New Media Reflections

We have all heard that the print media industry is losing viewership to online venues. There have been a lot of ideas proposed from letting print media die to printed blogs. Time magazine is trying an interesting experiment. They are offering a self-selected magazine (very web 2.0) that draws content from five different magazines into one that is composed of your favorites. For the five-issue introduction, there is no charge. They are calling it Mine. It reminds me of what has happened to the music industry. Remember when you had to buy an album or CD from a band you liked, and maybe you liked half the songs and wished the other half wasn’t there. Now you can go to iTunes and just download the songs you want. Well, Time’s experiment reminds me of that. Instead of buying five magazines, each with some content I want, there will be one magazine with what I’m looking for. Ironically you can order this magazine in a digital or print version. I guess they want to see which medium gains the most popularity. I ordered it for myself, and, well, I ordered the print version. And I’ll repeat, it’s free! I still prefer doing my reading from print. I’m notoriously bad about printing out what I find online, or if someone sends me an electronic file. I’ll come back and report after I’ve gotten my first magazine.

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I was beginning to think that there were more virtual world start-ups than could ever survive. I have to admit that I’m surprised so many are still around, even though they may be in a second year of beta or so. Then I found an article in the Chronicle’s Wired about a virtual world: Scalable City being worked on by Sheldon Brown at University of California at San Diego. They will be using a platform developed by IBM. It promises to be visually richer and offer more options than virtual worlds such as the well-known Second Life.

I have been a Second Life “resident” for over two years now. While we all have complaints about it, I still haven’t found anything as engaging or versatile. Maybe SL needs some real competition and people defecting in droves to force them to perfect the product. They have previously wasted their time on features such as Windlight which was supposed to be a visual blockbuster, but has turned out to be a big waste of time and a not so great feature. They seem to have finally gotten it that platform stability and reliability is far more important than eye candy you can’t use if you crash all the time.

There is a video that gives a rather confusing introduction to Scaleable City. It looks like a Kansas tornado that creates things eventually. It is visually interesting though, and I am excited to follow the progress of this one.

Here is the video:

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Those people at Google are quite restless, always coming up with something new. But they seemed determined to inform and connect us, so we will grow along with them. Something they have introduced, that I had somehow missed, is Google Latitude. You would use your cell phone, no wait, that would be your mobile device these days, or you could use your computer, and keep track of the location of friends. Now, this would only be friends you have a mutual agreement with to see each other locations; otherwise this would be the ultimate stalker tool. When you search for a friend, a map comes up with a little block and a pic of your friend, showing their street location. I guess they can also describe what they are doing. If you see friends nearby you could potentially meet them easily.

At first glance this seems like another twitter away your life application, but as with twitter, it has value, and probably value we haven’t yet thought of. I would like to know that my kids made it to their destination, or, more importantly, home. If a friend is nearby, I may want to contact them and get together. If other friends see us together, they may want to join us. Nice, a good social connection tool.

Here is a video that gives a good idea of what Google Latitude is:

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