Internal Server Error

what the voices in my head tell me to write

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

More SL thoughts

I was having a discussion in the Shelter last night with a few other AVies about SL. I dont quite hold to my idea that SL is Vegas without the morality or laws of physics or rather I have modified that view. SL is more like the early days of the web. When everyone was on dial-up and 14.4 kbs was good. There are no real big corporations in SL, maybe because of the legal aspects. All the content is generated by users or groups of users. Hobbyists basically.

Groups of hobbyists have the ability and motivation to do remarkable things with computers. Apple started that way after all. A lot of the dotcom boom was small start ups with many similarities to groups of hobbyists, Web2.0 companies are small and loosely organised along simillar lines.

Small groups of motivated people can do wonderful things with computers is the point I am trying to make. SL gives you far more scope to create stuff than basic html as there is a whole extra dimension to play with for a start. Then you can program your creation on top of that. Most of the modelling tools in SL are easy to use. Probably easier than learning basic html by hand at least. This should allow highly motivated hobbyist to create fantasitic material.

The one group of people that SL doesn't really cater for that seem to be vital for success in the 2D web is academics. The other main source of very intelligent innovators is academia. Think Google and Yahoos foundings and Sir Tim's reasons for creating the web in the first place. Academics like to be able to share information. They like to quickly find information that other academics have shared. Thats why they end up creating whole content sharing system like the web and content indexing systems like Google.

SL is missing a real information store. There is FIND of course and its pretty good for searching but sometimes you want to browse. There are SL blogs and stuff outside of SL for sharing information. Its hard to publish Textual information for all to read in SL though. Things like building or scripting tips are basically passed by word of mouth. It would be great to have a SL library where you could walk up and down the stacks browsing notecards on more or less any subject you like. You would need something like the directory structure of yahoo or even library of congress catalog to walk around. Even with the ability to put a huge ammount of text into a tiny notecard it would require quite a lot of virtual space to replicate physical library with the shelves to hold the required notecards. Especially if anyone could publish or edit them wiki style. I suspect you would need several highly trained real world librarians working on it though.

It would be the cross roads of information architechture and real architechture.

Tags: