Have I been in torpor? No. I have been resting up after my near fatal crash, or at least detaching from the net enough to clear thoughts and mull over the vast amount of information, theory and news that keeps flying my way. At times shutting off the spigot so I can listen. Not easy to do, but needed.

Still for those wondering- I have a pulse despite a publishing hiatus. I have been (and remain) deeply immersed in:

- unified communications
- Web 2.0
- “Security 3.0″, and, of course

- Metaverses and culture….which continue to totally fascinate me, or more the revolutions I find happening inside of them. I have went into deep immersion into the ether in the wee hours- in this case Second Life.

My AV has hot air balloned over empty sims, horse galloped through deserted suburbia, bought up slums, swept into griefer zones to trade tech, visited goth pits, coffin camping, entered places that were majestic and others that were too offensive for even my Indiana avatar to handle. I even jumped off the WSE (World Stock Exchange) with a parachute. The best way to know terrain is to get ones hands dirty. I do believe that. In this case, pixels are elusive.

I felt I (or my avatar who thinks he “controls me”) needed to go “Indiana Jones style” to find out what is/was really happening- good and bad.. A report soon…far too much to tell and like any story- you can’t tell it all, but it gets pretty intriguing. I have even contemplated keeping an AV journal…but then that shard of synthetic being might get more bold.

But metaverses, unified communications, web 2.0 and security are ALL related.

A side note on: “Twitter and Social Media Chain Reactions” that I wrote on March 18th, 2007. In that post I looked at how Twitter (it could be any nano blogging platform…) can forge new paths. Small sentences, mixed media, and memes propogate.

Noted this gem from Fleep. (Love the 30 prim cottage btw- if you read this Fleep.)

Fleep finds it and….this twit emerges three months or so later.

Responding to WPorter asynchronously: http://tinyurl.com/2xekaa

02:12 PM June 10, 2007 from im

If you have read Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “Sounds of Thunder” you will recall the plight of Eckels who “blew it” and history too.

A short summary: This well-known story about time travel revolved around a business called Time Safari, Inc. Time Safari promises to take people back in time so they can hunt prehistoric animals even the grand Tyrannosaurus rex.

In order to avoid a “time paradox”, Time Safari is careful to leave history undisturbed on the principle that even a minute change can cause major changes in the future. Travellers are only allowed to shoot animals that are already about to die, and they are required to stay on a path which hovers slightly above the ground. Hunting trophies are not taken; no souvenir is allowed except a photograph of the hunter standing next to the dead, and I think they even removed bullets. This was possible because T.S. knew when the animal was about to die of natural causes or by accident- like a tree falling on it. It was for the “thrill of it all”. I won’t spoil it- it is worth reading, but the story is a fictional exploration of what later came to be called the “Butterfly Effect”.

The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. So this is sometimes presented as esoteric behavior, but can be exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or prevent a tornado from appearing). The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Recurrence, the approximate return of a system towards its initial conditions, together with sensitive dependence on initial conditions are the two main ingredients for chaotic motion. They have the practical consequence of making complex systems, such as the weather, difficult to predict past a certain time range (approximately a week in the case of weather).

How do I tie this in? I have read lately a few pundits predicting the “demise” of certain companies namely Second Life, MySpace, and Twitter. I say- so what? Even if Second Life where to implode tomorrow more metaverses are lining up to explode into existence. Even if MySpace were to blow apart from critical mass and the abuse of that mass, the vertical vultures are prepared to swoop in and fill in. Even if Twitter, bless its soul, were to flatline tomorrow, the clones are in wait. I still maintain Twitter should be adopted for the Enterprise as a cultural and a tool to desilo. Throw out power points and Evan- get an Enterprise version of Twitter behind the firewall. Actually most of these technologies are UNDERUTILIZED.

Still the efforts are pioneering and the concepts are sound, provocative, useful- the future- ask ANY kid. They might not Second Life, but four million Club Penguin. If they are on Club Penguin they are not watching T.V. They are not doing alot of things traditional media powers might believe.

The firms might die, but the effect, the “concept” is out of the bottle and transfiguring the landscape.

MySpace

- MySpace has become a basic badge for the “digital self” and the destruction of the common aesthetic. Yes it is clunky and ugly, but it has mass- which is good and bad. The larger the system the more prone to errors, breakdowns, problems, gaming and mischief.

Twitter

- Twitter- Microchunked information simply makes sense and more sense to canonize thought in “blogs”. Much like contemporary mass IM, now a decade old, Twitter continues to impact our language as we seek to squeeze in information. Sadly much of what we write may be in danger of getting lost on media we won’t be able to read so keep your paper (or rock tablet) handy.

Second Life

- Second Life is effecting behavior and an early sign of the rise of nascent posthumanism. The injection of a robust economic system is causing mass change. For example, new exchanges exist to trade equities in firms that produce goods and products that simply do not exist beyond the purpose of creating goods for “Avatars” or digital representations for the self. You get dividends in currency that has no value beyond a EULA and the survival of a company. Big deal? I have talked to dozens of traders (due to my vantage point) from all walks of life fully prepared to wager on the virtual exchange, but when the NASDAQ says something to the effect of- “Yes we would consider trading in a virtual world”- people need to wake up.

All of these so called “doomed” companies are not failures- they are pioneers. It is the concept that matters. These are only a few examples of “social media or socializing around media and chain reactions.”.

These are conversations that never would, could or might have existed.

Each word from an individual is on par with a flap of a butterfly’s wings.

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