The last blog summary was in October last year, so time for another. You can reach all the posts associated with this summary through the post archive. So what’s happened as an outcome of thinking about the cldwrld/Real World model over the three past months?
For me, the big idea was the idea that we could combine facebook with Second Life as a region or Entropia Universe as a world to create a virtual Real World. In the first case we can call it facebookdc (facebook digital country) and in the second faceworld. In each case the potential number of uses tops 400 million. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds – MindArk (the company behind Entropia Universe) signed a contract in 2007 to build a “cash-based virtual economy for China” with a population goal of 150 million from around the world.
This is a big idea because it means that all the topics I have written about pretty much since the beginning of the blog – privacy, anonymity, virtual passports, banking, what happens after virtual death, a United Nations for digital countries, fingerprint recognition for Digital Inhabitants, Digital Inhabitants themselves, freemix, using Google’s Rosy as a stand-alone translation tool, the use of [Personal] Cloud applications and so on – all can find concrete (if you’ll pardon the word) expression in a virtual Real World. So you can be sure I’ll be pressing for that to happen and offering the services of a consultant I know (ahem) to help turn it into a reality.
The idea for a possible future for digital publishing (and in a broader way knowledge networks), blogging and blog navigation continued to rumble along, based on the software from debategraph and here is an example of that.
Another thread discussed the now accepted notion that we are going to need a curator of some sort (a person or software) to help us sort out the information flying by us at high speed. My term for that activity was “sort-and-report.” I came up with the poetic term “skywriter” to describe someone who could be described in more corporate fashion as a “media information analyzer.”
Off-topic posts included climate change, the idea for “the moveforward project” which I put up as a separate blog and, of course, Haiti relief.
Well, that’s it. The next three months look to be very exciting here on “the cloud and me” and I am looking forward to developing these ideas further and coming up with new ones.
this version february 10 2010
