: change

From the archives of Tales from Redesignland, one of Tonya’s favorite blogs:

The fact is, we aren’t claiming that LiveWhale does everything— that’s part of the point.  It does what its users need it to do.  

But maybe its successor, EpicWhale™, will make all other communication obsolete.

UPDATE: I don’t use Twitter enough to get the Fail Whale when it’s overloaded.  Now the comic makes much more sense!

Tags: comics, livewhale, the internets

To briefly digress from higher ed web development:

I’m getting married in a week.  (Thanks, I’m excited too!)  We have to get wedding insurance— something I’d never heard of— for our weekend-long wedding in the wilds of northern California.

Here is the list of exclusions in our policy:

Exclusions: Claims by Athletic Participants, War, Terrorism, Expected or Intended Injury, Sexual Abuse/Molestation, Asbestos, Nuclear Energy, Total Pollution, Fungi or Bacteria, Aircraft or Watercraft, Pyrotechnics, Employment Related Practices, Communicable Disease (Hepatitis, TSE, HIV, HTLV, or AIDS) Collapse of Temporary Structure, Lead Liability, Professional Liability, Use of Trampolines, Cheerleading Pyramids, Sale/Manufacture/Distribution of Athletic Equipment, Use of Saunas or Tanning Devices, Polo, Skin & Scuba Diving, Squash, Downhill Snow Skiing, Water Skiing, Whitewater Rafting, Bungee Jumping, Mountain Climbing, Rock Climbing, Motorsports, Rodeo or any Equestrian Related Sports, Waterslides, Ballooning, Parachute Jumping, Luge, Tobogganing, Gymnastics, All Motor Sports, Violation of Telephone Consumer Protection Act or CAN-SPAM Act.

How can we be expected to have any fun at all if we can’t play squash or violate the CAN-SPAM act?

Continue Reading »

Tags: asbestos, cheerleading pyramids, collapse of temporary structures, pyrotechnics, trampolines, waterslides

A post on the NY Times Bits blog points out that there are only so many social networking services any one person can keep up with on any given day.  I know this is certainly true in my case.  I’m always talking to clients about the relative importance of Web 2.0 and social networking tools to their higher-education concerns, but the fact is that I can barely keep our own blog updated, let alone check in on my Facebook page or remember to post chatty musings to Twitter.

Who are these people who maintain accounts with Tumblr, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Mixxd, and CrowdVine— what do they do all day?  How do they get any work done?  

(OK, I made up Mixxd. But I think the others are real.)

Update: Tony from CrowdVine comments that CV’s network is transient— used primarily during conferences for attendees to let each other know which sessions are “hot.”  That’s a good point— it’s easy to understand how transient, explicitly function-oriented tools can be useful, and if CrowdVine’s efforts really are directed at serving temporary social networks like conferences, I wish them well.  It’s a good idea.

Tags: social networking, tech overload, web 2.0

Because we’re building a CMS, I am on the mailing lists of several CMS service providers, and quite often receive email from these companies.  Usually the messages I get are pretty marketing-heavy, kind of spammy, easily ignored.  But I just got this from Hobson’s:

I have heard from several past clients that Hobson’s doesn’t offer much in the way of customer service—  they seem to be a company that earns its money by buying up any higher-ed-related tool with market share and repackaging it as part of a “platform.”  Judging from this email—which, as you can see, showed up in my inbox with no content whatsoever, and a reply-to link to the mysterious “myvippage.net”— they put about as much thought and work into email marketing as they do into innovation and technology.

Tags: email, marketing, the dark side of the force

So I started this tradition in my adult life where I celebrate my birthday every year by purchasing a quasi-expensive item that resides on my mental wishlist. Sure, maybe its a silly tradition to some, but for me it is more like an annual graduation present, a sort of a “good job son; you’ve worked really hard this past year, and thus made it one year closer to your ultimate goals” in the form of an item that my scrupulousness would never permit me to purchase otherwise. Being the level 27 nerd that I am, these “presents” to myself have pretty much always been in the form of tech gadgets, this year being no exception, as I am now the proud owner of an iPhone.

Being that I adopted back in February—just after the fancy 16gb gen1’s release—I’ve been witness to a great deal of technological evolution, albeit in a fairly short time. After the first week, i had that “this could be better” impatience that we-the-ingenuitive get shortly after a brainstorm, and I jailbroke (a tiny hack that allows one access to the inner recesses of the iPhone) my phone, installing a ton of 3rd party apps just prior to a trip to Barcelona. These apps put a lot of the functionality I’d expected of my new pocket mac into motion, such as:
- being able to actually put documents of any nature onto the device without the typical iTunes rigmarole (seriously, that thing is going to BE osx at some point if it continues it’s trend of forcing users to become increasingly more reliant on integrating with it to use their files/gadgets).
- FTP access.
- reading, storing, and bookmarking PDFs.
- writing real text files.
- playing games (not crappy cell phone games, but emulation of the nes/snes/genesis/gameboy/etc childhood favorites that are still somehow desirable after all of this time. )
- and the usual osx ammenities like a dictionary, a translator, a conversion tool etc.

During our trip abroad, these new found features were invaluable, particularly in terms of communication and commerce when my American Standard/half-fluent/US Dollar programmed mind reared it’s ethnocentric head. Even after our return, I found these new abilities so infinitely useful that I couldn’t imagine the void that should be in their place. Continue Reading »

Tags: iPhone

Every day in 2008, Brenda Hutchinson is filming sunrise and sunset (while ringing a bell) and blogging the results. When Alex was in town, we went to the bridge around sunset and Lauren was recruited to ring a bell (the shame of being mistaken for a tourist!). But in addition to the bell ringers below, you can catch cameos by two-thirds of the White Whale development staff and one-third of the White Whale canine staff:

Tags: bell, blog, staff, video, youtube

Hi everybody,

I was in Portland on Monday to unveil final Lewis & Clark site designs to an open audience.  It went really well, and I think we have an approved final candidate! 

The next step is for it to go to a larger public, on the redesign blog (which in this case is being run by Lewis & Clark instead of us, though we’ll be posting there from time to time).

If you’re interested, visit the Lewis & Clark New Media blog, where the designs will be appearing soon, and watch the action unfold!