Of Sharing and Salience

Here's an elegant meditation on the past, present and future of media production, written by Mark Pesce, one of the pioneers of VRML. This section on sharing (naturally) caught my attention:

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM, surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a television, somewhere in the background, or it might be coming from the Web browser right in front of him. (Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

Pesce then introduces what I think will become a key concept in this space, that of "salience":

All the marketing dollars in the world can foster some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch. Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all of his media decisions are weighed against the values and tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the importance, of that media to the individual and that individual’s social network.

Highly recommended (Via P2P Foundation.)

Fotowoooooooosh

I. Am. Gobsmacked. (Via Techcrunch.)

Behold: Ajax3D the Great

Something that seems to have everything going for it: Ajax3D. Yup: Ajax meets 3D - or X3D, to be more precise. Here's what a rather useful white paper on the subject by Tony Parisi, one of the pioneers of the by-now antediluvian VRML standard has to say:

Ajax3D combines the power of X3D, the standard for real-time 3D on the web, with the ease of use and ubiquity of Ajax. Ajax3D employs the X3D Scene Access Interface (SAI)—the X3D equivalent of the DOM— to control 3D worlds via Javascript. With the simple addition of an X3D plugin to today’s web browsers, we can bring the awesome power of video game technology to the everyday web experience.

The initial development has begun. Media Machines has created the first showcase applications and tutorials, and has launched a web site, www.ajax3d.org, as an open industry forum to explore technologies, techniques and best practices. This white paper describes the key technical concepts behind Ajax3D and, via examples, introduces the beginning of a formal programming framework for general use.

(Via Enterprise Open Source Magazine.)

The Second Million is the Hardest

News that the total number of Second Life signups has breached the two million mark comes at a time when such figures are being heavily criticised.

Of course, the two million figure does not reflect the true number of SL users. But think of it as a proxy for the real number - a kind of SL index. The fact that the index has doubled in a couple of months is the real news; even with a retention rate of "only" 10%, it's the rate of growth that matters.

What we are seeing is Second Life and the virtual world idea begin to break through into the mainstream. Even if the two million number were "real" it would be footling compared to the size of the Net; but even 10% of it is not footling compared to zero.

As to criticisms it's VRML all over again - and speaking as someone who wanted to believe in VRML, but never quite could because it was so obviously limited - SL is something else, for a reason that has nothing to do with SL's technology, cool though it is.

Unlike ten years ago, broadband is available and relatively cheap today. I have a line that regularly gives me 4 Mbit/s and over for a very reasonable price; this means that I simply never have to think about bandwidth anymore. Speeds will continue to rise, and virtual worlds will be able to take even more bandwidth for granted, with a resultant improvement in experience.

If Second Life can do this well in today's computing environment, it will do even better in tomorrow's.

A Question of Trust

Back in the 1990s, I used to write about VRML quite a lot. VRML - Virtual Reality Modelling Language - seemed like the future, but turned out not to have one, at least not in that form. As you may have noticed, it more or less disappeared, though I now realise where it went.

I also often wondered where the VRML pioneers went. One of them is Mark Pesce, whom I've just discovered through this post called "Trust, But Verify". It's of note for two reasons.

First, it's well written, and worth reading for that alone. But secondly, because it touches on what is becoming a key issue in the Web 2.0 world, that of trust. Trust - and reputation systems - lie at the heart of openness. It's a subject of particular interest to me, and I'll be writing more about it here and elsewhere in due course.