It’s Banned Books Week.
Go read one.
There’s a great list here of the top 100 banned ones lately. (I’ve read 28 of them… unless you break apart the series, in which case it’s more).
Over at the Cisco Virtual worlds blog, Christian Renaud is unhappy about the various bogus numbers being tossed around for virtual world populations (pointing out that if you blindly add up all the figures being reported, you end up at about a half a billion people, more than the population of all of North America). So far, so good — after all, I have complained about this myself.
But he, like Moorgard recently, is upset by the use of terms in the industry right now:
There needs to be an agreed common taxonomy of virtual worlds. You can slice and dice the market by 2D vs. 3D, web-based vs. client software, apples vs. oranges, but we need to find a common set of language by which to differentiate the QQ and Cyworlds from the ActiveWorlds and Kanevas from the Metaplaces and Toontowns. Until then, you have emoticon-on-steroids avatar chat in IM and Social Networking sites being compared apples to apples with narrative driven virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Runescape. It’s not apples and apples at that point, it’s apples and orangutans.
Now, while I have no idea why Metaplace is lumped in with Toontown (OK, we get the message, we’ll redo the site’s graphics!) I have to disagree somewhat with this point… apples and orangutans, really? For systems that share over 99% of their core technical architecture? Surely at most we’re talking the difference between chimps and humans. And in practice, I think there’s a good case to be made that we’re really talking about the differences between a college professor and a pro athlete.
I learned about Mini Friday from this Guardian article today, which is perhaps misleadingly titled “why Habbo held back on a mobile world.” Misleading because, well, they have 110,000 registered users in one already!
Habbo has held back launch of its own mobile product because of concerns over data costs and the quality of the user experience on mobiles, he said.
But it looks pretty good! Very much in keeping with the pixel graphics that Habbo uses. Looks like right now, it only works on specific Nokia phones.
Virtual Worlds News reports on yet another virtual world coming out of China, this one called UWorld, from a company called UOneNet. I’m struck by how many of the latest virtual worlds look kinda like There.com did at the beginning: all plastered over with brands.
Burning Man these days is starting to look a little more like Vegas.
