WordPress released version 2.3 last week, not more than a few days after I launched the site. I didn’t want to upgrade, but I thought it better to do that with no more than a few posts on the site, than wait till later when it would do more damage if I screwed it up.

It was a sensible decision, as it turns out, because I screwed it up. I took a back-up before I started. That turned out to be a good idea. I think it was something to do with the directory structure, but WordPress 2.3 didn’t work for me. So I killed everything, installed 2.2 again and then upgraded it. I then tried to restore the MySQL database. That didn’t work either, but it was easy enough to paste the few postings I had done into WordPress.

Then I got my “back catalog” and started adding in older content that I’d written over time. There’s quite a lot, and it’s a boring activity. It will keep me busy for a while.

To keep myself amused I tried out CSSEdit, software that’s designed to allow you to manipulate Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I was more than impressed – this is powerful software. Eat your heart out, Dreamweaver – as far as CSS is concerned.

I received an email recently in respect of the blog/article I wrote entitled “Second Life: The Campaign For Real Life“. It was from Chris Gayson and it read as follows:

Robin,

Disclosure-

Until very recently I was an AD with Ogilvy- the advertising agency of record to IBM. While I did not work on the IBM account during my years with the firm, I was exposed to some of IBM’s Second Life plans (nothing that isn’t publicly available knowledge). I also attended one private Linden Labs presentation.

Disclaimer-

These are my opinions. I do not profess to speak for IBM. I do not profess to speak for Linden Labs.

I am astounded sometimes when I read otherwise intelligent people, write short sighted appraisals on the triviality of Second Life, with little understanding of it’s full implications.

In the not too distant future a three dimensional VR platform will augment and in many cases supersede what we currently know of as the internet. It does not mean that Second Life will become that platform, and no, they were not even first to the party. However, nothing succeeds like success- Under Philip Rosedale’s management team, Linden Labs entered the market just as bandwidth penetration for such an application was reaching critical mass in the US market. Theirs was the first viable product to deliver on the promise of a scalable VR world. It is their market to lose.

IBM’s interest in Second Life is not a fad chasing, or passing gesture. With a 2007 commitment of $100M in Second Life development, they are fathoms ahead of others in this arena. They are not fools. Most of IBM’s Second Life development is not even open to the public. They have built large scale office parks off the public grid, accessible only to IBM employees, where far flung global team members are given virtual offices, replacing tele/video conferencing as the primary mode of holding project meetings, augmented by Voice over IP. Note that VoIP is the next major interface enhancement that will be implemented within the Second Life application. Headset based eye-wear is sure to follow soon. As bandwidth increases and compression/streaming technologies improve, the realism of the platform will continue to evolve in the same exponential manner as we’ve seen in video games over the past decade.

Neither is IBM’s interest a gamble on Second Life’s success. It is an investment in a new communication paradigm. While other companies are looking at Second Life as a short term PR based marketing opportunity, IBM is busy becoming THE company with extensive experience in VR based business practices- the business implications of operating a global company with full integration of Virtual Reality as a business communications platform. A communication tool where geography presents no limitations on speech, sight, or the full spacial interaction between participants. Whether Linden Lab’s product, or a competitor’s becomes the standard is not so relevant. It is the experience with Virtual Reality as a business tool that is of value. This experience will transfer to any successful VR platform. In time, as VR joins the web, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, the telephone, the cell phone, the PDA, the fax machine, as just another ubiquitous communication tool, when other companies are just waking up to the notion, IBM will already be positioned as the authority on Virtual Reality best practices. All this, at a time when many companies are only pretending to have their internet/intranet/extranet strategies in place. For many businesses, VR could prove a greater impact than even the internet itself.

If you happen to view Second Life only as an escapist fantasy “game” world, and you think IBM is out of touch for not understanding this, I suggest that you’re looking at Second Life through the lens of your own limited experience.

Chris Grayson

I reprint the letter here with Chris’s permission. Assuming that the letter is accurate, and I’m sure it is, then VR interfaces may proliferate quite quickly if they take off. Clearly IBM is betting on this with real rather than virtual dollars. However I’ve yet to have any demonstration of VR interfaces being more productive than alternative ways of collaborating. Entertaining? yes, and hence commercially attractive to the entertainment industry, but productive?

The problem that I have with this is that there are already a whole set of sophisticated interface options for being productive with a wired computer, depending upon the task that you are carrying out. I don’t see how being instantiated as an avatar helps with any significant ones. Many truly collaborative tasks involve working in teams with software tools, managing versions, scheduling and so on. How does an avatar improve the process. You don’t need VR to share white boards or do Powerpoint over the web or even play a 3D animation. Second life has chat – which is fine, but how is it superior if there’s an avatar on the screen?

I’d rather actually see a face because you can “read” faces but you can’t “read” avatars. Avatars are very useful for anonymity. There are probably some business contexts where that can help, but I don’t think there are many. I get the idea of marketing to people in Second Life itself. If they’re there and volunteer for it, then hit them with ads. But that’s clearly not what IBM has in mind.

Am I missing something IBM?

This is a simple thing really. This posting will be used by Technorati to validate that I am indeed the writer of this blog. (The alternative of sending my blog login and password over the Internet did not appeal). For the sake of convenience, I’m also reporting this activity as part of my on-going chronicle of how this web site evolved (which I hope will help other people trying to establish a blog). Once you’ve got going you need to publicize the blog in some way. I’m getting down to that now.

Endorsements

I ran into the web endorsement problem today. I added a recommend to Yahoo for a company I bought some memory from. I then got an offer from the company MemorySuppliers.com for a $10 voucher if I would but post a recommendation on Resellerratings.com. I refused because it felt wrong to get rewarded that way. I can understand why MemorySuppliers.com hands out $10 vouchers, and I’m sure some of their competitors do too, but there has to be a better way. I think I’ll start posting details of companies I do business with – good experiences and bad, as part of this blog. Let me think about it.

I’m here at Lotusphere, the first conference of the year. I confess to being impressed by what I’ve seen so far. Lotus puts on a good show—the best—great special effects and entertainment. The overture to the keynote session was a large gang of rock star impersonators, including a faux Elton John, a faux David Bowie and quite a few other fauxs. They sang a series of rock numbers then they all got together on stage to sing Pinball Wizard;

He ain’t got no distractions,
Can’t hear those buzzers and bells,
Don’t see lights a flashin’,
Plays by sense of smell,
Always gets a replay,
Never tilts at all,
That deaf, dumb and blind kid,
Sure plays a mean pinball.

Not much of a collaborator that deaf, dumb and blind kid, so I’m not exactly sure why singing about him was the appropriate overture for Lotus, because Lotus is very much about collaboration these days—and they have technology to prove it. The Lotus portfolio now consists of five products; Lotus Notes, Sametime, WebSphere Portal, Quickr and Connection.

Unless you’re prescient you won’t know what Quickr and Connection are. Let me deal with these two new offerings first:

Lotus Quikr is about Web 2.0 era information sharing. On the surface it looks good (thus far I’ve only seen a demo). The idea is simply for the user to be able to make their information available and for them to pull useful information together. Good interface, simple but effective capabilities.

I’m less certain about Lotus Connection. What Lotus has done is assemble all the social networking capabilities it thinks are useful under a single umbrella. So you can tag information (good idea), register your profiles (as on MySpace but with a corporate slant, of course), blog, create wikis and build ad hoc communities. What I’m not sure about here is whether the software scales down—to be compelling in smaller companies. All the advantages that IBMLotus trumpeted in the press release were large company advantages like discovering “new people and resources with similar interests”. Pretty much all of these capabilities have been tested by use within IBM for quite a while. They’ll probably work reasonably well in GE and General Motors too.

If one question on your mind is what happened to Lotus Workplace, you’ll be relieved to know (if, like me, you were impressed by it), that it has not been sent to the knacker’s yard. It has been merged with WebSphere Portal and is now, strangely enough, called WebSphere Portal. I’d be happier if IBM didn’t call it “portal”, because I think it gives the wrong impression. If you put it together with Lotus Notes and Sametime and the two new Lotus products, then what you get is what I referred to in SOA for Dummies as Presentation Services or what could legitimately be called a “Presentation Platform”.

No other product or product portfolio can make as broad a claim as Lotus in this area. And as regards SOA, Lotus is actually providing all five products as “SOA ready” services, while at the same time integrating them together in a very tight manner. It feels like they’ve squared the circle, because (Lotus claims) you can buy any one of these as an independent product and it will still deliver its set of core benefits, but if you put them all together, they hold hands like well behaved children and work together.

Now I could write a lot more but, hell, you can be here and experience the Lotusphere atmosphere like any of the 7000 delegates that have come here from all over the world, because Lotusphere, the full show, is also being put on in Second Life—complete with lasers and light shows and irritating doormen who check your badge.

So go to the Second Life website, put your avatar on and seek us out. If you manage to find us there, avatars of Lotus presenters will assure you that Lotus Notes is much improved and growing at something like 30 percent and Lotus Sametime is also going wild. Then they’ll start to rattle on about the new features in the latest releases and when you’ve had too much of this you can go to the bar. There, slumped in the corner, drinking something alcoholic, you’ll see the avatars of various peripatetic analysts. Try to guess which one is me.

The music industry as we once knew it is dead, long dead. It died from an overdose of Digital Rights Management (DRM). If you needed any confirmation of this, then yesterday the news broke (see Let the MP3 Price Wars Begin in The Street) that Amazon is about to offer more than 2 million songs free of DRM. Apparently, DRM-free music sells better (according to EMI). It certainly does if you’re selling to me. I noticed this the first time I visited iTunes and was offered the choice. I chose the DRM-free version for an extra 30 cents or so, almost without thinking.

The problem with DRM is the same as the problem with other security technology. It gets in the way. People – even those who have no intention of being dishonest – don’t like the hassle of DRM. DRM was the music industry’s knee jerk reaction to wide-scale music theft. Now they’ll have to live with theft, because it’s way too late to apply digital watermarks. The cat’s not only out of the bag, it’s escaped through the window and left the garden. The world’s back catalog of music – replicated illicitly thousands of times – is almost completely without watermarks.

The music business will have to restructure itself around the web and live music, with the sale of music being a less important revenue stream. Some musicians get the web but the music business doesn’t. The major labels will watch their business decline if they cannot find a web based business model. They need their own stores, don’t they?

This Web Site

Yesterday I added 30 pages to this web site. I added all the postings made so far in my AVID campaign. Click on campaigns (above) or here, if you want to see. I’m going to gradually add just about everything I’ve ever published on the web as time passes. Hopefully some of it will be a useful resource.

In the process of doing this, I’ve discovered some awesomely powerful capabilities in BBEdit – it’s a long time since I’ve been so impressed with a software product. I’ll do a review when I understand its full set of capabilities.

Apple Rumors

Rumors have started to emerge that Apple is working on a “PDA-sized tablet-like device.” They’ve probably rigged some prototypes up in the Apple labs – it would be surprising if they hadn’t. However there’s a strategic reason for believing that Apple may bring some product to market. The iPhone’s touch interface is competitive advantage writ big. Steve Jobs would be dumb not to make the most of it.

Gateway Gets PC Design

It looks like Gateway is the first significant PC vendor to (belatedly) follow Apple’s lead and actually design a PC (see here). They will not take business from Apple doing this, but they might take from the competition. Maybe Michael Dell should take a look.

We’re done here.