Brooders

The Wiki Workplace over at Business Week, looks at how companies are looking at, surprisingly, Wikis (and other collaborative tools).

Key point:

Lead users have decreased e-mail volume by 75% and cut the company’s meetings time in half. Rangaswami says: “We recognized that these tools would allow us to collaborate more effectively than existing technologies.”

This is interesting.

Previously, I noticed that a key benefit from Wikis is the reduction in email volume.

Interesting Notes (on organisation and structure):

Clear goals, structure, discipline, and leadership in the organization will remain as important as ever and perhaps more so as self-organization and peer production emerge as organizing principles for the workplace. The difference today is that these qualities can emerge organically as employees seize the new tools to collaborate across departmental and organizational boundaries, and, yes, “the power of human capital” can be unleashed.

The trend I keep on seeing is:

If there is no tool for information sharing, people will use email.

Give them a Wiki (or other tool), and the email volume will decrease, and documentation will increase.

So PS3 Home is being shown about. Take a look at the following video.

( Via Sentient Developments : PS3 Home by Sony: A rival to SL? )

Warren Ellis often writes about Second Life, and has already commented about “Second Life and competition”.

Does this speak to the longterm viability of Second Life, though? It seems clear now that within a year Second Life will have serious competition on its own terms: not from gameplay-driven virtual worlds like Warcraft or Eve, which are not operating in Second Life’s space, but from things like Sony Home, which are absolutely in SL’s wheelhouse.

So .. I’m thinking he’s right, more and more of these virtual world services will be created. So how useful does that make them when there’s heaps of them, and you need a different way (software or console) to access them? Maybe that just mirrors how peoples minds work? Instead of going to your local mall, you just go to your favourite virtual mall/thing/place because you just like it?

Even Gibson commented on all this:

But as Gully Jimson says, in The Horse’s Mouth, “It wasn’t the vision I had.”

Neither is Second Life.

Chia and her buds build their treehouses in corporate ghost sites. That’s the difference. Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.

Call me when you get it worked out. I’ll be on eBay.

Gibsons post also points to the article William Gibsons Vision Realised. Even “the man” is saying it ain’t right.

So what’s all this missing?

I think Gibson’s Cyberspace was the total system .. synonymous to the internet.

Everyone creating their own, probably not compatible either isn’t really creating cyberspace, but fragmenting what we have. So we don’t have this VR as primary interface for all Internet/Cyberspace interactions. Oh well .. we have flat text, some video ( i.e. YouTube et al), and other environments (World of Warcraft, Second Life, ++). So reality falls short of the Dream.

Maybe we’re just not there yet?

Give it another decade or so and the whole interface will change. The Jeff Han interface stuff is really cool, and things like MRI and EEG scanning allow enhancements to current devices and software.

I’m still waiting for my neural interface, hopefully without surgery …

Jeff Han has the cool multitouch screens that we’ve seen before:

• More Jeff Han Multi-touch Screens
• Digital Tabletops – Putting Humanity back into the Interface
• Touch Interfaces for Computers

But the recent TED conference, has another video:

( via Infosthetics)