My friend Roo is going to moderate a panel today at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York on ‘Evolution of Games and Social Networks’, with people from Sony, Google, and Millions of Us on, and he said “What would you like me to ask them?“.

Now you know my favorite question is “What is the question that I should be asking?“, so when a friend asks it, I must oblige, and help!

Hey Roo, give them a hard time! Ask them WTF?

Why? Hear…

Online worlds are persistent, three dimensional social spaces, where people who are simultaneously present can interact, in a highly empathic and emotionally fulfilling manner. Some of the worlds have set goals, others allow unbounded fantasy, and creativity.

Social Networks are facilitators of connections among people who are personally or professionally related, directly or indirectly. The connections are typically used for casual activities, or business networking, through the facilities of the platform, or small additional modules.

My question is not necessarily new, but looks like it has to be asked again: where are the people? And my answer is: in Online Worlds!

The synchronicity of communication, the way online worlds absorb your attention completely, the collaboration in topologies that are biologically familiar to all, our limbic response to the closeness of one to another, are totally unmatched by the aseptic efficiency, and grinding bore of accepting an invite, joining a group, filling a form, sending a message, which is what fills the time on today’s social networks. In social networks the social is missing. There is no town square to share. You are watching, and feeding the urges of the machine, instead of building a life there.

To shade my judgement a little: one exception is Twitter. The rhythm, and the the pulse, and the flow of people, there emotions, needs, conversations, and activities is so different from what is going on a Facebook, for example. It is closer to online worlds’ human-centered life, and an indication in my opinion to where the ‘social’ in social networks must tend to go.

Joi Ito wrote on his blog that Creative Commons was looking forward to receive some examples of how the CC licenses helped reusing photos from Flickr. I already had in mind exactly a story like this, so it took me just a few minutes to put together an email to Melissa at Creative Commons…

I publish all my photos on Flickr with a CC-A (Creative Commons Attribution) license. As long as people credit me as the original author of my work, I am glad for them to take the photos for any possible purpose, and if they have a way to make money through it in the meantime, so much the better!

Photo of Birka island close to Stockholm

I took this photo at a boat trip a couple of hours from Stockholm in Sweden where I went for a few days with my family. These excursions are a lot of fun now in Europe, for just three-four days maybe with low cost airlines bringing you anywhere. Ryanair leaves just a few minutes of bus drive from where I live. It is so cool to be able and hop on a normal urban bus, take the plane, and an hour or two later be in a different climate, country, and culture. The fact that the tickets cost just 10 euro or so, if you plan ahead, help a lot as well!

A few months after I posted the photo, I received an email from a company compiling a travel guide of Sweden, alerting me about the fact that they wanted to include the photo in their new guide, if I agreed. I told them that I was happy, and that given the license they wouldn’t have even had to ask… Now it is funny, as I am writing this, I do not remember the name of the guide: but since they gave me credit for the photo, I know that it is enough to type in Google “david orban sweden guide birka” and yes, it comes back as the first result: Schmap Art and Entertainment, correctly credited, linked back to the Flickr photo page, and to the appropriate CC license!

An other example is the inclusion of my photos of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and physicist Eric Drexler on their respective wikipedia pages.

From my photo

to his wikipedia article:

I like to take photos of people, with or without me standing on their side and these two are among my heroes. The photos were taken and put on Wikipedia without people asking my permission, which they didn’t need, and properly crediting me on the page of the photo. The fact that the photos were both appropriately cropped, to focus on the
subject on the article, and taking me out of the picture of course is also an important positive element of the freedoms that the CC licenses automatically grant to the people reusing the pictures.

It is interesting that exactly because I was so positively moved by the pictures being taken, and that I was preparing to write up something like this, I actually managed to take a before, and after picture of the Drexler article:

before the photo

after the photo

So what is especially cool about these other screenshots? That they are a reuse squared! Because they are not the plain screenshot of the Wikipedia article, but that of the Apple Macintosh Dictionary application, which feeds itself on Wikipedia. So these are a fairly long chain of culture propagating richly, from author, to source, to application, all smoothly, given the automation afforded by the CC license!

And a final example…

All my slideshows on Slideshare are based on CC licensed Flickr photos, and themselves are also CC-A licensed. For example:

| View | Upload your own

I have a fairly personal slide style, where I have typically 10-20 slides, each with three-four words in a sentence, and one photo. I invariably choose the photos through a search on Flickr, always using advanced search and picking CC licensed photos that I can also change, and use commercially. Even if today I release my material without
asking for any payment, or even without placing Google ads on my site, I want to be sure that if I want to publish a book for sale in the future, I do not have to go back and change my images. (Hey, it is annoying that Steve Jurvetson’s photos pop up so prominently in my searches, but hey, it is not his fault, is it? You can also see that I credit the photos on the last page of my slide deck…) Without Flickr I would not be able to create these slideshows, and I would definitely be a less effective speaker (or would resort to Larry Lessig’s style of presentations, which are anything but ineffective!)

So I hope these three examples help you understand why I love Creative Commons, and why you should also always label what you create under the license of your choice.

OpenSpime is the infrastructure company for an open Internet of Things!

OpenSpime creates hardware reference platforms, and software environments for collecting, and managing information about the world around you, where you live, you work, you travel. And through the aggregation of multiple validated data streams online, it enables new ways of visualizing the data collected.

Free hardware, free software, open APIs and communication protocols. OpenSpime’s business model is about the provisioning of the SpimeID identification numbers for the trusted communication of validated data streams between spimes and the OpenSpime servers.

We will be presenting the first OpenSpime prototype hardware sensor for CO2 level detection at ETech next week, and are actively seeking funding for OpenSpime, Inc. which is being incorporated in California.

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David Orban
“Strategic Marketing Evolves – The changing role of brands in the network age”
Disintermediation is immediacy. After a hiatus of ten thousand years, during which more and more sophisticated tools were needed to overcome the lack of contact between the producers and consumers, today, with the new opportunities that the network gives us, we can go back to rely on reputation as the surest guide on which to base our transactions.

You can also download the slides, and the audio of the lecture separately if you prefer.

[Update: I also uploaded the audio of the QA session following the lecture]

Dealipedia is launching today, aiming to apply wikinomics to the collection and mashing up of information about corporate deals, including financing, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and even bankruptcies.

So many times there are announcements of interesting deals that are shrouded behind a ‘details were kept private’ veil. What Dealipedia is betting on, is that there will be a large set of parties, who will be interested in filling the blanks, and let everybody understand the details. Investors, bankers, principals, PR people will all potentially use Dealipedia as a repository and a source of information. Think ValleyWag, but less animosity, ill feelings, and more collaborative and quantitative meat to the daily gossip!

Dealipedia is a creation of Michael Robertson who is at it again, this time disrupting the closeted world of technology dealmaking, bringing into the open its details, the ‘cui prodest’, ‘whose benefit’, that is actually an essential piece of information the market should not be left without. (Robertson is a libertarian. I am sure that if he could he’d also make sure insider trading would be made legal, for example: at the end it is one of the most efficient methods for the market to learn about what insiders think!)

It is also very good to see that Dealipedia is licensing all its contributed content under a very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. What does that mean? That the data contributed to it is not sitting in a one way silo, closed away from creative uses, but that anybody can take it for mashups, the creation of visualizations, derivative second-order knowledge, and even make money off it if she wants to!

…and with proper participation in it, if you want to know how much Michael and others made from the sale of MP3.com, now you can!

I also wrote about Dealipedia briefly on the Metasocial blog.

I have been invited to hold a lesson at the California School of International Management‘s course on Strategic Marketing. The lesson will be delivered online, via Skype, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Wednesday, February 6, starting 2PM PST (11PM CET). If you would like to attend just let me know in the comments, or write me an email a tweet, or anything else that you fancy, and I will be very happy to have you with us.

During the seminar I will concentrate on analyzing the role of brands and strategic messaging in the future, drawing a parallel with what these concepts might have meant in prehistoric times, and concluding that today we have to speak with the same immediacy, and spontaneity that has formed the basis of communication then.

Thanks, Marc, for the invitation and the organization of the event!

The printed edition of the ‘Corriere della Sera‘ has an article today about the unintended side effects of the site filtering system that Vodafone put in place recently to supposedly protect minors from adult materials while browsing the web using the Vodafone Live! application suite.

As reported in Italian by Stefano, the author of Quinta’s Blog, among Italy’s most read, the censorware used by Vodafone is also impeding the access to the websites of several political parties. It is often, if not always, the case, that the dumb filters are unable to do their ill-defined jobs, and at the same time stop people using the internet in an unfettered manner to communicate.

The Italian Government has just fallen a few days ago, and the level of discussion, both among politicians, and with the voters, is intense. This is not the time to artificially restrict what people can say on a medium, like mobile phones, which in Italy is actually much more widespread than PCs!

Nowadays there is no programmer probably who doesn’t feel at home using mice and windows, and who is not glad that high level tools help in the development of rich client or web applications.

Online worlds have been attracting content creators, especially Second Life, which is famous for having started out as an empty desert, and was filled with millions of objects by its inhabitants. This however is a little different than the attitude of hackers. These have a natural tendency for self-reflection, whereas whatever they place their hands on is turned into a further tool for making new tools, to program better. An example could be the passive attitude of many users of Second Life, who lament the low quality of the debugging tools that can be used in-world. This would be never accepted by a true hacker spirit, where the quality of a debugger is especially important for the creation of highly evolved code.

We have to watch, consequently, very alertly, any attempt at luring programmers, developers, hackers, to any online world, as the one which wins their hearts will leapfrog the others.

Today IBM announced their Project Bluegrass, a virtual world in which they will immerse the Rational CASE toolset, and the Jazz collaboration platform. For the moment Bluegrass is not apparently open, so I can’t comment on it further, but the move in itself, if followed by something that people can try out and use, could be a good one.

Not a lot of people remember VPL Research these days, even if many know Jaron Lanier, the inventor of the term ‘virtual reality’. VPL Research produced and marketed at the end of the ’80s and the very beginning of the ’90s the original DataGlove, and other groundbreaking virtual reality tools. Jaron Lanier was convinced that virtual realities were necessary for making sure that the computing metaphor could advance.

And VPL in the name of the company stood for ‘Visual Programming Languages’.

Thanks to Michele for the original article!

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

There are also some videos that I shot, photos

Your comments are welcome here, or on the discussion group we created!