Second Life - Findings

1. At our company's disaster recovery tests this weekend, I overheard one of my co-workers talking about an avatar. I asked him what website he was referring to and he mentioned second life. He has been using SL for over 6 months and has a second job selling guns. He has coding skills and has joined with another person on SL, a graphic artist, to currently sell guns. They are moving into the vehicle and aircraft business. He has told me that by spending little time with some programming skill he was able to produce a good second income and is looking forward to more revenue oppurtunity in the future. This gives some evidence that SL is gradually gaining ground outside of the education world and my be the real deal.

2. I was watching TV a couple week ago and saw a Law & Order episode called "avatar". It was about a crime where the parties met and communicated via the virtual world. L&O only picks current topics that are very relative to real life and cutting edge, again giving me more evidence that this thing may take off. One concern was raised during the episode, in that all information provided and all activities are tracked and logged. Today end users may not be able to access this information, but the providers of these websites have the access and ability to log everything and query that information as needed. This is a little frighting.

Kickoff our Group Discussions

Hello all,

Just to kick this off, during our first two sessions, I thought about how my company currently uses new communication technologies for business purposes.

Currently our CEO uses a BLOG to communicate company changes and direction. This is fairly useful, but I really think an email could achieve the same outcome.

Personally, I have used WIKI, http://www.wikipedia.org/, at work on a daily basis. I support 8 production applications and each application has a reoccurring meeting (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly) with all stakeholder leads for each particular application, development, production, support, app support, etc. Each group is responsible to communicate the ongoings or potential impacts to the entire group. Previously the support team would own a MS Word document and needed to follow-up with each team to make modification for each meeting. With the WIKI technology we have a link for each product and everyone in our company can view or make changes to the agenda which is reviewed at our next meeting. This gives everyone the ability to participate, communicate their teams achievements or activities, gives upper management a area to see what each product is doing, and allows my team extra time since we are not tracking down updates and make every one's modifications.

Hope you can share a new communication technology that your company has adopted.