(Flickr picture NASA/GSFC, woodleywonderworks, Creative Commons License)

(Update: at the end of the text, reference to another, related, post)

Virtual environments help us to make geography collapse, as do other more mainstream tools such as Skype, wikis, WebEx, blogs, forums etc. Virtual worlds help us to engage with others in an immersive way and can be organized in such a way that serendipitous encounters are facilitated. So, will all this help the world to become even flatter?

Metanomics partners with Muse Isle to provide easy access to Second Life® for people who are new to virtual worlds, and content of particular interest to enterprise users from the profit, non-profit, education and government sectors. The six-island Muse Isle complex is a picturesque, business-appropriate and easily-navigated destination for people to outfit their avatars, buy useful scripts and animations, and explore Second Life art, machinima and architecture.

We get a sneak peek inside the new Immersive Workspaces™ platform with Justin Bovington, founder and CEO of Rivers Run Red™. Bovington joins host Robert Bloomfield to discuss the challenges to enterprise adoption of virtual worlds, recent improvements in data display and collaborative tools designed to create a more familiar business and branding environment, and the company's experience in collaborating with Linden Lab®.

Rivers Run Red chose the Metanomics program to introduce their new product Immersive Education Spaces™.


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Benjamin Duranske of the popular legal blog VirtuallyBlind.com takes a turn as guest host, interviewing authors of books about virtual worlds. Guests include: Mark Bell (Second Life® For Dummies), Eddy Shah (Second World), Julian Dibbell (My Tiny Life; Play Money), Tom Boellstorff (Coming of Age in Second Life) and New World Notes’ own Wagner James Au (The Making of Second Life; Second Life: The Official Guide).


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This is my Connecting the Dots segment from Monday's show, in which I talked about some feedback we received on the prior week's show, and give a partial response. Feedback is really helpful to us--keep it coming!

One of the pleasures of running live virtual events like Metanomics is that we get immediate feedback through text chat, backchat, on how we’re doing in our shows. But we also get more traditional feedback after the show. Last week’s show in particular we got quite a bit of feedback.

First, we got one email from a viewer expressing disappointment with our segment featuring Nonny de la Peña’s Gone Gitmo installation in Second Life. This viewer was unhappy with the fact that we’re focusing on Real World politics rather than economics. I’d like to just take a moment to respond to this comment.

Samsung Vice President Victoria Coleman predicted in the 1980’s that email would never catch on; she is more optimistic now about virtual worlds. Hear Ms. Coleman discuss Samsung’s plans for the metaverse, and give us an update from the Steering Committee of the Virtual Worlds Roadmap project. We start the hour talking with European Parliament member Paulo Casaca (Portugal) about his new book, 'The Hidden Invasion of Iraq,' and his use of Second Life® to discuss global politics.

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11/24/08 Electric Sheep Company. Two years ago, Electric Sheep Company was one of the premier content creators in Second Life, responsible for high-profile corporate builds and events, such as CSI: NY. Earlier in 2008, they announced their intention to develop a flash-based virtual environment of their own, Webflock. Hear CEO Sibley Verbeck talk about the fortunes of ESC after Second Life, and the future of Webflock, which hosts the new virtual presence of the Showtime series ‘The L Word’. This week's 'On the Spot' features Nonny de la Pena's "Gone Gitmo" and Bernhard Drax's machinima.


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The new secretary general of the United Nations is about to thank her or his election to various nonstate networks, a loose coalition of NGOs, religious groups, business leaders and local activists. This is only logical after those groups managed to set the international agenda on the environment.

This success was possible because of some terrible climate-related disasters (remember the hurricane destroying part of Wall Street?) and by the use of the ubiquitous internet. Observers saw the shift of power from states to nonstate groups coming when the annual Davos meeting was transformed several years ago. It brought in a host of activists from these networks and has since established virtual meetings where thousands more could participate.

I read all this in an article in the Financial Times of September 14, 2024 . The fictional article is published in Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (large pdf file), a very influential report by the National Intelligence Council.

Host Robert Bloomfield welcomes Jon Brouchoud of Crescendo Design and Studio Wikitecture. The October 2008 issue of Architectural Record -- one of the world's foremost publications on architecture-- featured Brouchoud and colleague Ryan Schultz for their pioneering work in Second Life®. Jon writes the virtual world blog, The Arch. Kirsten Kiser is On the Spot to talk about her recent work with architect Frank Gehry, and her efforts to bring architects to virtual worlds through her influential online architectural magazine, arcspace.

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Rezzable Productions claims to maintain "the largest public space in the metaverse", and are the well-respected creators of Greenies, public art, machinima, games and music. Jon Himoff, Founder and CEO of Rezzable Productions, Ltd. talks about his inworld business and his thoughts on Linden Lab®'s new pricing and policies for open space sims. Virtual worlds experts Nic Mitham of Kzero and Doug Thompson of Remedy Communications Limited and Dusan Writer's Metaverse join in to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing residents, businesses and developers.

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(adding first results of an in-world discussion about this project, at the end of this text)

How important will virtual worlds become in the global village? In order to answer that question, one has to have an idea what the big issues will be the next 50 years, what "the big picture" will be and how it evolves. Often Virtual Worlds Roadmaps are being studied in splendid isolation from the rest of world history. References are made to the cost of energy or to the financial crisis, but often no attempt is made to describe the issues which will define our planet from now to let's say 2050.

In a previous post, Second Life, OpenSim, Web2.0 point to a different future for the global economy, I used some ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein to get such a big picture.

This time I invite you to consider various concrete aspects of the evolution of the world system, and to meditate what role virtual worlds can play for each of these aspects.

Even though still inspired by Wallerstein's text, the big picture I will present here does not imply one has to agree with his visions. Personally I am convinced that the next 20 to 50 years will be a period of chaos, of unexpected disruptive events, of important mutations in the financial and business world.

However I simply don't know whether this can be adequately described by Kondratieff cycles, or by Wallerstein's vision on the long term evolution of capitalism. I will just list a number of big issues, and I really would like getting feedback on these topics (which issues did I forget, which are far more important than others, extra information) and on the way virtual environments could be involved.

I think the work we would do in situating virtual worlds (and other new media?) in the broader context of the future of our planet, could very well complement work which is being done elsewhere, such as in the Virtual Worlds Roadmap group.

The "big issues" are based on a book and blog (in Dutch language) by Geert Noels, the chief economist of the Belgian investment bank Petercam.

Noels identifies six "econoshocks" which will have an impact on our lives and which can be compared to the Industrial Revolution:

- demographics (including urbanization in Noels' book, but I'll propose to create a separate entry for this phenomenon)

- the shift to the East

- the information- and communication technology

- energy

- the new capitalism

- the green economy

I will briefly discuss those issues, not necessarily sticking to what Geert Noels says (for instance, I added my own take on urbanization, adding the security and geo-political risk stuff, I lumped the green economy and the energy/raw materials stuff together, I have another take on the New Capitalism etc).

I think studying the possible evolution of virtual worlds in relation to the global context can provide new insights, and I invite you to contribute to this text on the MixedRealities Wiki. Of course, all contributors will be free to republish the evolving text as they see fit.

Sales of virtual goods are a crucial fact of the Second Life economy. But what about selling real products? What kind of system could be used for that? Would users rather pay in Linden dollars or real currency? Would a vendor suffice or should there be a 3D depiction of goods?

These are some of the questions Neener Keats is trying to answer with his Master thesis at the University of Liverpool. He asks the Metanomics community for help: if you have a minute, please answer his short survey.

I'll let him introduce it himself:

My name is Neener. I joined SL a long time ago, in 2006. I thought so much of this environment that I wanted to dedicate my Information Technology Master of Science dissertation towards it. I believe SL prefigures the future of the web and that we should be thinking about how we can prepare some of our technology for migration to a platform such as this.

This questionnaire is meant as a source of information to provide me, Neener Keats, with important design aspects related to linking webshops to the Second Life environment. The idea isn't just to put 2D webpages on a screen limited by land settings, but rather real vendors using unique identification and securisation methods to allow for webshops to expand their services into new social environments, taking profit of all the important features provided by Second Life (3D, media, web, etc).

All this information will only be shared with my Master's dissertation adviser, and ultimately with the University of Liverpool.

No personal information of any kind will be disclosed, I just am interested by your opinions and needs. Your IP will NOT be kept or shared.

Thank you for your time.

We'll of course try to persuade him to share the results of his thesis with the Metanomics community.
Survey address

Dahlia Khalifa, senior economist at the World Bank discusses both the World Bank’s launch into Second Life and the conclusions of the World Bank’s "Doing Business 2009" Report, which examines business conditions in regions around the (real) world. The program follows the World Bank and IFC venture inside Second Life as they launch their Doing Business 2009 report to the digital international community in an event on October 30, 2008. Also, Dorette Steenkamp of Virtual Africa and Uthango appears "On the Spot" to talk about public benefit work in South Africa.

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From the Department of Wild Hypotheses

(update: providing a concrete example at the end of the text)

Second Life, OpenSim, web2.0, open source stuff are pointing to a possible different future for the global economy. In a very negative sense, this future announces itself through the current financial crisis. In a positive sense, extreme customization, collaboration and more egalitarian organizations make part of a bifurcation of the development of capitalism. However, there is a very considerable danger that the other part of the bifurcation may prevail: a more protectionist, authoritarian version of capitalism.

The basis of my hypothesis is the text The Depression: A Long-Term View from Professor Immanuel Wallerstein.