Blog Restyle

Here's a small update. Over at the main MindBlizzard website I've installed Joomla 1.5 and worked hard on the design. Last night I tweaked a bit and rebuild the Joomla template to replace my blogger template. Here's a snapshot, but off course, you already see the new template at work (unless you're reading the feed)

MindBlizzard statistics update

I've talked with a number of people on how hard it is to keep blogging. Since December 07 I've had a hard time keeping up with blogging at the pace I did before, and it showed in my technorati ratings. The positive thing is that the number of unique visitors is steadily going up again. Thanks folks for reading my thoughts.

MindBlizzard Belgiums' Finest

The MindBlizzard crowd is getting more and more international by the day. Last week I received a call from Belgium requesting to put up a feed of this blog in their Second Life space.

So MindBlizzard is one of Belgium's Finest blogs (be it that I write from the Netherlands) and they've put me up next to the Official Linden Blog. Thanks Frans!

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Belgiums%20Finest/128/128/0/

Feed Out - Feed in

Every morning I wake up I stumble towards the coffee maker for a cup of coffee, then turn on my screen to have a look at my launchpad, a netvibes portal. Default tab is metaverse news.

After several weeks, or months of producing glitchy links 3pointD has been removed from my startpage. A great blog has died. Another blog I removed was Metaversed.com. Sad but true, it no longer produces the information I'm interested in.

At this moment there's only one blog that came to mind in replacing these two: Roy Cassini's Digado (Digital Adaption) who has a great blog with a broad interest in the metaverse with a focus on the marketing side of life.

So, two feeds out on my daily starting page, one blogfeed in. Means there's an empty spot. Which blog should fill that empty space?

Also, a number of additions have made it to my Del.icio.us list and will appear in my blogroll (once I fixed the max count in the template) on the left (if you use IE):

• Meta Live
• Happy Creations
• Metaplaces (NL)
• SLAndreaMedia (Fr)
• iVinnie

1st Metaverse Meetup - Amsterdam

At exactly 0.00 I returned from Amsterdam where I attended the first Metaverse Meetup (Amsterdam Edition) in "De Balie" which was initiated by Joja Dhara and Ze Moo.

As this was a first meetup, apropriately themed "Meet the Avatar", the most timeconsuming event was the introduction round, but on the other hand it was nice to know who was who. We saw representatives from several MDC's such as Jeroen Frans, Executive Director of the Vesuvius Group (the guys that brought us Google in SL), Damian Simmons of Lost in the Magic Forest (Content, Essent, Aegon) and Up the Vortex (blog), and on the corporate present there was 'moi' for Sogeti, and people from ING (Our Virtual Holland), KPN and Philips Design, researchers from EPN, bloggers like Roy Cassini from Digado and excellent freelancers such as Ollie Kubrick from Unreal Design.

And off course, Bart DutchX, Founder of the Dutch Echange was present. I seem to run into him at about every metaverse related event these days. The Linden Lab banking ban doesn't seem to affect his business, as it is still expanding and they're hiring new people and adding new payment methods continuously.

As it was the first meetup I won't do an assesment of the contents of the meetup, as it was primarily a networking event tonight. I hope we'll get to discuss hot metaversal topics in the future.

Sogeti Kicks Off in Second Life

Earlier this evening I was present at the Sogeti Netherlands Kick Off party 2008 in the Heineken Music Hall. Over 2000 colleagues filled the hall to the max.

This years' kick off was titled Sogeti 2.0 and the keywords 'innovation' and 'participation'. Sogeti Netherlands is one of the leading IT companies in the Netherlands, so off course we used lots of web 2.0 stuff in the presentations. First of all, Sogeti CEO Jeroen Versteeg started the kick off from Second Life.

Contrary to previous years the CEO speech was not prepared in advance but was user generated as colleagues were asked not to turn off their phones but instead sms their topics for the keynote which generated the tagcloud below:

Menno van Doorn and Sander Duivestein of the Sogeti VINT research institute lifeblogged the event at the Vint.Sogeti blog (in Dutch) and a group of 32 Young Professionals who are currently at the Ohio University Without Boundaries (who also have a very strong SL presence) were plugged in through webstream and Second Life.

One of the fact-parts of the show was the financial and performance speech. We've had a great year and Sogeti Netherlands has grown 18% in 2007, outperforming every other Sogeti and Capgemini SA groupmembers by miles.

Right after closing the show, CEO Jeroen Versteeg took some time to chat with the Young Professionals in Second Life.

The SLord moves in mysterious ways

2008 holds a promise...

That was about the last line of my previous blogpost. And it does. One of the most promising new startups is Clever Zebra, an initiative by master builder Lordfly Digeridoo and the guys from Metaversed and others (among which a bit of Sogeti).

But aside from this promise, there is something funny going on which makes me think the SLord moves in mysterious ways:

Clever Zebra, Stupid Metaversed?

Although the Clever Zebra project has my sincere sympathy, there's a thing nagging me, and that's Metaversed. Early 2007 57 Miles was blogging like crazy on the Metaverse, doing great stuff and turned it into a business. A sponsored blog with sponsored events. That's when trouble came to town. First there was a break-up with Prokofy Neva on the Second Rant, and now Metaversed is going down to provide space for Clever Zebra. I wonder how the Metaversed Sponsors will feel about this. What will happen to the MMI, the Metanomics and the Virtual Business Innovators. Projects like the Grid Safari and the Geek Meets weren't long lived either.

Onders Skall writes:

How can you close Metaversed?
We covered business in virtual worlds like nobody else. There wasn't a better place to go for coverage of this stuff. We just loved it.

Along the way Nick and I compiled a huge amount of information about business in virtual worlds. We studied the phenomenon like few have ever had the opportunity to, and our imaginations were constantly ignited. More and
more of our days were spent discussing what could and should be done in virtual worlds to help business. We began designing plans to change things and make them better.

We soon realized that we'd rather create products people want to talk about instead of talking about products others were creating. The thing is, you can't often make things happen by telling stories. You make things happen by...
well... going out and making them happen. So while we came across as much news and met as many incredible people as we had before, news reportage became an afterthought. We were chasing a dream: bringing change to the virtual world.

I can agree on this, but why tear down Metaversed? It isn't too smart to burn all your bridges before you've crossed to the other side. A whole lot of tantrum is created now about the Clever Zebra start up and the Metaversed blog has died a slow death over the past months. Fortunately, the guys over at Metaversed also see this:

Why part with a popular brand?
Yes, Metaversed became a beloved brand. That's why we had to close it. Without publishing regular news, it was becoming a shadow of its former self. There's nothing worse than a brand that was once great and has lost its shine. If it's a name to be remembered, it should be remembered as something great.

Some feel we could have kept the name and switched the business model. The problem with doing something like that, though, is that it's a bit disrespectful of the readers. Metaversed is a blog about business in virtual worlds. If it suddenly becomes an open-source virtual world company, well, it's no longer the same company. We'd by lying if we said it was, and we respect our readers far too much to do something like that.

Wello 3PointD Horld

Much of the same is going on at 3PointD, a former leader in virtual world news, where Mark Wallace is letting the blog beed to death posting Glitchy Links for months now without blogging anything usefull and working on a gigantic new start up, Wello Horld with metaverse guru Jerry Paffendorff. His sponsor, Electric Sheep Company probably can't be bothered at this time though as they seem to be focussing on a whole new industry according to the word on the street.

The naked sheep

The word on the street is that the Sheep are (co-) developing a new platform which will be a true adult world (i.e. Porn, XXX). I wonder what CBS and the producers of CSI:NY will think of this. Would they be willing to be associated with a company that's in the porn industry?

Now what is it with these companies in changing their objectives? Is it short term profits, or are they just Metaversal Cowboys that jump on every opportunity?

The Proky Soap: Episode Metaversed

It's the Proky show again. She (yes she) is getting a habit of getting herself banned for carrying her heart on her tongue (which often is quite sharp and critical)

Here's Prokofy's account on Second Thought:

Nick Wilson (57 Miles) in Second Life, IM'd me during the IBM/LL
Interoperability meeting today and told me that he was canning my podcast, and banning me from his
island, group, and site. I had "gone too far" yesterday in telling a heckler to
fuck off in group IM, he hadn't liked my last podcast critical of the Sheep, and
I "wasn't good for his business". He couldnt' really point to any *content*;
just his own nervousness about the optics of metaversed.com Like the Linden
said, who confessed that I hadn't actually violated the TOS when I was banned
for calling Aimee's name "like a cheerleader," it was "a business decision".
Nick offered to give me the domain name he had registered and offered to put out
a cover story that he was cutting the podcast because "he had no time" lol.

Now, I don't fear Proky's life here is at stake, since she's always gotten through and keeps her course (which some may think to be a head-on collision course with disaster) and nodoubtedly will continue to put her worries to blog on Second Thought.

The thing is that Metaversed has been gaining a lot of momentum in the past 6 months, becoming one of the leading blogs and discussion panels on Second Life and the metaverse in general, partly due to the effort of Prokofy and her sharp analysis on the podcast show. Now, will Nick be able to keep up, or will this have a shakeout?

What sticks out is: "I didn't violate the ToS when calling out Aimee's name like a cheerleader". I wish I had been there. Prokofy seems to have a deep grudge against Aimee, as being top of her envied/hated Feted Inner Core circle and I can't imagine her actually 'supporting' Aimee like a cheerleader. For the record... you just don't go out there calling Aimee names. That's just not done.

Proky's FIC-list is a list of Second Life celebrities whom she calls haughty, arrogant and whatever. Aimee is many things, but certainly none of the above, at least the way I have gotten to know her over the past months.

Blog4Life

My professional network is growing with people who are 'professional' bloggers. In the Netherlands we don't see many full-time bloggers. We just don't see how it would work out. Sponsored blogging... that would jeopardise objective reporting. Doesn't it?

Just taking a look at 3pointD, sponsored by the Electric Sheep Company and SecondLife.nl sponsored by DNB Media are just two examples. Is it enough to go blogging full time? Are these blog subjective or objective when it comes to their sponsors presence?

Everyone needs some recognition. I must admit I'm pretty keen on keeping track of my Technorati ratings and blogs that link to this blog. I'm quite satisfied at the result I've made sofar: A Second Life blog, loosely focussing on the business side of life getting into the Technorati top 100K blogs within 4 months.

But what's it worth? I've put time into it. An awfull lot. Near 100 hours a month. So what's it worth? Now there's a tool by Technorati that values the MindBlizzard blog at 37K in USD.

My blog is worth $37,259.64.
How much is your blog worth?

But how valuable is this? It's said to be based upon proper research:

"Data from Technorati and inspired by research from Tristan Louis. "

But how valuable is this? Is it like American mortgage loans getting wrapped and traded by hedgefunds? What would you pay for a blog like this? Here's a contra-expertise:

I ran the test once more on a fresly set up blog with just one post:

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

Then what's Scobleizer worth, or 3 Point D? Robert Scoble is valued at $1,860,723.84 and Mark Wallace at $426,792.24.

The question remains. This is what research says. But how much would you like to pay? Are you offering me 37K US Dollars? I don't think so. Value of blogs is based on content and its value changes for every reader. Maybe this post has value for you, or maybe only my last post on Rezzable, or my series of posts on Banking in Second Life... Or maybe this blog means **** to you because you're only looking for sex in SL.

What's art? That's a similar question. The answer lies in the eye of the beholder. And still: Is a sponsored blog able to give unbiased reviews?

I can has cameras and stuff

I believe I can fly - or I can has camera's?

Yesterday was a quiet day at the office and we had some nice talks on Second Life. There was quite a fun discussion going on about building our Sogeti presence in Second Life.

At some point in the discussion we were al making fun of staircases and escalators in Second Life. "Who needs escalators... you can fly man." One of my colleagues thought himself to be a great, well-metaversed, explorer and never walks in Second Life, only flies. However, our good friend Damanios Thetan once said: "you fly? I never fly. I move my camera..."

Just a small example of how we all have to adjust to the metaverse.

I can has good ranking

Earlier today I took a peek at Technorati to see if their were any new links to the Mindblizzard blog. Bummer. No new fans. Looking at the rating I'd say there must be something strange going on...

Mindblizzard blog rank 1? That's an error. Or do I misinterpret? World no 1. blog surely is I CAN HAS CHEESEBURGER.

Teva Shoes logo

Last week we bought new shoes for my daughter (nearly 3 years old). They were sandals of the Teva brand. Nothing special, nothing fancy, but just good quality of a fairly well known brand. It wasn't until yesterday I noticed their logo... Looks familiar, dunnit?

Mindblizzard now top 100K

Thanks to all readers and commenters the MindBlizzard blog now entered the Technorati top 100.000. Quite a good job I think, considering I started out barely 3 months ago.

Next objective is 50K :)

Capozzi branding hyperjump

Everything new gets dubbed 2.0 these days, upto and including the Financial Times writing on gospel 2.0 or the blogoshpere getting excited about Philantropy 2.0 or Fundraising 2.0. To state that this blogpost is about wine 2.0 or distilling 2.0 would not give credit enough to the sim I visited today...

This is a tale beyond a succesful immersion - even when the island hasn't seen it's final version and opening yet. This is a tale of creating a brand 21st century style in a 19th century business.

The business I'm referring to is that of making wine, a traditional profession that -at least in Europe- brings images of old, weathered farmers and old French chateau's. It's classic and romantic and absolutely non-tech-savvy. During the 20th century we have seen the rise of new wineproduction areas, like California, South Africa and New Zealand gaining popularity over the traditional French and Spanish wines. The popularity of these new wines are partly because these wineries use modern technology to create well balanced wines and of a more constant quality than the traditional French ones.

Here's a look at the Capozzi sim

To start off by calling this a hyperjump and getting all excited about it does raise some expectations. Why?

If you look at the sim -without its context- it's nothing special. It is a quality build, as expected when built by Chip Poutine of the Prion Design Group and the guys (and girls) over at Metaversatility. Lush green rolling hills house the winery and a path that leads through the various stages of the production process. Though totally different in design than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Second Life, it's the same concept. So why the buzz?

The buzz is that this is not a brand creating a virtual presence like "we've got to be there" but it is a grand design in creating the brand itself. The Capozzi winery was established in 2005 by Josh Hermsmeyer and really is a tale of crowdsourcing as it started off on the pinotblogger blog:

"On November 18, ‘05 pinotblogger was born. Its stated purpose is to “outline the long and painful processes involved in starting and building a family winery in the Russian River Valley. While we haven’t been at it very long nor has it been particularly painful yet, I’m 99.9% certain that at least one of these adjectives will correctly describe the project in the very near future (hopefully NOT painful and short though, as that would be sad)."

Meanwhile the Pinotblogger website has been been among the top 5 wineblogs in the world and gives a great insight in the business and starting up the new winery. The virtual presence complements this strategy. It's an all in, a 21st century marketing campaign from a traditional craft, that's a hyperjump.

Read more on the build of the sim at the http://www.simvineyard.com/ website, or visit it inworld: SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Capozzi%20Winery/121/235/37

Geek Meet Gadgeteers

Fridaynight - Geek meet time. This time not at the Metaversed home but at Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 island where hip and techsavvy things are as common as bugs in Microsoft. This week brings something new to the Geek Meet as it's the first time it gets sponsored by Information Week.

First off, some snaps of the Dr. Dobbs island.

This weeks line up as announced by Metaversed:

"Alidar Moxie of Mechanized Life, makers of the popular Calendar Cogs Google API integration app for Second Life as welll as the new StatsCollector RSS app, and Vincent Shore, creator of Squawk, the Second Life Twitter / Jaiku presence and bookmarking app, will be joining Mystical Cookie, creator of the MystiTool, who we confirmed earlier at this week's Friday Geek Meet. Our regular Friday tech forum in Second Life is co-sponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal, InformationWeek and of course Metaversed, and has quickly become the virtual worlds top regular technology and business networking event, where bloggers, journalists, new media types and tech heads of all kinds come to talk about the business and technology of virtual worlds. "

Vincent Shore - Squawk

Vincent created the popular Squawk app that that incorporates twitter, jailku and delicious into SL.

"Squawk is essentially a tool for connecting your Second Life experiences up with popular web services. It began as just a presence client for Twitter but has progressively grown in scope as time has gone on. Today, Squawk supports Twitter, Jaiku, del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia, with more services on the way.

In terms of presencing, Squawk can do anything traditional clients can do, and a bit more. Squawk can attach a geocode to your updates, allowing friends to see where you are in SL, or teleport in to check out something cool you microblogged about. If you visit Squawknest.com, those geocodes are used to visually place markers on a web map. Squawk also automatically builds your Nest profile and tags based on what you like to microblog about."

The latest addon to Squawk is social bookmarking, or gridmarking.

"Squawk is a combination of LSL scripts (housed within the virtual Squawk bracelet) and a number of intermediary PHP scripts housed on Vincents web server, which translate API calls and make the response data easier for Second Life to handle."

Alidar Moxie - Mechanized Life
Alidar received a great welcome by Nick Wilson:

"Next I'd like to introduce you to a great scriptor, one I think of as an "integration" specialist. She deals mostly in API's and RSS and other ways of bringing our 2D stuff into SL. She's famous for Calender Cogs, a Google Calendar API implementaion, but recently has released StatsCollector, which I think you'll find even more intriguing. Please welcome Alidar Moxie!"

On Calendar Cogs:

"I have two real lines of things I've worked on the first was 'Calendar Cogs' I wrote it because I was literally writing on post its on my monitor when I wanted to go to events then I said 'why not use Google's thing to do this for me. I wrote 2 objects, a Hud for personal reminders and a Kiosk for people to place on land and tell others of their events both pull events directly from the Google calendar and use them in world and Huds talk to kiosks. I think I had a similar issue to Vincent in that the API for google had SO MUCH information that I had to write a ton of scripts between the Google Stuff and LSL."

On StatsCollector:

"It simply records who comes in contact with it but then allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of those visits and recently allows you to find out if they are credit card users, how old they are

what time of day is your busiest, etc. At the moment you can pull either graphs or HTML versions of the data in the near future I plan to allow XML downloads and I am working on my own API so that others can make their own objects to 'talk' to the systemso to speak"

The statcollector could be a breakthrough in Inworld purchase history as a vendor could be written to record who purchased an item and when. Transaction history in Second Life is only kept for 30 days, the default for the current version of Statcollector as well, due to server capacity in logging.

Mystical Cookie - MystiTool
The Mystitool app was named Metabrand no. 1 by KZero a few weeks ago and is classified as an essential tool for Second Life survival.

"After my first month in SL, i had several things on my hud.. a spatial radar, a popular "shield" after being attacked on my own first land, ao, and a few things i was playing with ..."

"...Anyway, I was learning lsl and I wanted to keep all of my toys in one place.. i also did not like having so many hud attachments, and i wanted to learn how they worked.. so i started writing my own replacements for things. i started giving copies to friends.. as time went on, i added things.. av scanner, non-physical vehicle (a pseudo shield), etc. Mystitool has several privacy and convenience features in a single hud attachment.. all easily accessible by hud menus, it was designed to consume the least possible hud real estate to keep the screen clear for play and provide certain basic functionality which is missing from the SL client.. things such as knowing who is near you.. a quick "favorites" list of locations, teleport history, and basic anti-stalker and anti-griefer tools. Mystitool has grown in features as friends and customers suggest new things to be added or improved.. i also add things as i need them and with the latest update, there is now a plugin system in place to allow other scripters to write their own mystitool plugins, which will place buttons into the main mystitool hud menus :)"

The above parts are the introductions to the products, for the tech-talk I'd advise you to read the transcripts that will be on at Metaversed soon.

Metarazzi down the drain

Earlier this week Second Life's premier Machinimist Moo Money noticed the metarati on twitter and within a few hours it became a pretty good row. It was living the fastlane for metarati-TV - though forced to take the first exit.

Within a week the project has died and the site's been taken offline. Moo Money was kind enough to snapshot the site, so here's yesterdays news and todays reality.

related articles:

• Metarati Blogwars
• Metarati Copycats
• Nick Wilsons piece of mind
• I, Platform on the Metarati TV

The MindBlizzard Crowd (2)

Here's a little update on the readers of this blog. Let's start of with a welcome to the new visitors coming from China, Singapore, Latvia and Yugoslavia.

Then there's an increase in visitors from Southern Europe, like Italy, Portugal and Spain, but the sharpest increase comes from France, Japan and India. So Aleister's observation that Asia is slowly discovering Second Life does have a point. His report on the first Korean Content Creator in Second Life is another sign, and if the massively cyworld addicted Korean nation is truly getting to Second Life, we might see a few good shows with their nationwide virtual world experience.

Here's a few links to places that linked to MindBlizzard:

Mindblizzard in France

• Second Life reporter (French Video reports on Second Life)
• A Brand New Place
• Hebi Flash blog

Mindblizzard in Japan

• Metaverse.jp

Blogwars !?

I was reading up on some other blogs and found out sometimes our allegiance switches. When it comes to Skynews I'm in line with Nic at KZero in liking it, contrary to Aleister.
When it comes to Comcast though, me and Al like it, and Nic doesn't. Now we're all pretty serious bloggers, so where's the switch? Why do you like a build, or why don't you, what makes you think a build will work, or not?

Here's a little comparative reading:

AL on Comcast : http://www.3pointd.com/20070605/comcast-parachutes-into-second-life/
AL on SkyNews: http://www.3pointd.com/20070605/can-sky-news-rise-to-second-life/
Nic on Comcast : http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=728
Nic on SkyNews: http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=658
Me on Comcast : http://blog.mindblizzard.com/2007/06/comcast-plugged-in-sl.html
Me on Skynews: http://blog.mindblizzard.com/2007/05/skynews-hits-virtual-sky.html

Obviously we have different tastes, and sometimes we like Rivers Run Red and not Millions of Us, or the other way around. But should that matter when it comes to judging a build. We should be able to go beyond that and spot the key elements for branding, for business integration and potential to actively engage the community.

It seems that it is a complex cocktail of several factors after all.

Blogstats April

Well, I've started this blog in February, but only got serious somewhere this month.
The first 10 days of april saw an average of 5 visitors a day, the last 10 days an average of 146. So it's been a good month :)

Here's where our visitors came from:

1. Netherlands
2. Usa
3. Japan
4. Italy
5. Singapore
6. Denmark
7. Canada
8. United Kingdom
9. Australia
10. Belgium

Our top referrers:

1. Ambling in Second Life
2. Google
3. Technorati
4. 3pointD
5. Secondlife Blogo