(News)Print is Dead

Location: Newspaper Graveyard

The Rocky Mountain News is gone, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has quite literally stopped the presses to enter an uncertain future online. The Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer appear to be on the endangered-species list now.

No one has any idea of how many papers will survive the ongoing newsprint-apocalypse. Classifieds are moving to Craig's List. Comics are going online.

Only those whose names will appear soon on the obituary page continue to read daily papers.

A few papers will hold on and devise a new business model, like local bookstores not Barnes-and-Nobled out of business. But for many, the way forward looks more like the "record" stores that have closed nearly everywhere. They are victims of a new technology that offers more convenience and a hard-to-beat price.

Some papers, like the New York Times, provide depth in their archives (only available to subscribers) that will keep some of us on the rolls. I take a Sunday New York Times precisely for this reason, and then I can use the archives in my classes. That is probably not a model for survival at the Times. As to where they will get revenue, the answer remains mysterious.

The Times seems to get thinner every month.

Some news companies are shifting gears, attempting to capture some of the eyeballs that go to free services. Even the venerable Richmond Times-Dispatch went down this road, buying up a local web-portal for local news, events, and human-interest stories. A version of this blog, now featuring selected content from this site, has been at the TD for two years. To be honest, I did not expect a mainstream-media outlet to continue wanting coverage about Second Life, even if it were provided free.

I am happy to be wrong, and my TD editor was hoping I'd make a leap into the future with the paper.

The TD's version of "In a Strange Land" will soon move over to the new richmond.com portal with other content clearly intended for the types of readers interested in popular culture, technology, and other topics not typically associated with the news Goliaths of decades past.

I will be wistful about this. It was fun, for a while, to be a pro-bono member of the old media. I'll miss their company, as I wonder who will cover the news in the future in enough depth to keep me interested.

Max, The Guide Dog of Second Life

Location: Kennesaw State University Campus & Wheelies On the Water

It sounds odd that a world as visual as Second Life now has a growing number of residents with visual impairments. The client itself provides some daunting hurdles, since screen readers cannot access SL inventory. This really limits the ability of the visually impaired to enjoy SL's content.

That is changing fast. During the recent conference on Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education, I attended a workshop with Polgara Paine, Louise Later, and Max, the star of the show. Max is a guide dog for avatars.

When Louise was new to SL, it took her one week to get to Wheelies, a region dedicated to assisting residents with disabilities. Louise wears white because she has central vision in one eye. She can locate her avatar more quickly because white rezzes first on her screen.

Polgara met Louise and accompanied her at first. This limited them both, and Louise decided that she wanted to use a guide dog. Her first dog was a prop, attached to her left wrist. It cued folks into her visual impairment, and they responded well and with a lot of curiosity.

This hit home to me in a rather unsettling way. I strain to read some of the smaller type in this blog-client, and think how often these days I'm changing prescriptions for my bifocals. Since my mother was legally blind in one eye, and barely sighted in her other, by her early 80s, I wonder about my own eventually use for some of these virtual-world technologies.

As Louise noted, most of us are temporarily able.

Louise was encouraged with the reception that a mere prop had received, so she pressed on with Max, working with scripter Charles Mountain (pictured in the next image) to give the dog radar, then a follow function. I got my own copy of Max and began using simple typed commands to recognize avatars around me, then I asked Max to take me to them. Finally I used Max's help to teleport back to Richmond, since Max can use SL map directions and and has a script inside him to read scripted "Polo objects" as he and his avatar travel SL.


I had added landmarks to Max, each renamed with short names, and then, with a simple typewritten command, I called up the SL map and typed another command to invoke my landmark and teleport me.

The latest version, Max Voice Plus, will send a screen shot of the location to a helper. Charles has added chat-text recognition. So now chat will read to the visually impaired resident. Soon, with a raised braille refreshable display and a text-to-braille program under development, residents will be able to type chat and read chat as braille.

We all took Max home with us. Several old friends, such as Tuxedo Ninetails of the SL Education Roundtable, and Feldie Epstein of The Metaverse Journal, joined the workshop and were as impressed as I was not only by this technology but also by the passion that drove this team to assist others.

Louise ended her talk with a statement by Helen Keller that "Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained though self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."

Louise, Polgara, Charles, and the avatars at Wheelies are certainly dedicated to something worthy, and ever more necessary. According to World Health Organization, the population of the blind will double in the next decade. They deserve, Louise notes, the same access to online materials that others have.

Those interested in trying Max can get dogs from Louise or Polgara, or from the bridge at Wheelies on the Water.

Metaplace Update: Iggy the Evangelist

Location: Iggy's World, Metaplace

I've been invited to write about this virtual world, still in Open Beta, and so far, I enjoy what I'm seeing. The only caveat is that under the agreement to be a MetaPlace Evangelist, I'm only supposed to write "favorably" about it.

That is fair enough; so far my limited experience means I'll limit myself to discussing features and initial impressions of the virtual world.

1) The browser-based client means low hurdles for graphics. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison to Second Life, of course, which strives for immersion even as ever-increasing graphics requirements strand some residents. Even my own laptop is gradually getting less able to run SL.

Metaplace's client, however, doesn't even make my laptop's fan start up. If the graphics seem simplistic compared to many stand-alone games and worlds, consider what it does provide: a place with user-generated content, chat, IM, and a currency.

The Metaplace client's default settings provide a word-bubble for my chat as well as a chat window with tabs for the current world or the entire universe...I guess it's rude to overuse the latter, like some group-chat spammers do in SL.
System requirements aside, I like the clean simplicity of the Metaplace client. At the bottom I see Iggyo's "Coins," a currency Metaplacers can exchange for goods and Metacred, a total that levels up the player as soon as the yellow bar fills. I've earned Coins and Metacred so far by visiting a few other worlds, posting messages, and spending time in-world planning world domination.
Every mad scientist, even a 4th level one, needs a) a bunch of machines with blinking lights plus b) a dog named Tesla.

3) Immersive? We'll see. Fun? Yes. I don't think I'll identify with little Iggyo anytime soon, or lose myself in being him. Is that a bad thing? My students have an initial reaction--naive and childish in my opinion--that SL and other immersive worlds are "creepy," a little mantra that must have been drilled into them by hovering and overprotective adults. I don't think anyone would find Metaplace creepy. Silly? Perhaps. But some of us like silly, as long as it's silly in a playful and clever way. Luigi yells, look out, Mario!

I grin whenever Tesla sniffs me out and comes over to stand with my little bobble-head.Tesla, the squirrel, and rabbit were free from the marketplace; they all have simple movement scripts that follow me, in Tesla's case or, in the squirrel's case, flees when I get too close. Tesla seems uninterested in killing squirrels.

I'll work on that if I can figure out how to script...and put in a vegetable garden.

4) My Small Piece of Land. So far, every Metaplace player gets his or her plot of land, called a world, when the register. That's a wonderful feature reminiscent of the First Land initiative that Linden Lab had a long time ago. Some residents still lament its passing.

5) One Final Graphics-Grumble about SL. As gamelike as Metaplace seems, it offers utility that was missing during my crash-prone April road trip in SL. If mainstream users like my students--who primarily use laptops--are ever going to use a virtual world widely, the world cannot require frequent hardware upgrades as a prerequisite for full engagement. Linden Lab has not addressed this issue as they keep updating their client software.

If Metaplace or browser-based worlds like it can develop the sort of detailed and pedagogically useful materials I see in SL, and if a world like Metaplace could be embedded into a Course Management System like Blackboard, then Linden Lab had best worry.

There's a bit of arrogance at work when experienced SL residents reply "buy a desktop tower and swap graphics cards as needed." No, I would rather go play in my garden and quit SL at home. I'd just have to enter it from a high-end lab at work and reduce my time in-world.

And look for alternatives for my classes.

Road Kill in SL

Location: Undisclosed

I ran someone down. Squish.

I didn't mean to do that...so if you are reading this, consider it the Grid's fault. By the time your avatar rezzed, in the middle of the road, it was too late.

You must have flown a mile.

I feel so awful...wait.

What were you doing STANDING IN THE ROAD??