Living, Learning, and Business in Second Life

Randy Hinrichs is CEO of 2b3d, a virtual world company with offices in Second Life. He stopped by today to demonstrate the locales that they’ve built to help clients conduct business and do work online on Second Life.

We were treated to a tour of their office. Features included board rooms, employee training facilities and medical training facilities. These spots are augmented with communicative and training tools. For example, the board room includes slideshows, blackboards, and other live conferencing tools.

Social Network effects on the popularity of Youtube videos

Anjana Susarla, from the School of Business at UW, is beginning to explore how social networks in Youtube (friends and subscribers) impact the rate in growth of “views” of freshly uploaded Youtube video.

Social Traces: sociological topographies for enhancing search, community and social science

Social Traces: sociological topographies for enhancing search, community and social science
Marc Smith a sociologist from Microsoft Research

The overwhelming majority of data objects are, in nature, relational. They are often from one person to another. As they travel from place to place, these digital messages leave traces. Like footprints on an ocean beach, these traces tell stories about people. Given these traces, Marc is interested in collecting these traces and discerning those stories/patterns/etc…

Today, Marc gave a grabbag talk about all of this and some more, too:

Community Engagement

Leo Burd, from Microsoft, is newly graduated from the MIT Media Lab. Before entering MIT, he ran a community computer center in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A critical question for him was how a small room with twenty computers could ever impact one of the largest cities in the world with thousands of slums. He carried this interest of community empowerment into action-based research for his thesis work. This afternoon, he shared his projects with us.