The home of stigmergic systems
Might be something interesting here.
"It is a very clever strategy used by nature to get colonies of insects to self-organize, tell each other where to find food, create sophisticated messaging systems and build complex architectural structures."
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Great podcast about issues where SF starts hitting philosophical issues.
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Exclusive: The LEGO Universe Trailer - Kotaku
Nice bit of video of the forthcoming Lego virtua world.
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How's this for a mash-up? Sat in my apartment in the Kaneva virtual world, watching a machinima made in Second Life, on YouTube.
Probably shouldn't judge Kaneva too early since its only in Beta, but initial impressions are:
- look and feel not much beyond SL, certainly not FF standards
- movement more like There, better than SL
- interface a bit fiddly with lots of floating menus that get in the way
- very laggy, even worse than SL, but is in Beta
- looks like its going for a fairly closed approach - ie user construction is controlled
- love the ability to paste in YouTube embed links
- extensive use of AI avatars as shop keepers. If AI avatars are going to be this prevalent then that alone should cut a few years off the Turing test, you just get used to having human looking AIs around
- you buythings through the AI avatars, that means that in a shop people cluster round the shop assistant, not the goods (as they do in SL)
- use of the web for many functions (eg adding media) actually gets in the way
- apartments are disembodied, so its teleport all the way, even more than in SL
All in all its an interesting experience but no substitute for SL. But not everyone wants/needs SL. What it probably does do though is give a good view of what Sony Home might be like. Kaneva's best bet might be to sell out to Microsoft fast to get Kaneva onto the XBOX.
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Lovely site, especially the map of the USA with states renamed to countries with similar GDP.
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This will be lovely when live. One page for every species on Earth.
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Gwyn%u2019s Home » The $20,000 Question: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
"We think a lot about the nature of the brain, and whether computational substrates can be dense enough to enable thinking within them. I know exactly how that's going down, I think SL is dreaming. It could be looked at as one collective dream." - Philip Rosedale
Cracking essay by Extropia DaSilva on AI in SL
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Zoho Creator - Online Database Application
Having got into using Google Spreadsheet this looks like a good next step - a web database.
Add this to Google's recent purchase of a PowerPoint lookalike and the web desktop looms close.
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Technology Review: Second Earth
Cracking article on the potential future merger of virtual world (Second Life et al) and "Neogeography" (Google Earth etc).
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A collection of the best shots from Google's Street Viewer service which provides ground based streetside shots to complement the aerial/orbital photography of Google Maps/Earth.
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7th Son is an audio novel that's being written by JC Hutchins with a lot of promotional interplay in Second Life. Well worth checking out.
Update - busy listening my way through this. Each of the 2 books so far is about 24 x 20 minute episodes read by the author. So far, its not brilliant but its not bad, and at least it begings to get to grips with some of the issues that GND (Genetics/Nano/Digitalisation) technologies coudl bring about.
Third book comes out in July, so I've got 2 weeks to get up to speed!
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