Boy, am I neglecting blogging lately. Even my Twitter has gone mostly silent.
There have been several stories that caught my eye. For example, this one about musicians making decent gig money in Second Life was interesting, in part because some of what a virtual environment provides is an easier way to do marketing. As I have said before, I think the future of a lot of the arts is around personal relationships with their fans because of the way the landscape is shifting around information and money, and there’s something about virtual worlds that helps build fandoms.
Speaking of personal relationships, while at the IGF and GDC awards, I was struck by the clear signs of “celebrity” that some of the event had. Some of this was due, no doubt, to the fact that Tim Schafer’s performance as emcee was funnier and more entertaining than that of the emcees for any televised awards show. Some of it, though, was the evident fact that the creators of indie games are getting known as names, in large part because they produce quirky and individualistic games at a rapid rate. Which brings me to mention The Croopier, just because it’s a neat project.
Which reminds me that there’s a new documentary premiering on journalism in virtual worlds — talk about a profession that is in upheaval thanks to changes in business models and the value of information! I’m halfway through a galley copy of Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, in which a journalist figures pretty prominently… and struck by how prescient Bruce Sterling was when he said “information wants to be worthless.”
Which leads me to idly speculate… if anything that can be digitized will be, and anything that is digitized becomes worthless, then what will eventually remain both undigitizable and therefore monetizable?
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Boy, am I neglecting blogging lately. Even my Twitter has gone mostly silent.
Bad Raph, no cookie.
Funny you mention information wanting to be worthless. The Associated Press seems to be struggling with this notion as well. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/ap-launches-campaign-against-internet-misappropriation.ars
They are wanting to keep the value of their news releases profitable and they claim that blogging and other “misappropriations” of their content is hurting the bottom line. Anyway, thought that article was relevant to this topic and pertinent to the changes happening in the journalism industry.
Relationships.
Service.
Service.
My bad, I was too slow.
The signature.
Along with what’s already been said, there’s a few of the more obvious things: food, clothes, transportation… unless, of course, we are heading to a day where we’re all naked beings that don’t need to go anywhere and are fed through an IV, but humanity would likely perish before that.
There’s also the service providers that allow you access to the information: cable TV, Internet, phone service providers. That market will probably only get bigger.
Service.
DAMMIT!
Service is a form of relationship, but there’s more to it than just that. 🙂
Anything at all that has the end result of two or more people communicating in a direct way – over time they can come to know each other even if it’s just through pseudonyms – can be monetized. This doesn’t have to occur in both directions either, it’s quite possible for the relationship to be uneven in terms of knowledge of the other; webcomics can monetize through donations very successfully, not because the images they post have inherent value, but because the fanbase likes the artist and wants them to succeed. When Michael Poe of Errant Story made a post saying he was in really tight finacial straights one month, he gained twice the target monthly donation in a matter of days. There have been a lot of cases of random internet people providing funds to worthy causes because someone they know brings it to their attention. People care about each other, and that care will translate to money if the cause is decent enough and the base is invested enough.
More direct services provide more in return, but they’re still rooted in investment with the product or company in question, or the experince being provided. But the experience has to either be unique, or involve relationships with other people (with company or product potentially standing in, but it has to be exceptional or unique in some way) or you won’t be able to monetize it. This is why “news services” like the online components of news papers don’t do so well. Your service can’t just be content. The service needs to be community. Even in the case of webcomics, it’s the sense of place that’s being provided by the comic’s webpage that allows it to monetize. If it were randomly distributed over the net, it’d be really hard to monetize it. Just having that one webpage can create a community, even if that community is very one sided. And communities look out for their own.
“the future of a lot of the arts is around personal relationships with their fans”
It’s also the future of a significant section of the tangible development design world and is why the general lack of Industrial Design participation in social media both perplexes and irritates me.
Something I wrote in 2004 (Link to full forum discussion)
>if anything that can be digitized will be, and anything that is digitized becomes worthless, then what will eventually remain both undigitizable and therefore monetizable
Well, things like open source HW are interesting, but we are a pretty long way off from ‘build your own chip fab in your garage’.
🙂
“I’d like to see one political organizer, even Begala or Carville, who could put together an online crowd that can match those clamoring masses of Ultima or Everquest.” – Bruce Sterling, 2002
As you wish, Mr. Sterling. Welcome to the future 🙂
I don’t think bits are inherently anti-monetization, but I do think that they work against centralization. When the means of production are cheap and accessible, you don’t need the production/distribution/marketing infrastructure of a corporation to make a quality product.
As Bruce pointed out, online games have been the couunterexample. It does take infrastructure and staff to develop, distribute and maintain an MMO.
But if WOW is the T.Rex of MMO gaming, there are small, quick, voracious little mammals scurrying about underfoot, and they’ve already got designs on the king’s throne.
Personal relationships are part of the equation, but so is being fast, adaptable, and hot-blooded about what you do. All that works against big organizations, unless big organizations reinvent themselves as infrastructure and resource providers for small, agile teams and individuals.
And in this context, a model like Metaplace becomes very, very interesting indeed.
Talent and original ideas. There is a reason the studio system came into being and then evaporated. The problem is the rate of consumption. New entertainment products are now blipverts in fact and in time in the limelight.
We burn through acts almost faster than we can find them and we do not develop the talent smoothly as was done in the time of the studio systems. The rise of the small startup feels heroic but it also means a lot of inexperienced, unwise, rash and almost trivial applications are hitting the market. I wonder what the lifecycle of a Facebook application is and I wonder if those are going to replaced by more useful utilities as Facebook and it’s type become the new desktop.
Otherwise, it is clear that we are rebuilding the entertainment business into a different model.
a) Artists are now sheepdogs. It doesn’t have to get that personal but it has to be that active. Arlo Guthrie’s Rising Son Records is and has been doing this better than anyone since 1993.
b) The middle men who’s job it was to keep us in boxes are dieing off. They are being replaced by the people who negotiate deals with artists after they establish themselves independently. Felicia Day is the avatar of the new generation of web storytellers. Unfortunately the streaming model is a giant leap backwards in terms of storytelling technique. Leave it to Hollywood to crunch the web back into a shorter sitcom format.
c) User financing can work. See The Guild. It is still a farm league system but at least it isn’t sharecropping.
d) It’s all about URLs. That’s a cosmic d’oh, but the critical understanding. As said a long time ago, the links are the coin of the realm.
c) It’s all real-time now. A deep understanding of that is critical. Viral is slightly worn out as concepts go because that is predatory and really doesn’t have a comfortable niche in a social based amplification of stimulus through the networks. Real-time has quandaries but emphasizes the fast pattern recognition Gladwell goes on about: learning to program the unconscious.
Note that Obama used/uses a secret team of behaviorists to advise and plan for his campaign. Not getting this and understanding it will be a fatal flaw in future campaigns of any kind. Essentially, cognitivists claim to know why but can’t prove it. Behaviorists only claim to know how and can.
The work I’ve been doing lately with videos and songs is giving me some personal insights but coals to newcastle here. While the freebies last (and that is the billion dollar unknown right now), the broadcast services are there for the using and the fast movers can build brand.
I guess they’re not that secret then…
Damn, I was gonna say Service too. I’m way late this time. 😛
“Information Wants to Be Worthless”
That explains why money is constantly worth-less.
“then what will eventually remain both undigitizable and therefore monetizable?”
Food, electricity.
Soooo…maybe I can give you a new topic to post about. I have been playing MMORPGs since “The Realm”. Ever since that time we have had many upcoming MMORPGS to get excited about every 6-12 months. EQ, AC, DAOC, WoW, LOTRO, etc.
The only things coming out lately seem to be either:
-Completely niche (Darkfall…but Warhammer to some extent too)
-F2P (Runes of Magic anyone?)
-Crap (AoC)
Now don’t try to sell me on Metaplace. I understand your first instinct will be to go there. Talk to me about what the hell happened to all the MMORPGS?
While it might be true that many things can be digitized, and that digitized items are often available for free, that does not mean that they will ever become worthless. There are innefficiencies on both fronts.
If something is digitized and released as free, many people will still want the paid version, or will have trouble finding the free version. To borrow from another current event, even though DnD Players Handbook .pdfs are widely available on the internet, there are still a lot of people who will fork over the money for the paper book, just to have the physical book, or to support the continued development of a product that they love. As a reader of several magazines, while I like being able to read articles online, there is something special about having the physical magazine right there in front of you.
In the pipeline, off the top of my head, I’m looking forward to Champions, DC Universe, Star Trek, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic; all old-school, big budget, big license MMORPGs. Champions is an obscure license outside of the pen-and-paper RP community (widely beloved inside that community for being one of the first non-class systems), but by pedigree it is essentially City of Heroes II. DC Universe, Star Trek and KOTOR have huge non-MMO fan bases which are potential players, if the games are a bit more polished and accessible than MMO licenses to date.
(That’s not a jab at SWG, which I thought was a marvelous sandbox… and for which I feel some small degree of responsibility as an early beta tester. But I think we can agree that the release was rushed before all the components were finished, making the initial experience less than optimal for non-gamers).
I think the free-to-play browser-based games, with microtransactional extras, are going to continue to expand, but we haven’t seen the end of the age of dinosaurs quite yet. And that doesn’t sadden me. Dinosaurs are magnificent beasts 🙂
“I guess they’re not that secret then…”
You should read the paper occasionally, Morgan. That came out over the weekend. He used a “secret” team of 27 of the world’s top behavioral psychologists to help determine campaign messaging and strategies at certain “bumps” in the road. Like it or not, it was a willfully manipulative campaign using every possible trick in the Skinner Box to train the pigeons.
Not that any campaign won’t do it, but until recently and on most web blogs I read, behaviorism has been in disfavor given it’s associations with Skinner’s early work for the MIC and the overall tendancy of web pundits to rip concepts, rebrand them then sell them *virally* as their own ideas. The problem for those trained in the topic is behaviorism is a fairly direct handle on the controls (that is, it really works) and subject to abuse. In my college, they would teach as the Psych 101 course until the abuse by upper classmen became radically apparent. Then the head of the department shifted it to a later course with an Ethics prereq.
Not news for those of us who knew how that campaign was being run but I suspect a little startling for some who didn’t and who hold misconceptions about the subjects.
As one of the members of the Consortium appeared at a public lecture at UCLA a month before the election and outlined his work in some detail, “secret” appears to translate to “unbeknownst to one Time magazine staff writer”, proof enough of dirty dealings to capture the imagination of a particularly paranoid segment of the blogosphere.
Back to the matter at hand — even free bits aren’t free, really. There is a time cost and an opportunity cost to the viewer, and conversely a value to the producer. You can play my game for no money, but it will cost you an investment in time. Maybe for a little bit of money, I offer you some way to reduce the time investment. Or maybe not — maybe the sole return I get from my game is a really dynamic portfolio piece to help land a paid gig, or word of mouth that I rock as a designer. In any case, that “free” bit of work has both a cost and a value associated with it, and as long as the value exceeds the cost (preferably on both sides of the transaction, since value is subjective), it’s not worthless.
But it may be a hard sell to investors.
Like all things BINARY there is no balance, just either – or.
The web has had all these webisodics, virals, old media dumps, new media hypes before. Its been 15 years so far. The models for sustainablity for no technical coding projects( repeat after repeat;0) has not been found.
Current.tv has become just another “viral” entertainment portal.( L.LING not included) and now struggles to survive and has canceled even asking for money via IPO.
Dollhouse dead on mass tv. Len missed Felcia in SL, when asked “what was the best way to have a successful webshow? the answer that murmored in the crowd was a “joss whedon tv show”..lol
The best of web1.0 entertainment went on to TV…but now web2.0 wants to kill broadcast and the money it moved around to many….
All very “meta” folks.. but I still see very few models of proven sustainbility that come close to the last centuries “industries” that provided the increasing masses of bodies, with middle class mediation:)
Remember, all it took was one dude and a cable cutter yesterday to shut down all this meta fabulousness in silly valley…..
what, manhole covers cant have “locks”?…..binary thinking, open/closed…
ugh..
enjoy the show.
“..proof enough of dirty dealings” Not dirty. Direct yes. Unbeknownst and secret in a presidential campaign are the same thing. It doesn’t bother me they do it. It bothers me that it goes unnoticed. As I said, UAH had to reorganize the course schedule to cope.
c3: The problem of the moment is we are building commercial worlds based on services each of which may become unstable or unavailable. Then the higher order composites stop working. But… the Drag Drop and Go age has finally really come to the masses via Facebook. This is big juju for artists that can work in the medium because it ties the whole social node’s resources into an easy to play in space. We need some more message standards so the DD&G widgets can integrate more services, but the pattern set is working and ready. I’m jazzed by how easy it was to put all the different resource types I build into one smoothly navigable scene.
As a 3D builder, it’s another day but from the perspective of a music composeer with a library of songs, instrumentals, video and other materials, this is a neat time. We’ve been on a long trek since the Intervista days but the media convergence as fused into real-time 3D is here at last for the masses.
WOOHOO!!
Actually, C3, I’m considering writing a blog entitled: “The Guild Considered Actively Harmful” discussing how streamy’s are a retro entertainment form wedged into a non-linear medium. They may become to web entertainment what Basic is to programming languages: the accident of history that held programming languages back as Alan Kay describes.
I admire what she does but I fear she is the advent of Buffy Forever: a rash of vampire-as-bad-boy-needing-to-find-the-right-woman masturbatoriums that add nothing to the vocabulary and keeping any non-linear story systems from getting funding. Think of them as 2.5D over real-time 3D: profit centers with sub-optimum evolution paths.
lonelygirl15,, now the production team is making a website for a TV show on CBS…
well len. i know a bit about this stuff;) I did launch Starbase C3 on AOL ASYLUM in 97, having to navigate around AOL /SGI/Cybercoin and so many others who didnt get it then, so what’s new ?lol
maybe what you didnt know was that the webisode was the beginning of all that, with the SPOT 1995-6, that begat the AOL ASYLUM, which begat StarbaseC3 3d/episodic/avatars/etc/ which begat Stan Lee Media- webisode flash cartoons. which begat.. so many others….
Theres been no growth in “creative content” for over a decade, just 2-3 restarts since creative works that are using these media are held hostage to a banker /programmer system which is caught in a religious myth that has no place for content creation in the new machine order. Flash, as un moving as it has been since 1998, has been the closest thing to a creation platform/tool ala the ” movie camera-projector” or the “TV set- camera” for sale.
3D only found its home in consoles “fixed boxes”, or PC games for high end nvidia/ATI buyers. SL took 3d and jumped right to the amateur, and purposely ignored the creative professional, the result being the unsustainable “SL pyramid” of today, a MIAMI Beach of rt3d virtual reality:)
As to the “3d for the masses” being here, or even for the “creative professionals” who want to work in RT3D immersion as a medium?
Faith..lol. Glad you have it;)
I still see it all in perma loop. Unity3d replaces Axel3D, Youre Mix Music Videos in Vivaty are B3D/Def jam 2001 redux, but you dont even own the tools or the distribution…;)
Craftsman MUST OWN their own tools. They MUST be free to own and resell their efforts. If not, it’s all a scam.
Crea tiveContent makers have been forced to follow BAD Business visions/models on the web since 1995:)
web1.0 offered FREE PCs/ webpages(geocities) in the hope for eyeball/advertising CONTROL. Web2.0 offers “platforms” for free. like facebook/twitter/ etc. A pay for AOL lost to the “free” 1998 YAHOO, who lost to the FREE 2003 Google. Those who created content in/for each aol or yahoo ended up with dead. technology specific IP…somehow i just dont see the endgame being different.:)
3D will come because as i said for a decade, its the last bell and whistle that can be sold by the tech/ bankers. Its also a powerful medium for entertainment for the viewser.
But as the title says, Bits for free ? GrandMomma always said “you get what you pay for”. right?
anyhow…The memes today are so fked my thoughts are just blog fodder for those who can’t see past the turn of the millenium
;:)
back to the show;)
c3
I realize the cycling of the forms but scale is changing. Remember, I go further back to when markup was something only IBM lawyers did and to login to the Internet, a black console and pre-Pine was the ticket.
When HTML came along, people thought it was THE hypertext markup language rather than a very bad redux of Truly Donovan’s work. The jump backwards to go forwards cycle is so familiar now it is normal. It’s why the ‘let’s put 3D into HTML’ idea is so boring. It will be another jump backwards.
I look at it this way: when something like Vivaty gets the catbird’s seat AND Parisi and crew finally do what we’ve been begging for, DD&G for the customers, I’m thrilled. Of course I want to build below that level but they are opening that up now. The good news is by adding to those libraries, there is a lot we can do for the average DD&G consumers. Now that feeds are just ‘fill in the URL and Go’ (something we didn’t really have in the day), with free YouTube and Reverbnation services, with gadgets that drop into the page and just work, with combined free services and user-paid-ISP-storage, we are getting to the point where Ma and Pa can build these.
I and mine had to face the fact that HTML won when we knew by years of experience it was a bad retro design destined to become Internet kudzu, but win it did. Everytime we have to cross that line from professional content to ‘assembled by amateurs’, we deal with this. I think we have to get used to it and work with it. Just as professional web pages finally emerged from the morass of gray screen Times and Helvetica blinking at us, we will see these consumer worlds turn pro. Second Life is a blip.
Now we need more high level vocabularies. It’s no good to try to sell in the vertex economy to people who are just now figuring out how to turn left or right in-world. We have to sell them assemblies and they have to be pop because a pop culture drives the web. Again, Day is someone to watch because she IS that pop culture at work blithely unaware of what is beneath the asphalt and justifiably so. I’m pretty sure a lot of the content will be dreck. So? For every ten bad “The Day the Earth Stood Still” or worse, “The Watchmen” there will be one “Slumdog Millionaire” and it will usually come from outside the Hollywood systems once the media gets a better footing.
“Just as professional web pages finally emerged from the morass of gray screen Times and Helvetica blinking at us, we will see these consumer worlds turn pro. Second Life is a blip.”
It didnt happen that way Len. Macromedia paid for AOL and Microsoft to train and execute 2 professional Portal sites using Flash. Then they sold tools to those who followed those 200 people. They created the commercial web around flash’s production value for commerce. If all the work had to be tunneled through Shockwave.com in 1998, flash as a media would have died.
creative meta utopias dont exist Len, and Ms.Day will easily allow a starring role on FOX to replace her webshow. She has to eat and pay comcast broadband bills as well.
Felicia will go where the money is and her star shines, no doubt. Most people do that. Not all but after reading her blog, my bet would be you are right. The time to shine and make hay for actors is quite short and she is about in the middle of that. Fortunately, she has the brains to write and produce so she has a long career. Good luck to her.
I don’t believe Adobe built the commercial web. I remember Intel paying for content too to very little effect. I believe it is these creative storytellers who will drive media convergence. Too many cute code monkey tricks have come and gone because there was no content and no pipeline where the money made it to the artists. We’ve had an entire industry standing user content and very little money for the artists. So when someone like Day steps out and gets money for her artists, I’m all for it. Same for Second Life: it made some money for the artists and I’m all for that.
But the integration with the social networks is fairly new at scale despite all Cybertown, Active Worlds, Second Life, yada did. Vivaty is sitting in a very fecund place right now and they seem to be executing. MySpace and iTunes don’t compete. I think the small differences in ease of integration will make big differences in adoption. I don’t believe it comes down to player penetration because the plugin download barriers are gone for most people. We’re over that chasm. What is before us now is really an artist challenge to produce saleable commercial content. It’s easy from where I sit to see the SKUs shrink down from what Warner believes into that which can be pumped through that social network/virtual world. I can easily see the virtual world becoming THE album. I know how to build those. Someone else will have to have the business model to make that happen but I can think of lots of way to bundle and sales targets for those.
So no, not a utopia. I think we are starting to see the content as king meme become commercial instead of BS. Right now, companies like Vivaty, Metaplace (no offense, Raph) and Second Life don’t really understand how to make that happen without stacking up all the intermediaries. At some point that will thin out because none of us want to have to manage say ten different service accounts to build one world although we will until a company steps up to aggregate that.
You mean the same “social networking” sites that keep trying to “own all uploaded content” from the FREE masses.? Or those who say they “dont own” or have any responsibilty -only profits to show- from the content distributed in the search for another companies buy out?:)
We’ll see how that bit a meta meme works out? If it keeps a sustainable sytem at play I think we’ll have bigger issues than music videos in 3d.
Ive had to manage over 60 such accounts from just as many failed service” entertainment” -media platform startups for over a decade to produce the type of emergent immerisive entertainment that starbasec3 represented. I see nothing in any of the startups youve mentioned that suggests anything different in their models that wouldnt put them on the same trajectory as those 60 plus since 1996.
And a macromedia few, DID birth the commercial production level web, just as a kinetix few, did birth mass commercial 3d media. ( both companies seeded and encourage copying of their tools in early years) The fact that all 2d/3d tools are now held in the balance by ADOBE and AUTODESK is a great problem as well..one that has been also 15 years in coming.
Adobe already attempted a SERVICE like FLIKR and got slapped , like facebook did for a TOS of ownership control. They will try it again Im sure.
Content is KING, ok:) but Control of Content is Congress/Parliment, and that form of media governance is NOT part of any VC startups plans:)… nor shoudl it possibly be, but unless a balance is found, we will just go around and around, and I see no new metas being any smarter than the previous ones, they just replaced them at the conferences.:)
I hate to say it: The artists that will make real-time 3D moneymakers are not graphics artists this side of games. The 3D services model is services to artists who are NOT object builders. They are scene builders.
What is about to happen: the vocabularies of film and stagecraft are being rolled up into the object classes and GUIs of the real-time 3D systems based on libraries. Graphics artists can use these but the target demographics as screen writers, novelists, actors, dancers, choreographers, cinematographers and even musicians.
Stories inside stories, Larry, movies inside worlds inside movies.
i think you really are a bit too removed from that business here len…sorry/. RT3D has had a storytellers for a decade…they just had to work in the games and film industry proper since no tools and economies existed online for them to INDIE it. len, youll find that most of hollywoods -A list- directors/story guys of today, were pixel pushers of 2d/3d assets a decade or more ago….
built libraries are full force in 2d flash online today….. . for rt3d they still dont exist except in SL-kinda, or a few professional tool systems sold to pro ventures…
btw- antics3d which offered these machinima tools for years, and who only a year ago began to awake to the mass audience(they ignored it for 5 years on purpose) has also went the way of the dodo… selling to an internal pro production facility… Mindavenue did the same in 2005. they built these tools, but maybe too early, or maybe the myth of the “service sell to google” just swallowed them up….
Unity3d is the current tool/ deal….i wish them alot of luck and good vibes… you should look who their US evangelist is BTW— for some more lessons to be learned:) Another BTW was Virtools, that didnt make it either and never really took the us media market seriously..they had all you needed if you wanted to make rt3d content….but they never really told anyone:) today their toolsets like VRMLone from 1998 are lost in corporate purchase IP vaults… worlds.com’s to come maybe:)
possibly the unity3d nickworld which a day ago PRed 5 million users i think, will provide a roadmap for others to use their tools for creative profit projects, and usher in a time of rt3d content created in what i see as a more fair deal for content makers.
and that project was not just made by “artists-graphic artists” len…:)
i suggest you google “5D”….conferences..etc.. they just in the last 2 years sprung up as professionals from games and film..autodesk sponsored i think.. to promote what youre talking about… but they arent going to grow in numbers if they can convince their fellow creatives that theres a living wage in it…. but again, autodesk sponsored, so maybe theirs a bit of tool maker hope:)
im glad you now are enamored with the media side vs the tech side len..:) but my points have been that just because everyone has a polariod camera, does not make everyone want to make living at being a photographer, and more importantly, one must own his pictures to even be able to sell them for food.:)
most of the vr /3drt businesses that fill these blogs and press interest today, are all still believing that “everyone will use web3d” and their services… and thats why web3d has failed twice before.;(
your target demographic i fear all want to make a living to pay for the lessons they had to learn those skills..
and to get back into the metaplace of things… i think the same goes for making games:) it certainly has been for websites…maybe why geocities became myspace. which became facebook, which is now twitter…:)
the majority do what they do.. not having time to do what your business plan says they “should do”..lol we all had Legos as a Kid…but those darn Star Wars action figures kept selling more!.. and today its now only Star Wars legos that keep those danes alive:)
anyhow..L)
That’s ok, Larry. I think being removed from it is why I have perspective. My experience is that those with involvements that extend to their dinner table have too much to lose to see sometimes. I know that the things you speak of occurred, but they didn’t make a dent in the mass consumption market except for Flash and Second Life. Right now, I just want to be an assembler using the models and incorporating my work into that. I think that is exactly where most people will be who are not either 3D nuts like ourselves or gamers. It’s 1993 and everything old is new again. The hypertext business didn’t see that and TimBL took a knighthood and handed them their heads. His fans did the rest.
Two or three generations of hypermedia technical gurus, staff and even a few artists watched their entire careers go up in smoke when those gray HTML pages went up. Piss poor won because “it was easy”. It is a pop culture (even Alan Kay agrees) that drives the web. So a Buffyverse will do a whole lot better than a DollyVerse, and stars with production clout will get a lot more media coverage than you and me. If Felicia is succeeds with her machinima.com project, that will be more attention focused on sucking the third dimension out of the production and onto YouTube and MSM. We survive by anticipating that and being ready to ride the wave it generates.
Right now, Vivaty has the catbird seat in the social network mass consumption game. Darlings of the technical industry are seldom the winners if they sell to the wrong audience. Just one opinion, but today I can not only DD&G in Vivaty, I can embed it directly onto my Google blogs without any effort as well as open it from Facebook. Sure others can and others will, but that ability to put it everywhere the eyeballs go is crucial.
you need to count len.:)
recheck your eyeball hits….
you find when hits are low, no money flows….and no free effort either. but yes.. one can burn others money.:)
the only “hits” from facebook mass embeding are games len, content-not platforms or tools….really simple games yo ville/ mafia warss for example….
none of the “social” virtual worlds has any mass traction. they again live in a falacy ( give props to prok for the words meme today) that “people want to use 3d”..been to scenecaster lately:)lol ok but all these facebook babies are on borrowed time anyway, very soon facebooks bankers will want a return, and that will come easiest by charging developers for eyeballs, just as AOL did… anyone remember CDNOW? 50 million reasons to remember them..lol
masses, fun term, just want to play games, have a job, raise families, and feel connected. no technology offers this, only expressions built ON top of technology…which is why again, ALL creatives still wait for rt3d media to be made into a business and society plan they can benefit from as well.
1993 was the birth of pop VR tech from SF…As lanier finally got in 2007, (he calls himself a filmaker byw len, not a 3d nut;) the offer to creatives has not been tendered. And frankly the offer made by macromedia and kinetix in 1993 , has been slowly recinded by the online networked service meme and its TOS controls over all content made by the “masses”
unsustainable. all of it.
Unsustainable? If we would quit naval gazing and simply build for the rooms there, plenty of monied interests want in. Second Life is finally discovering the metaverse generation is full of more than just a little crap regards the grand unification in a single metaverse. They are spinning off private owner hosted servers because business wants those just predicted. Once it is a matter of private systems, we are back to VRML in terms of real integration wants: they barely want it. They want each other’s feeds. The next step is building that back into Google’s maps and that’s a slam dunk.
I don’t see a business problem here. I see a very serious competition going on. As much history as we’ve all seen go by, it is precisely like SGML: who cares. Cruel and cold but that’s the way it worked. Then XML and so on. I think things are actually going well for the technology nosing out of the fringe into the mainstream if still hard on the graphics artists. It’s d+++ hard on the musicians too. We have live gigs, jobs and whatever we can sell as writers, but hey, it’s still an exciting time to be in this business.
The difference is the graphics artists aren’t alone. The way 3D is going to grow fastest and surest is as the cheap web 3D technology becomes a wrapper for lots of other arts. It IS the album.