Oh my. My blog is written by a man. That’s news to me, but GenderAnalyzer surely knows best: “We guess http://pickingupsticks.wordpress.com is written by a man (55%), however it’s quite gender neutral.” They got Strange Doctrines even more wrong–despite the title of the blog post. Judging by the results of their accuracy polling (currently 54% accurate), GenderAnalyzer isn’t very good at what it does.
And according to the new Digital Campus podcast, virtual worlds haven’t had the success rate that was predicted for them either. The success stories in the past few years have been the ones that link people’s actual lives with their virtual lives, like facebook. Citing the recent demise of Google’s Lively, they surmise that virtual worlds that are premised on an entirely separate realm from the actual world won’t have enough appeal to make them successful commercial ventures. Thus, they end up predicting the same fate for Second Life as Lively. However, some think Google was just testing the waters the 3D web and wasn’t really taking Lively seriously from the start.
In any case, the Digital Campus crew are talking mainly about visually and graphically based virtual worlds. As a side note, and to distinguish them from virtual worlds like Lively and Second Life, gaming virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, which are also graphically based, seem to be doing fine–in terms of gaming itself and being the focus of anthropological field work and study.
But by mentioning the success of facebook the Digital Campus crew have placed predominantly text based virtual worlds into a separate category from graphical virtual worlds without acknowledging the difference between the two, and the many types of virtual worlds which fall under each category. A more nuanced or descriptive use of ‘virtual world’ would clear up a lot of misunderstanding surround the term.
For example, the blogosphere is text based and doesn’t seem to be in any danger of decline, in numbers or prestige. In the introduction to Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere report, they characterise blogging as so mainstream that they need to shift their focus to the “active blogosphere”–what influences the rest of the blogosphere as well as the mainstream media. This is a long way from the problems Lively had with attracting an audience.
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