The American intellectual, writer and NYU professor for new media Clay Shirky explains matter-of-factly what’s happening in publishing houses worldwide (ignorance; panic), why it’s happening (the world changes) and what they can do about it (nothing but adapt and get on with their lives, doing something else).

Some parts in his article especially resonate with me because some of my clients are the very large publishers who are cought in the midde of this revolution.

I’ll copy and share huge parts of his article here because that’s what people do nowadays and the author is cool with it (over 130 people wordlwide have done the same so far and therefore spread his word, drawing attention to him and his work).

Shirky’s following observation made me laugh and sigh at the same time, because part of my job over the last 8 years was to “bring innovation” to old media structures and particularly to set up Innovation Departments for the news media:

“Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.”

Here’s his post:

Clay Shirky: “(…) The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. (…)  And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

(…)

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place.

They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. (…)

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.

That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence.

Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”

Read the whole article here: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

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Amanda Van Nuis, Enterprise Marketing Director at Linden Lab, wrote about her first virtual meeting experience with her colleagues in Second Life and about how she “wasn’t 100% convinced that working in virtual worlds really works.” It sounds like an authentic record of her experiences and some commentors have contributed little stories about how valuable immersive environments for meetings and brainstormings are for them. While it seems natural that people working in the virtual world industry use their own products in their everyday office life many people from the most innovative industries still don’t “see” how virtual meetings with third dimension add any value.

Dennis Shiao posted a list of efficiencies he’s seen with virtual office meetings (please read his article where he elaborates on every point):

1. Lower overhead to start a meeting
2. Facilitates ad hoc, spur of the moment collaboration
3. Material related to the meeting is at your fingertips (or a mouse-click away)
4. Immediacy
5. True facial expressions

I’d add another two points to that list:

6. Social bonding (by having fun)

7. Inspriration & motivation (by having fun experiences)

Karl Kapp listed some advantages of 3D environments for learning the other day and we had a discussion about the “fun” factor that’s an important ingredient in any learning situation. I believe this is true for meetings in an immersive environment, too.

In addition to the social “water cooler effect” 3D environments (and in some cases even 2.5D) add value because people are having fun with it. Here’s why.

Laughing together not only builds a better rapport and therefore improves the corporate climate, but it also motivates and inspires people. Since people tend to loosen up in virtual meetings (try not to if you’re sitting across a giant turtle – your graphics designer – or the Wizard of Oz, who happens to be your technical director) and things get a little more playful if you’re able to “magically” materialize anything you have in mind (or on your desktop). Psychologically speaking those are the basic ingredients for new ideas, group inspiration and motivation.

What’s astonishing even for me is that these effects also happen in 2.5D spaces.

Just yesterday I evaluated the Meetsee.com beta again and I invited a colleague of mine, who is working in another city. Meetsee is a virtual office solution with 2.5D or isometric views. My colleague is no geek and she refuses to use Second Life; a web browser is as far as she would go.

Usually we Skype (with and without video) but now I tried the web-based Meetsee solution with her. She was in-world within seconds after I sent her the link and scribbled a note on the virtual blackboard before we even said a word. So we have zero accessability issues here (in stark contrast to Second Life or others). We had one of the most productive meetings in a long time. It was almost as effective as our face-to-face meetings but without even leaving our desks and driving for 6 hours. And that was no thanks to Meetsee’s technical features, because the most basic stuff like whiteboard, voice- and video conference didn’t even work (it’s still in beta).

UPDATE: Their staff has seen this post and in fact fixed the video conferencing and white board feature – thanks to Nikki Santoro (Meetsee CEO)!

The reason was that we both had the sense of being there together, pointing at important information like we’d do in a real meeting room and having fun by using the emoticons to get our message across. At one point we even discussed a new layout of chairs (by moving them around together in the virtual room and try-sit on it) for our next workshop. Now that is something you can’t do in WebEx or Go2Meeting. The only thing that would have topped this would have been the true sense of proximity that you only get in 3D environments with real indivdual avatars and real three dimensions. Well, like in real life

Simple virtual office solution for classrooms, meetings, web conferences or panel discussions. If video, audio and whiteboards would work, that is. Meetsee still has to work on it’s technology and become much more reliable and stable. If you want to meet me in my offices to try it out please IM me at LaConsiliera on Skype.

Karl Kapp’s listed today some of the advantages of 3D environments (virtual worlds) for learning. Take a look at this list if someone (your boss, client) asks you why they should allow you to set up the next employee-training or any other course in a 3D world.

Although Kapp, one of TrainingIndustry.com’s 2007 “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals”, sums the advantages up pretty nicely, I’d like to add the following two aspects that in my experience had the most impact on successful and sustainable learning situations:

1) One of the most important aspects in any learning environment: fun. Having fun is the most emotional engagement you can get (and that secures sustainable learning). Students have fun in 3D environments, especially if they’re designed to include casual games or playful training situations. But the three dimensional, immersive online environment is already so much fun for youth that this alone works to your advantage.

UPDATE: Jacob Everist has a background in dealing with East Asians from living in Korea Taiwan and China and writes in his blog that “Particularly in East Asia, education is considered hard work. If something is fun, it is not taken seriously. ” Interesting aspect that could also be said about some “typical” Germans (I am German, but lived abroad a lot)

2) The water cooler effect. This is true for business trainings or meetings; studies show that the informal socializing in-between or after sessions is as important in virtual worlds as in the real world. Only that you don’t need to pay for airline tickets, hotels and catering.

My Sky Campus in Second Life: Example of a 3D learning environment with extensive multimedia capabilities (YouTube screen, 10 m high presentation screen, interactive web displays) and a recreational area with bean bags, cocktail bar and many fun features you can’t experience in real life classrooms or seminar settings

If we still missed some aspects (I added some in the comments) please comment here or in Karl Kapp’s blog!

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General Electric is running an ad featuring Augmented Reality for the masses at the Superbowl, Mini convertibles live their 3D life in magazines (as ads), Lego is selling toys with Augmented Reality boxes. I’be been posting Augmented Reality examples  a lot during the past months and one thing is for sure: it’s not just for geeks anymore. Real companies are using it to sell real goods or to save real money (Ford Ka, see my recent post with the video).

But is that a good thing? Metaverse blogger Curious Raven wondered today if “it’s too early for Augmented Reality”, drawing parallels to the virtual reality hype in the nineties (you remember the sci-fi like data-suits and and grotesque head-mouted-displays?) which was too early because the tech was not ready and disappointments great.

While I agree with Curious that the Gartner Analysts have it wrong this time, placing Augmented Reality applications in the “Technology Trigger” phase, which would mean that the technology will not be adapted by mainstream within the next ten years, I don’t think that it’s too early to for Mixed Reality for the masses. Why? Because some usable products already exist (see below) and because virtual reality never came in range of being accessible to even the greatest nerds (exept those working in research). And following the highly accepted Gartner Hype Cycle again, that places the mainstream adoption of Mixed Reality in the 2-10 year range. I personally think it’s well below 5 years.

Why do I think that the brilliant Gartner analysts missed something that I see in the near future? Because sometimes technologies get a burst from a totally unexpected area – for AR I think that is “camera and Internet equipped mobile phones for the masses”. Because anybody, from kids to DINKS, can use their cell phone to log-on and take pictures or videos anytime. Meaning: With an ihone or G1 Android phone anybody can aim their buitl-in digicam  at a printed symbol in a paper magazine and they’ll suddenly see a Mini convertible driving around. Without a computer anywhere near! Well at least early adopters are able to install those apps at the moment – wait till xmas, and you’ll be the one getting a card enhanced with AR.

Ok, let’s see all these great examples:

Here’s a collection of interesting Augmented Reality examples in entertainment, research and business by blog NOTCOT.org (Mini, Xmas card, Lego, FLARToolkit etc.)

One recent and outstanding example is missing in that collection: The General Electric campaign that puts “a digital hologram in your hand”. I call that “Augmented Reality for the masses”. Here’s the video of what you can do:

And here are the 5-step instructions to play with the windmills and more in your very own palm of your hand (all you need is a printer and a webcam).

Wikitude: Very useful application, available for G1 Android phones:

Sony’s virtuel EyePet, living in your living room (coming soon)

UPDATE: I forgot another great business example: Ray-Ban offers Augmented Reality to sell sunglasses online

Kzero's map of virtual worlds company headquarters

Download: KML RSS | Create a Map

If the map doesn’t load please go directly to the MAPme site: Virtual world HQ’s on MAPme.com by Kzero

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Virtual Worlds Management today released its updated Youth Worlds Analysis. Based on comprehensive research available through Virtual Worlds News, we’ve found that there are now over 200 youth-oriented virtual worlds live, planned, or in active development

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. Follow me on Friendfeed for more up-to-date news and projects regarding virtual worlds, mixed reality, social web and how humans deal with the metaverse of the future.

But I had an idea: Since some of my English speaking friends would actually miss my blog, I integrated a “Google Translate” Widget in my German blog so you can have it all with one mouse-click. Try it out – it really works! Those of you using Google Reader have the option to instantly translate anything anyway. I also transferred all articles to the other blog so it’s all in one place now.

I might cross-post some HowTo articles in the future so I’ll keep this blog up and running as an archive. Something like “How to Move from Tumblelog to WordPress, from Blogger to WP and from WordPress back to Blogger while keeping all your posts” (that last one was a tough one, I can tell you!)

Bye for now,

Gaby aka Consiliera

I am not a gamer or at least I was never a gamer before. Although I am having fun in Second Life, the 3D virtual world built by its own residents, I see my time in-world mostly as part of my normal work load, because I am a Metaverse expert and need to expericence virtual worlds first hand to be a useful advisor and trainer. But this year two things happened: I got myself a Wii console with Balanceboard (to stay fit and have my very own bowling alley in the living room) and for a couple of weeks now I am seriously considering buying a Sony PS3 console just because of PlayStation Home (ok and the Blu-ray player is nice, too). I probably won’t do it because I still don’t like playing video games but what strikes me is that after all I’ve seen from the PS Home beta version I want to meet people this way!

The avatars look great, they’re highly customizable (albeit human – well I can be a flying dragon in Second Life anytime) and the body movements look much better than in SL. And it doesn’t seem to be as difficult to meet people because the area doesn’t stretch out over thousands of square kilometers (like the huge SL grid). It’s like a bar that’s never deserted – 24/7. And you get to meet people from all over the world, too. Ok you have that in SL all the time; but it can be difficult to find everybody. And who wants to look an armless Mii figurine or one of the new cartoony Xbox LIVE avatars? Let’s face it, we like looking human.

Easily customize your avatar. You don’t need to be a Photoshop expert and don’t have to pay extra (like in Second Life). Ok, you do have to pay for fancy cloths in Home as well – that’s the same in any virtual world.

Jack Buser says gamers don’t hang around in arcades (in real life) – that’s just not the way we do things today. Gaming is entertainment, like watching TV – it is a way to beat boredom. If we don’t have anything better to do and there are no friends around, we like to hang out with others nevertheless – be it (in the games) with NPCs (Non Player Characters), who are only software-controlled extras, or with other gamers, known to us only by their handle and score records (or in case of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft by the actions of the roles they’re playing).

The whole point seems to be that people more often than not like hanging out with other people. We are a social species – we even die if we don’t have contact to other human beings, after all. And if we have the opportunity, we very much like to play together. More than one study revealed:  Gaming is not for loner’s and gamers are more social than non-gamers. Oh, and we sure do like decorating our own apartment and invite our friends.

And so I guess that’s what’s so intriguing about Home:

• we can hang out virtually anytime we don’t have anything better to do
• people we meet have the same knowledge about the game we do (no newbie challenges)
• if we’re up to it we can play with people we actually got to know a little, because we didn’t just shoot each others brains out but laughed or danced together (see the video below)

That’s what people do if you give them the opportunity…

It’s hang out on-demand. And it’s definitely a social virtual world – a shared virtual environment.

I think all other consoles will follow and offer similar hangouts for their users. And I hope that we’ll find a way to have a meta-friendlist some day: a buddylist with friends from all kinds of virtual worlds, game consoles and flat web social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and the likes). Some kind of interoperability, so we can at least communicate (IM) with all our friends, in whatever world or network they prefer to hang out. I am not talking about data portability here – Pixelsebi blogged his detailed thoughts about that here – just about a standardized mechanism that automatically collects all my friends/connections from all platforms/networks where I have a public account (like Google’s SocialGraph).

And I am going to get me a PS3 – what the heck. It’s X-Mas after all

• Official PlayStation Home homepage
• Interview with PlayStation Home Director Jack Buser on Gamasutra
• Older article: PS Home – Just for gamers or a huge 3D social network with a pre-installed user base?
• Update: Pixelsebi’s screencast about “Distributed Social Networking” (the first necessary step towards the scenario I described above)

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We’re seeing some real nice developments that are important for the use of virtual worlds as a place of collaboration and any other social function: non-verbal communication like facial expressions (a smile, surprise, scorn) or other body language like a nod of your head has been missing. Now sl.vr-wear.com offers a beta viewer for Second Life that uses a camera to track your head and expressions and acts them out with your avatar.

Up to date people adopted various new ways of social behaviour in immersive 3D worlds like Second Life, but the point is that body language and sudden emotions on your face are unconscious behaviour and while typing “lol” is second nature to most of use by now, it’s still different if you’re suddenly appaled or delighted.

sl.vr-wear.com supposedly shows immediately – and therefore genuinely – these kinds of emotions on your avatar’s face as well. All you need is a webcam and their special SL viewer, available for Windows and MacOS.

Found via: http://www.massively.com/2008/12/01/face-and-head-tracking-for-second-life-avatars/

UPDATE: I couldn’t get it to work on my MacBook Pro and I would like to know if anybody else has had more luck on a Mac. But I found this Seesmic video showing how simple it’ll work (once it works):

VRW – SL Viewer mod – 0.99 beta 1 public release