Intellagirl has a great post offering a taxonomy of virtual spaces. It's a nifty approach to thinking through MMOGs, Second Life, and Web 2.0 all at once. Headers include relationships with other users, document/object ownership, size of user base, persistence of content, open access, etc.
That post is towards a chapter in her upcoming book, which I'm looking forward to.
NPR's All Things Considered ran a piece on Second Life yesterday that raised some interesting points, although I don't necessarily agree with Giff Constable's likening the importance of an avatar to the rise of e-mail or his prediction that "10 years from now, everyone is going to have an avatar." I can function without e-mail, although it would be difficult to do so day to day, but I can't imagine a practical application for an avatar outside the world of VR. It may be short-sighted of me to compare the two (or perhaps even an apples-and-oranges argument), but this strikes me as akin to saying that in ten years, each of us will have our own personal logo or symbol we'll use in our daily work and school lives.
Story and audio link here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6682433
Wolf
Posted by: Wolf | December 27, 2006 at 11:25