July 21, 2006
After I blogged the location-tracker hacked up for use in Second Life by Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka the other day, Cory sent along a link to a similar service, SLStats [Cory also blogged it, I now see], that was started recently by SL resident Mark Barrett. I’ve also been meaning to look into the new blogHUD built by SL resident Koz Farina, which is currently in alpha. The cool thing about that is that it can be used as a kind of location-tracking device as well.
SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [< -- SL link] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch "watches" where you go, tracking your location as you move around the world, as well as which other avatars you come into contact with. The information is used on the SLStats site to rank most popular regions (among SLStats users, of course), and to track how much time you've spent in-world, which you can view at a link like this one, which tracks Glitchy: http://slstats.com/users/view/Glitchy+Gumshoe.
nately, the service doesn’t let you extract a list of sims you’ve been to and who much time you spent in each (as Cory’s does), but I imagine that information is easily gotten and just a matter of building in the feature. What would be extra cool is if you could overlay lines on the SL Webmap API so you could see your path around the world. There are all kinds of other cool things that could be done with this information as well, I imagine, and I get the impression Mark is planning more in the near future. He wasn’t in-world when I was this morning, but Jerry spoke with him recently and at least found out that he’s a SecondCast fan. (Go us!)
SLStats is also associated with SLBuzz, which seems to be yet another MySpace-like social networking site for SL residents where you can add friends, blug stuff, etc. I love to see people adding functionality to Second Life, but I have to say, I’m sick to death of filling out online profiles, so I doubt I’ll be using this much. The explosion of social networking and Web 2.0 sites in general in recent months is creating a lot of work for very little return, as far as I can tell, and there’s going to have to be some kind of convergence or implosion fairly soon.
But back to our topic. The blogHUD is an unobtrusive heads-up display that lets you post a blog entry to the blogHUD site via either the chat line or a notecard. At the moment, you can browse recent entries, or see entries by a particular person on the “recent blogHUDers” list or from a place in the “recent places” list. A future version will let you browse blog entries by person, by place, or by person in place, and grab RSS feeds for most of those slices, or so I understand. (Remember, this is still in alpha.)
What I like about the blogHUD is the SLurlPane-like SL Webmap that shows up when you click on a blog entry. (That’s a SLurlPane at the top of the right-hand column here.) As you can see in the pic above, you end up with a close-up shot of the location from which the entry was posted, as was as an SL link that will launch you right there, should you find the entry intriguing enough.
Between this kind of stuff, Cory’s hack, SLurlMarkers and various other things that are in development for SL and the Web, we should see some pretty powerful location-based social software popping out of this primordial virtual ooze. Definitely looking forward to it.
blogging, design, mapping, MySpace, Second Life, Social software, virtual worlds, Web 2.0
Originally posted by Mark Wallace from 3pointD.com, remediated by yatta on Jul 21, 2006 at 10:03 AM
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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