Go to the Computerworld Tool Talk blog to read the write-up and listen to the podcast of Sunday’s Copper Robot session:
While technology blogs nitpick the iPad over missing features and inadequate specs, they’re missing the point of the device, which is to create a tool that people love to use.
"From a techie point of view, one could say, oh, my gosh, it didn’t have this feature, it didn’t have that feature. And I think a lot of the blogosphere has gone along with that line of thinking. But I think [Apple] is after a different market entirely," said ArminasX Saiman, an Apple enthusiast and IT manager for a large multinational company.
Me (left), Armi, and Joe
The iPad is designed to appeal to people who don’t know much about computers at all — the crowd that has "12:00" blinking perpetually on their VCRs. "Those people don’t have a hope of running a desktop machine. There are a lot of those people, and I think that’s the group this is really targeted at," Saiman said.
Next on Copper Robot, we’re talking about the Apple iPad with the two of the best minds and Apple observers in Second Life: Joe Miller, a/k/a Joe Linden, VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab; and Second Life entrepreneur and blogger ArminasX Saiman.
WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 31, 6 pm Pacific Time/Second Life Time
WHERE: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast later on this Web site.
Joe (left) and Armi
The iPad is Apple’s answer to low-priced PC netbooks. It’s a tablet computer with a 10″ display and a multitouch screen like the iPhone. It runs a Web browser, plays videos and music, displays e-books, and functions as a gaming console. It also includes an office suite, and runs all the applications in the App Store, with its own software development kit to allow developers to write more. You’ll be able to buy it, priced starting at $499, in two months.
Apple supporters say it will reinvent computing the way the iPhone reinvented cell phones. Apple detractors shrug and say the device isn’t much, it’s just a big iPod touch. Join us Sunday when we’ll decide what’s really going on.
About our guests: As VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab, Joe oversees the technology strategy for Linden Lab. Previously, he oversaw all of engineering, including operations and viewer development, which included the viewer used by tens of thousands of Second Life Mac users (including yours truly). He headed up deployment of SL Voice (without which the Copper Robot would not be possible — well, I suppose we could do it in mime). Joe’s a Mac user himself, and follows Apple quite closely. He’s been a registered Apple developer since 1983, before the first Mac. He’s even met Steve Jobs.
Armi is author of the popular Second Effects blog, and proprietor of the particle effects store Electric Pixels. Armi keeps his first life and Second Life separate, as so many of us do, so I don’t know a lot about him, and I can tell you even less. But I do know this: He knows a great deal about Apple products and business technology. He was one of our guests when we had a roundtable discussion about Apple’s spring announcements last year.
Hope to see you Sunday. Bring your questions and opinions, this will be more of an open discussion than our usual interview format.
AM Radio is a well-known SL artist. I’ve heard of his work for the whole three years I’ve been in SL, but I’ve never been moved to check it out myself until recently. A friend compared AM’s Second Life builds to paintings. AM’s builds don’t do anything, but they’re beautiful, my friend noted. He also noted that AM uses creative building techniques to create infinite landscapes and brooding skies, both of which are difficult to do in SL.
Cory Doctorow got the idea for his latest novel, Makers, during the economic meltdown that started the decade. He released it during the meltdown at the end of the decade. And he wrote it during the boom in the middle.
“I wrote it as a parable about the dotcom collapse, and specifically the aftermath in San Francisco. Because there was this amazing thing that happened when the money went away in the Bay Area,” Cory said in an interview. “It really seemed like one day there was an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around the city, and the next day it just vanished. I remember walking down Van Ness [Avenue, in San Francisco] one day, somewhere near 18th Street, and passing a guy who had 50 Aeron chairs and five boxes of dotcom T-shirts on the street. He had a sign up that said, ‘Make Me An Offer.’ He was literally folding up his company and going back to the midwest that day, as soon as he sold his Aeron chairs.”
But the money running out didn’t put a stop to the creativity.
Tor.com has graciously agreed to let me write up science-fiction related Copper Robot interviews and post them there, which will help bring Copper Robot to the attention of their large audience, and also spread the good word about Second Life.
I’m going to be blogging on other subjects for them as well. I’m very pleased to be blogging at Tor.com, a blog which I’ve enjoyed reading since its inception a year or two ago. Tor.com blogs about science fiction and related subjects, and they understand that “related subjects” can be a pretty broad area. Also, I’ve known Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who oversees Tor.com, for nearly half my life now, a thought which I find disturbing, because it actually doesn’t seem longer ago than last week when we met.Update, Saturday 1/23:Patrick says: “I don’t oversee Tor.com, I just buy the fiction. Pablo Defendini runs the place.”
I do encourage you to bookmark Tor.com and read it regularly, but if you’d rather not do that, I’ll continue posting updates about Copper Robot here, as well as in the Second Life group, mailing list, Twitter account, etc. — see the sidebar for those links. I also post Copper Robot updates and more on my personal blog, Mitch Wagner’s Blog. By the way, I came up with the name for my personal blog all on my own, I didn’t focus-group it or anything. And I post pointers to all my Internet activity on @MitchWagner on Twitter. I’m all over the Internet, baby. I’m like a brother-in-law who always wants to borrow money; wherever you go, there I am.
Gaetano Mosca noted the tendency of an elite group to form in any organization–what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The elite wields some combination of power and influence, more or less of each depending on the setting. In the US Senate, senior senators have power over things like committee appointments. The parents who really call the shots at PTA meetings may not sit on the PTA board at all, but have considerable influence over the faculty, staff, and other parents. (And then there’s this comic but terrifying story of a bare-knuckles political battle among department store Santas…)
The same Iron Law holds true of user communities. Over time, a subset of customers emerge who participate regularly in user group meetings, discussion forums, the comments sections of blogs, groups in social media channels, and other channels of face-to-face and electronic communication. Because vendors are interested in feedback, this group of notables get increasing attention from product managers, product marketers, and the like. Unless the company takes deliberate steps to mitigate the Iron Law of Oligarchy, a small and often unrepresentative sample of users will wield disproportionate influence over the vendor’s thinking about products and services.
Second Life is an extreme case of how you can develop a very happy group of customers, and still fail miserably at reaching a wider audience. Some businesses are comfortable with that outcome, as long as the customer base stays loyal, and the business stays profitable. Most would be terrified to discover that their best customers are, in subtle ways, holding them back. I can’t say for sure that the Second Life notables are the reason why the UI is still klunky, and the useful content is hard to find, but I definitely have my suspicions.
It’s a nice theory, but it suffers from the main fault of most outside analyses of Second Life problems: The author didn’t do research. His evidence is thin. He doesn’t have any experience with Second Life, he comes right out and says so upfront, and he didn’t talk to people with Second Life experience either. He read an article by someone else who did do the research, and also read the comments on that article.
New World Notes’s Wagner James Au is more charitable than I, he says Grant is half-right:
To a significant degree, the distinct tenor was active and almost angry resistance to the features that might make Second Life easier to learn, and more accessible to the tens of million who regularly play virtual worlds, and the 10+ million who downloaded the SL software, but found it too intimidating and confounding. As one reader put it succinctly, “Don’t dumb down things for the riff raff.”
But Grant is only half right. For every Second Life user who could scarcely care less if SL fails to go mainstream (even if that ultimately leads to SL’s decline), there’s a plethora of content creators, educators, enterprise users, and many more who want Second Life to get big, and indeed, have a deep personal and professional stake in seeing that happen. (Including, well, me.) Consequently, Second Life’s userbase also devotes more energy and effort to growing and improving, and defending itself from outside critics, than just about any other Internet product. That’s a rare and precious thing.
Second Life has a cadre of users who seem to hate everything that Linden Lab does, and complain bitterly about every change. Most of the service’s users seem content to shut up and use Second Life. If they get dissatisfied, they don’t complain much, they just stop logging in.
Some of the most vocal complaints seem justified, but many of them are just silly. For the silly variety, see the first comment on this post — for Pete’s sake, he’s a new employee introducing himself, don’t start complaining right away! It must be hard to do customer service for Linden Lab, the group of users who complain loudly about everything must make it hard for management to find the complaints that actually should be listened to.
I’ve seen the opposite of the Iron Law of Oligarchy at work. Twenty years ago, I was extremely active on an online service called GEnie. Owned by General Electric, GEnie was a market leader in the early 90s, the period of three years or so before the Internet really took off in 1994, when consumers mostly connected their computers over proprietary online services, including GEnie, CompuServe and AOL.
Like Second Life, GEnie had a small but fiercely loyal user base. But GEnie management had a history of hostility to its most loyal users. In an era when online services charged hourly rates for usage, GEnie launched a pay-one-price, all-you-can-eat service plan, and then management complained when users took advantage of it and stayed connected a long time. What did the management expect, anyway?
GEnie management commissioned a shiny new Windows user interface — Windows was new then — and ignored vocal criticism from existing users who said the new client software was crap.
GEnie management consistently behaved as if its existing, loyal customers really didn’t understand the service, and the existing customers’ needs were hostile to the needs of the millions of new customer who would come into the service any day now.
GEnie alienated its existing customers, and the anticipated new customers never came.
In 1992, GEnie was the second largest online service in the world, competing hot and heavy with CompuServe. AOL was a distant third, and the Internet was still only being used by a small group of researchers. Over the course of the next eight years, AOL bought CompuServe and then Time-Warner, the Internet took over the world, and GEnie — whose management thought its existing customers were idiots — shut down on Jan. 1, 2000. GEnie is now pretty much forgotten.
Second Life has a lot of problems, but its most loyal customers — even the ones who complain about everything — are not among them. They are the service’s greatest asset. To Linden Lab’s credit, they seem to understand this. From what I understand, the company plans a lot of changes to relaunch the service over the next six months. By summer, I think we’ll know for sure whether Second Life has a bright future, or whether it will follow GEnie and die the long, slow death of obsolete online communities.
Our next guest on Copper Robot is novelist Jonathan Lethem, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the MacArthur “genius grant.” Lethem is author of Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn. His latest novel, Chronic City, features a fictionalized version of Second Life. We’ll talk with Jonathan about Second Life, books, writing, Brooklyn, and more.
WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 17, 6 pm Pacific Time/Second Life Time
WHERE: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast later on this Web site.
Lethem’s best-known novels put a fantastic spin on contemporary life in Brooklyn, where he was born and lived much of his life. Motherless Brooklyn is a funny and poignant story about a petty criminal with Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder who solves the murder of his beloved boss. Fortress of Solitude is a realistic coming-of-age novel about a boy growing up in Brooklyn around 1970, that becomes a fantasy novel when the boy discovers a magic artifact that gives him superpowers.
In his latest novel, Chronic City, Lethem goes across the river to Manhattan, to tell the story of Chase Insteadman, a directionless former child star living on residuals from his 80s TV show. Chase meets up with Perkus Tooth, a half-mad pop-culture critic, and they forge a peculiar friendship around marijuana, hamburgers, and Tooth’s bizarre theories. A fictionalized version of Second Life is important to the novel. In Chronic City, Second Life is called “Yet Another Life,” and it fits in with a major theme of the novel, which is that none of the characters know what’s real and what isn’t. I loved Chronic City, and reviewed it here. Also, Wagner James Au interviews Lethem about the Second Life connection.
Much of Lethem’s work is science-fictional. Gun With Occasional Music is a hard-boiled detective story featuring talking animals, made intelligent using “evolution therapy.” Amnesia Moon takes place in a post-apocalyptic America, and Girl In Landscape tells the story of a colonist on another planet.
See you Sunday for what’s sure to be a fascinating conversation.
Paisley Beebe, the charming and delightful host of the Second Life program Tonight Live, interviews Yours Truly about the Copper Robot program, the state of journalism (it’s bad — remember you heard it here first) and my future plans after leaving InformationWeek for the wonderful world of self-employment.
I’m the first guest, watch it here:
The entire experience of being on Tonight Live was great. I enjoyed talking with the staff, and participating in the process they have for getting all the Second Life and Skype hookups to work correctly to create a smooth-running show.
However, I had mixed feeling about the interview itself. I had somehow given Paisley the impression that I’m going into PR, which is only partly true. I expect to be consulting in Internet marketing, which is, I suppose, a kind of PR. And I do expect to do some work for PR agencies. But I don’t expect PR to be my primary focus going forward. And I do expect to keep doing tech journalism, for as long as I can keep at it.
I also said something that I don’t expect will win me many friends in the PR community. Earlier in the program, I’d said that journalism is dying as a business. None of this is new or particularly controversial: Newspapers are closing, Web advertising is evaporating, jobs are disappearing rapidly. I added that I don’t know how much of a future PR has, given that PR people don’t have many journalists to talk to.
I know many PR people say that talking to journalists is not the main part of their job. On the other hand, the tone of those discussions, which I’ve only witnessed from the outside, indicates to me that maybe it is the main part of the PR job, but many PR people would like to change that.
Join us on the next Copper Robot program for a conversation about avatars. The movie Avatar is cleaning up at the box office. Those of us in Second Life are familiar with avatars–they’re the faces that we show the virtual world. But how do they relate to our physical identities?
WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 3, 6 pm Pacific Time/Second Life Time
WHERE: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the playback later on this Web site.
What is the relationship between our physical identities and our Second Life avatars? Pick one:
None. It’s called “Second Life” because nothing we do or say in-world has any relationship to the physical world. It’s another life, separate from the one we lead in the atomic world.
Or total. Our Second Life avatars are simply the extensions of our physical identities.
The longer we spend in Second Life, the more complex the question appears, and the less satisfactory the two extreme, simple answers seem to be.
We’ll discuss these issues with two of Second Life’s leading avatars and the people behind them:
Kim Smith (SL: Rissa Maidstone), is an old friend of the Copper Robot. She’s co-founder of World2Worlds, the company that provides the venue, media streaming, and priceless production help with this program. World2Worlds consults with enterprise businesses, governments, and other organizations on putting on virtual worlds events, applications and programs. Prior to World2Worlds, she had a long career with positions of responsibility in technology training, engineering, and public works.
Harper Beresford (RL: Jennifer Grace Dawson) is business manager of SL clothing vendor RFyre, and author of the blog A Passion for Virtual Fashion. She’s been active on virtual worlds since the text-based MUDs of the early 90s, and has a masters degree in English with a partial Ph.D. in cultural anthropology.
By the way, alert readers will note that I called Kim primarily by the name she uses in the physical world, and Harper primarily by her Second Life name. That’s how I think of them–and I think that’s part of the discussion.
To get you started, you might want to listen to this episode of the Studio 360 podcast, it’s about Avatar the movie, and avatars, and it includes interviews with Avatar director James Cameron, as well as Felicia Day, star of the Web sitcom The Guild, about a group of obsessive online gamers. Copper Robot interviewed Felicia and her Guild colleagues in April. Also interviewed is an expert on Internet avatars; he describes Facebook personas as “avatars.” I’m not sure I buy that they’re avatars in the same way that our SL identities are avatars. We can talk about that Sunday.
Hope to see you there!
Update 1 pm: The blog Metaverse Journal looks at “Avatar: The film, the idea and the word,” noting that the major world religions have the idea of avatars at their centers: Our bodies are not ourselves, our spirits are our true selves, and our bodies merely avatars in the physical world.
That suggests an image: Our Second Life avatars are puppets, manipulated by our physical bodies, which are also puppets, manipulated by our true selves.
What gets me about cretins like this is that (a) they don’t bother to do any research and (b) they don’t even have the decency to hide their lack of research. They’re very upfront about the lack of research they did. It’s like they don’t even know that failing to do research is something to be ashamed of.
The fact is, Second Life requires an pretty intense amount of time investment. Admittedly, I’ve only spent limited time “inworld,” but the time I did spend was mostly wasted trying to figure out how not to walk in circles and how to find anything but my feet to look at. In otherwords, unlike other “social” platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Second Life isn’t exactly the easiest to use. You need to put in the time to figure out how it works, and to find your own “inworld” niche. And even when you do, I’d estimate you’d need to spend a good hour to two hours at a time time really get anything meaningful out of your experience.
“I’ve only spent a limited time inworld,” he says.
If I wrote an article about Afghanistan, but had only spent “a limited time” in Afghanistan, and hadn’t talked to anybody who’s spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, I’d at least be smart enough to try to keep quiet about it.
This seems to be the standard for Second Life journalism. I’m not surprised to see this kind of thing at TechCrunch, which sometimes does great journalism but often shoots from the hip too. But I expect better from the BBC, which relies on two-year-old reporting for its research.
Update 11:11 am: I had some difficulty posting this — I mistyped the HTML for the blockquote, which made the formatting funny, and in the course of correcting that, I accidentally double-posted this. As a matter of fact, I’ve spent days configuring this and my personal blog. Blogging “requires a pretty intense amount of time investment.” It “isn’t exactly the easiest” thing to do. You “need to put in the time to figure out how it works.” I guess that means blogging has no future. Somebody let Arianna Huffington know about that.
Listen to the Copper Robot interview with Tamra Hayden, singer and star of Second Life and Broadway. Tamra headlined on Broadway in Les Miserables and Cabaret, and has toured the US in plays including Phantom of the Opera, and Fiddler On The Roof. We talked about her life and career, and making music in Second Life and on the Internet.
Tamra grew up in Littleton, Colorado. Music runs in her family. “My great-grandmother was a one-woman band. She literally had the harmonica on a little harness hooked to a guitar, and a foot on a drum,” Tamra said.
Tamra’s grandmother could “play the stride piano like nobody’s business” with her left hand, while also playing marimba with three mallets in her right hand, and singing along.
Tamra started making music herself early on, learning to play the accordion at age five.
She dreamed of Broadway from an early age. “As I started telling people that I wanted to play Cosette on Broadway, they laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right, you’re from Denver, Colorado, how are you gong to do that?’ So I stopped telling people the dream because they’d squash it. And lo and behold I got to audition for Cosette and I got to play it. It was an amazing dream come true.”
She came to New York in the 90s, got roles on Broadway, and has supported herself as an actor and singer that whole time, except for a brief stint making and selling her own jewelry.
She started singing in Second Life more than two years ago, and found it very different from her other experiences. “It’s a huge difference and it took me a while to adapt to it,” she said. It’s physically more demanding. In a real-life performance with an orchestra, she takes breaks between songs, but in Second Life, she sings the same material straight through. “It’s very vocally challenging. I’ve learned to pace myself,” she said. She mixes genres to stay fresh–Broadway singing is intense but folk music gives her throat a break.
I asked her how she gets energy back from an audience she can’t see or hear, and that’s giving feedback in text chat alone.
She said, “If people are talking in text, I know that they’re involved and they’re engaged,” adding, “But I find I’m not needy that way. I could sing to an empty room. I just sing the songs I like and I’d be happy. But it’s more fun when other people are there who are actually enjoying it, so I do actually rely on people talking at me and commenting [in text chat].”
She said, “What I like about singing in Second Life is it’s a very intimate situation. There could be five people there, there could be 89 people, but it’s still a very intimate reality. I’m in the comfort of my home, which is really nice for me, I don’t have to be dressed up, and I can just talk to people who are in the room.
“I can see their avatars. I like that I can see something that represents who they are. Even though it’s not them, and even though it might not look anything like them, I get a sense of something about them. But I get more of a sense of them by what they say to me and how they react to me.
“I’ve thought about broadcasting out beyond and I know other people do, but what keeps me from doing that is I feel that I’m going to lose a sense of who I’m singing to. If I’m standing in front of a crowd of 30,000 people, I can only see the first couple of rows. I can’t see who’s beyond in a sea of black, but I know that they’re there and I can see that they’re there. But if I’m singing out to an Internet of strange people that I don’t know and who aren’t talking back to me I feel it could be a little strange.”
Tamra is making another big career transition, into independent music. Her new album, I Believe In The Fire, is now available on her Web site.
Singing as an indie musician is different from musical theater. In musical theater, she’d get a part and be told what to sing, and the producers would handle fans and marketing. But as an indie musician, that’s all her responsibility. “I have to gather the fans, I have to put it together and I’m finding it a little tricky and difficult, because it’s a different muscle that feels difficult to use.”
She finds Second Life helpful, learning from marketing and fan clubs in Second Life how to do same thing in real life.
Another thing she’s learned from Second Life: How to handle technology. She handles her own Internet streams while she’s singing. Her great-grandmother the one-woman band, simultaneously playing harmonica, guitar, drum, and singing, would be proud.
Tamra said she finds music to be its own reward.
“If someone asks me nicely I’ll sit down and sing for them. I love to sing. I had a voice teacher who said, ‘Never sing for free,’ but it’s already too late. As a matter of fact, I’m singing to honor her–for free. I love her and they asked if I would sing at this dinner for her and I was, like, ‘Yes–but I can’t wait to tell her.’”
Tamra also talked about how to stay fresh performing the same role over and over again, playing Hodel in Fiddler On The Roof opposite acting and music legend Theodore Bikel as Tevye, resources for Internet musicians, and how to get a start singing in Second Life.
