The Clever Zebra Blog

Judy was kind enough to point me to this amazing list of healthcare and science related virtual world projects. It's amazing just how much is going on in that space!

I've been engaged on Twitter with a few folks as I wrestle with explainging why Second Life's content creation and scripting flexibilty is important to a group of non virtual world folks. The challenge is to avoid the curse of knowledge, and make a concrete, easily understood statement. No easy task.

Here's what I have now. If you have suggestions I'd love to hear them!

I can't tell you any more than Amanda has in her blog post, but yes, those are Clever Zebra buildings you can see in the new Linden Lab Second Life behind the firewall product. Very exciting stuff!

We're already recommending this for one client, and I think the potential of a fully working Second Life installed behind the firewall is amazing.

Just think about what that means for the possibility of fully immersive, rock solid events...

It's practically blasphemous to even suggest that corporations should give up face to face meetings, but they should. Like it or not, this is not the time to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on physical meetings when there are rich, viable and practical alternatives.

I'm not suggesting face to face is without value. I am suggesting that for the vast majority of corporate meetings, including conferences, exhibitions, team meetings and training, it's irresponsible, and wasteful.

A little while back I talked about how virtual events could evolve beyond mimics of the physical, and effectively put aside such considerations as time and geography and use other online formats such as the web, podcasting and social tools to become something better suited to the way we live our lives online. We've decided to put our money where our mouths are and experiment with vBusiness Expo in this way.

Over the last couple of weeks I've seen successful demonstrations of both OpenSim and Wonderland virtual worlds as on demand services using Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform. Here's the business model I've been playing with, feel free to run with it...

Virtual Worlds for Business Q2 passed 2000 downloads over the weekend. I think it's important to note that information still appears to be the #1 goal for those pushing virtual worlds within their organizations. This book does not have one single major blog or news outlet linking to it and it has passed 2000 downloads in a just a month or so! I'll be working on the Q3 edition starting this week.

Here are a couple of things I've learned since publishing this report, and a few thoughts on it's future:

One of my goals is to make our events "better than life". I know that will rile some folks, but that's OK. I really think virtual events can be better organized, have better content, be more engaging with better networking and learning opportunities and more valuable than physical events. Not to mention greener, more efficient and less stressful!

There are extremely good arguments for mimicking how we handle physical events in the virtual world. The most obvious is that giving new users (and old..) familiar points of reference, clues to what they should be doing, works. When we see rows of seats in front of a stage, we know where we're supposed to sit. We know we're supposed to hush down when the presentation starts and we know that polite whispers about the content are appropriate. We expect virtual world conferences to follow similar time, location and content analogies also.