From our view, OpenSim could become the Apache of the 3D Web serving up 3D scenes to hundreds of millions of daily users in the near future.

Below are my notes on OpenSource: what it is, why it is changing online and how it has become so significant a force.  Plus, how people make money around Open Source–which is not necessarily free or a charity effort at all. Also watch the short video below where I hit some of the key points on why we are investing so much time and effort into using, developing and trying to make money with our mix of OpenSim, Drupal and more.

Watch video above: Jonathan Himoff, CEO Rezzable talks about why Open Source Software is so important to online innovation and the 3D Web

Not Just About Coding—Using Something That Works

We come at the Open Source topic from the user side, not the coding side. Wouldn’t it be great if software just did everything we wanted it to? Well, that never happens. We want to make new user experiences without having to deal with the technical issues—just in the way people make website and don’t have to first create their own database application etc.

Using a big software application, especially if it is core to your operations, is making a relationship with the developer. This is more critical in innovative, uncharted areas–like virtual online.  And it is not just about the present (unless the software is good enough as it is) it is about where the development roadmap is heading, the people leading the efforts and how fast progress can be made.

When software works,  it keeps working without fatigue, without rusting.  New hardware often makes old software perform better too. So really it is about enhancing and making applications meaningfully better over time. People can keep challenging the software with new uses, many of which can be accommodated and some which need new code to run.

Open Source Software is Seriously Big

If you have a computer you are already using Open Source. For people not familiar with the software industry and online it might be a surprise to note the following data-points:

• Apache celebrates 15th anniversary and proudly boasts 112 Million servers running the software, something like more than 50% of all servers
• Java went 100% open in 2007
• Firefox / Mozilla went open in 1998 and is by far the most popular browser today
• Linux released by several companies including Red Hat (market cap $5.0 billion+), Debian
• Google purchase the initial developers of Open Source Android and now their new browser Chrome is based on Chromium which is partially OSS.
• MySQL – coveted and purchased by Oracle for billions
• More than 225,000 open source projects on SourceForge with tens of thousands of downloads per day.
• OpenSim has something like 500,000 lines of code – Ulysses by James Joyce has 22,941 sentences in it.
• Drupal a web content management (WCMS) and publishing system has 500,000 installs and runs the Economist, the Onion, NASA and many university sites. Check nice whitepaper by Acquia on why Open Source is best.

What is Open Source Software?

The code can be read openly.  You can see the lines of code and comments. Developers can review, study and understand how the applications and modules function. It is also possible to make your own changes to the code and then (try) to compile it and run in your flavour.

Yet, OSS is not necessarily free to use or without usage restrictions. You can’t just do anything you want with opensource code – just like you can’t read a new book and then go off on your own and make a movie out of it.

Opensource is developed by a community with vested interests in using the software and having it work well. Collaboration with a community of developers and users can be organized and is not necessarily anarchy.

OSS is a very different way of solving problems, designing solutions and developing software. It is done out in the public. It is global collaboration at web-speed. There is also a balance between what the coders write and what the users contribute and each party gets access to the codebase for their participation.

OSS is released under a variety of licences such as GPL and BSD which restrict usage and how code can be modified and republished.  According to Black Duck GNU GPL licence is the most widely used.  There are a lot of commercial and philosophical points on why certain licences are better or worse. There is also a hot debate regarding Free  and Open Source Software.

More info on Open Source:

• the Open Source Initiative
• Opensource.com news and articles
• list of top 50 OSS blogs
• IBM describes OSS
• City of San Francisco goes only Open Source
• GPL vs BSD blog post by Paul Ramsay

Why Open Source is the Way to Go –

• More Users Faster
  Users, especially early adopters, seem to jump on good open source a lot faster than proprietary software. More users means more attention to bugs, more comments on roadmap and more stress testing.
• Share the Load, Build Momentum
  Making great software take a lot of time and an enormous amount of effort. Many people using and working on  improvements is better than a small team in stuffed into corporate cubicles somewhere. Typically there is a core coding team, but also there should be lots and lots of other developers and users involved. It is an extended team activity and leverages the web in a great way. The developers can get massive, immediate feedback and then make rapid updates further building trust and momentum within the community. Users are part of the process—not just the recipients of what comes out of it.
• More Flexible Architecture, Faster/Smaller Iterations
  As OSS has a collaborative approach built-in to the development process, the systems should have more modular design to allow people to work independently on functions without impact each other or degrading the core performance. This also enables faster/smaller new code releases. Each release then is also easier to debug and track uplift.
• Easier Integration
  Integration is more than just pushing XML files around. Complex online systems share data and resources in more detailed often delicate ways. Replicating data is not efficient either and impacts scalability. OSS allows for new small applications to be built into the code, often as modulars that can be shared also,  or accessing data in tables already existing.
• Focus on Core Performance
  Ultimately there should be a set of core functions that should be common across all the use cases. People can then work on making  those critical areas work better—ie serve pages faster, be more secure, scale better. This then benefits all the users significantly.
• Create an Ecosystem
  While the OSS might be free/low cost there are still many opportunities to add commercial value and build value in a business that has expertise around deploying, running, customizing, integration and creating content. As a network effect, more users lifts the benefits of each participating in the community.
• Less Risky to Use
  You always have access to the code you are running. While it might not be practical for non-technical people to do anything with this, it does mean that you have the opportunity to pay for changes or at least port your content over to an alternative in the future. You are not at the mercy of a single software publisher—many of whom are bought and sold or become so profitable as to neglect the interests of their users. I don’t know that in all cases using OSS is necessarily cheaper, although it certainly seems to be, but as a user or a business you have a lot more control of what you put into it.

How to Make Money Around Open Source Software

The main point is you can add value to something that already works and performs, it is a foundation for your new intellectual property. You don’t need to create a web page server to make a great website—use Apache and then focus on what you can do best. Your starting point is much further than if you had to build everything or if you had to pay lots of money to get the basic online stack (like LAMP).

Depending on how mature the code is, you should prepared to invest some effort in the Community – it doesn’t have to be writing code, could be in using software, flagging issues, reporting bugs and also giving active coders good use cases.

Then understand where you want to add value and build a business in an open source ecosystem

• Premium modules
• Services – at a lot of different points
• Support
• Using a mix of opensource in unique ways to do amazing stuff – like 3D Web!

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3D graphical representation of digital information that is interactive and delivered within an online social environment.

The 3D Web is a lot more than a single virtual world. It uses some of the virtual world technologies, but goes way beyond to integrate with web and mobile.  It is a new way to engage with information and people across the global internet.  A lot of major forces are coming together now to enable the 3D Web to go mainstream. Following is a short video were I outline some of the key points about the 3D Web as we see them. Below are my more detailed notes on why that is happening, what is the 3D Web and how big are some of the opportunities.

Above: Watch Video Jon Himoff, CEO Rezzable Describes 3D Web and why it will be a serious factor online

3D is the Hot topic

The movie Avatar is the biggest grossing film ever, pulling in more than $2 Billion in box office (the franchise is planning sequels etc). 3D Movies (including Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, Train Your Dragon)  in the US market were more than 33% of all box office sales since mid-December. You can bet that there are a lot of new films being planned for this amazing format now. Some interesting detail on how Dreamworks makes 3D movies.  (check Intl 3D Society for industry info).

Beyond the big screen of course is your home television, where 3D is also headed fast and furious. Expect to see a lot of new  consumer electronics and digital cameras for capturing 3D and sharing it back online (some gadgets now for sale). Samsung is betting big that the market will be 85 million 3D televisions units sold in 2015. The 2010 Masters Golf tournament had a special 3D broadcast so there are even some experiments for 3D native content.

I think people love 3D because it is so much richer. You can absorb a huge amount of detailed, stunning, energizing, detailed information very quickly. Your brain is working a lot harder to assemble all this data into something comprehensible.  It is a much more stimulating time. Once you get into3D,  consuming flat content is like looking back at old Polaroid pictures.

Yet, it won’t be reruns of “I love Lucy” alone (ok, I would actually watch that) that will people will want to see after getting all their kit sorted in their home. This new format will also need new types of content (Cameron is urging TV to get into gear and start making new stuff).

For online consumers, the drip feed of single thread content is too slow=boring.  Active online consumers already don’t have the patience to sit passively still and slowly swallow 10 minutes blocks of shows in-between tedious ads. Already people are augmenting their tv viewing with twitter and facebook to make it more dynamic and social. They want to drive their own action. The want to be the stars of their own shows. They want to get to specific or related content fast.  They want to have a lot of chats, interactions flowing as part of their viewing time. It is a tough audience with increasingly complex demands to meet.

Collision of Gaming and Social Web

Games already grab the attention of millions of committed users. Online games are of course interactive and offer something to do online. It is a seriously big business. World of Warcraft (WoW) has more than 14 million customers paying about $10 per month. WoW owner Activision (ATVI) is blowing its numbers posting $1.3 Billion in revenues for the last Quarter. ATVI has a $13 Billion market cap today.  Farmville, a rather thin social game,  has attracted more than 75 million players–Zynga boast more than 230 million players across its games.  Zynga may even have an enterprise value itself of $5 Billion. Then there are the console games which have the kind of dedicated fans that sit out in front of stores waiting for new releases. (on its first day, GTA IV sold 3.6 million copies and generated $310 million in sales.)

• ITunes is projected to grow from $6 Billion in 2009 to $29 Billion in 2013 — and a huge portion of activity and revenue is from games.
• IBM is rolling out a corporate leadership training game called “CityOne“

Aside from the fun of playing them,  online games are also very social. One of the drivers for Zynga is the integration with Facebook to not only attract new users, but to give a sense of status back to the participants. So social is not just about meeting/making friends, it is also about staking and enhancing your identity in the online realm.

Game guru Koster teases out the impact of social games as: ” The value in these networks lies in the connectivity to friends, the easy distribution of content across the social graph, the web accessibility.”

The potential of the 3D Web is to deliver then the next level of rich media that takes the best of gaming and social web–but also delivers this for mainstream content (ie not the ole ultra-violence first-person shooter, porno, gambling or fantasy role play).

What is the 3D Web?

Elements of the 3D Web have already been imagined in science fiction and key parts are out there on the web today.  It is more than a lone virtual world–it is an ever-growing web of content that can be viewed via 3D graphics and eventually in 3D.  This will be a lot more complex than clicking between websites and browsing pages or watching videos.

In the near future, the best of the 3D Web will probably be described as combining all of the following factors:

• 3D Graphics and 3D
  3D scenes that you can move into in high quality and very detailed. It will need to be more than cartoons and 2.5 kid stuff to grab mainstream users. 3D graphics, in contrast to 2D photos,  are like videos you can walk (or fly) into in some way. It will also be possible to present these scenes in 3D to users with new viewing software– the content is already good to go for the glasses and just needs new viewing software.
• Synthetic Places
  There already are streets, cities, locations modelled from real or created new that have a digital geography and are bound by a sort of gravity and physics. People get to know them and understand areas within them just in the way you would know a public park or mountain trail. They can get crowded or be empty. When you log-off these synthetic places are still there and evolving. When you come back they may be different. Or they may disappear.  I like the term “Placeness” which sort of captures the real and the ephemeral nature of these digital venues populated by real people.
• Your Avatar
  This is your navigation, your presence and your guide to the virtual online areas. You control your Avatar like a sort of puppet. It is very tedious now to push it along with a keyboard and mouse. Our trusted computer companion the Mouse is on the verge of extinction.  New natural movement interfaces like Natal from Microsoft and Omek will remove that strain from users by allowing control from simple human movements. Further, the look of your avatar can be customized to reflect your real personality (or not). Personalizing avatars is also a big digital content sales opportunity that some are valuing in the $billions already.
• Real-time Social
  You are connecting with people in real-time across the web. It is much more immediate than swatting messages around the net. Meet/make friends and also establish yourself within the global communities that you want to dip-in/dip-out of.   The 3D Web pulls together the visualization, light interactions and status factors in a completely new way.  For many this phenomenon is very threatening, but also very liberating. It will open the entire world to itself — fast and dramatic.
• Useful & Varied Things To Do
  Mainstream users are seeking activities online that help them do something meaningful. And they also want enough variety within easy access to give them the freedom to dip-in and out of experiences. Hot online transactions today include things like tracking news, buying travel services, buying media and dating.  This is a key distinction from the gaming world or virtual worlds as they are today. People will use the 3D Web to add value to their real life and help do important things better.  Just in the way that people us Amazon to buy stuff or Expedia to book travel, the 3D Web will offer more efficient ways to do things online. As an example at Heritage Key you can learn about history in an entertaining way and then even plan a trip to a real world site.  Modern life in 2010 and beyond will be increasingly complicated (and maybe dangerous?) and the visualization, interaction and social capabilities of the 3D Web will be the platform to survive.
• Easy to Use
  Within the next 2-3 years all the clumsy, stumbling technical issues will be solved somehow. Already we see that software like OpenSim has made major progress in the last 12 months. The more people use it, the more chance things will get sorted. Then the complicated parts of the technology will be invisible. People can access the 3D Web across pc, mobile, tv.  Also the big improvements in natural movement control will allow users to enjoy their online time more.
• New Types of Content/Experiences
  It is a more complex environment and needs a more goal-oriented path to keep people from getting overwhelmed. Just because it is there, does not mean people will stay around any more than they hang-out on web pages after they scan them.  The 3D Web offers more and visitors will demand more, just in the same way you have an expectation that on vacation the real world place you visit should be better then the one you departed from.

Net Net: the results of the best of the 3D Web will be Immersive. This is where a switch in your head is released and you believe in the digital content that you are using. The engagement here is very high. It has a personal impact way beyond anything on the web today.

Massive Market Opportunities

• Reach 600 million connected users by 2013
  1.7 Billion PCs in 2013 and 1.82 Billion mobiles means probably more than 600 million users will have access to good enough systems and connectivity to tap the 3D Web usefully.  Intel is betting big on 3D Internet: Sean Kohl: “With the availability of all this computing power, we’re only beginning to exploit it. Now we’re adding more intelligence and more capability.”  That total market will continue to grow dramatically (add the 85 Million 3D televisions also!). More market statistics on the 3D Web here.
• New Online Use Cases
  The 3D Web will enable completely new things online especially around groups of people enjoying shared experiences in real-time. This will change how education is delivered and open new opportunities for people to work together on projects.  Visualizations will also be very exciting as well as role play and simulations. In general it is all the same kinda stuff that spurred the internet forward in the early 1990′s but in a more complex, intense format.
• Premium Customers
  The quality 3D offerings will be something that people will be willing to pay money for. There just won’t be that much good stuff and there will be tremendous demand.
• New Companies
  This is a fast moving space. New companies can focus in on creating new users experiences and tools to answer the challenges.  It is still amazing to remind yourself that Google and Amazon are only around for 15 years. Facebook was started in 2005. There are tons of 3d Web opportunities across technology, infrastructure and new content experiences.

The 3D Web is the newest Frontier

We have taken the first steps down the 3D Web road with Heritage Key.It is a new online community with a totally unique virtual experience. We think it can be the basis for a new range of “real-time, online communities.”

From our side, we are focused on delivering a powerful mix of educational and entertaining content (edu-tainment?). You can transport yourself to the Valley of the Kings and enter King Tut’s tomb. You can understand how small a tomb this is and then go to a surreal cosmic gallery to see dozens of the most incredible ancient world artefacts every discovered. Your only other chance to see the artefacts better is to actually go to Cairo and visit the museum. The best pieces of the discovery do not travel as part of any of the Tut touring exhibitions.

Online you can get up close to see the details with your friends or participate in a live lecture. And the virtual environment lets you even travel across time to go back to reconstruction of a day-in-the-life of King Tut (check our highlights video here). You can wander a stately home in Amarna and get a feel for how the Nile supported the vibrant Egyptian culture for thousands of years. Watch Heritage Key coverage on CNN here. The market for people that buy culture travel services and related media is global and large. We think Heritage Key can add something useful to actual visits as well as helping people learn about why the ancient world is relevant to their lives today.

I would point out that the main take-away on Heritage Key is that we are trying to mix the online community which has the broadest reach via web and mobile with the 3D, virtual experience which has the deepest possible engagement. It is early days on this, but we can see that the combination makes sense and has huge potential.

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The Extinction of an Old Friend

From one perspective, new technologies should have already changed the ways in which online users deal with the web. The market is loaded with cheap, powerful hardware and low cost bandwidth. There are thousands of software applications and services and tens of thousands of sites for almost every interest area.

Looking out across the horizon--not a mouse in sight.

From another perspective, changing user behavior is always a slower and more difficult process than most people expect it to be  (or early adopters have the patience to wait around for). When the change comes, though, it is a moment of opportunity as we learn to let go of old habits and tools that no longer help us as they once did.

With that view, I think the mouse is on the edge of extinction. My guess is that within two years, you won’t even be able to buy one that easily. What will that mean to the future of online experiences?  Plenty.  But let’s first consider the mouse’s desktop companion, the keyboard.

As most know, the keyboard was designed for the mechanical typewriter. The keys were designed to both optimize finger movement and to minimize the chance of the typewriter arms of getting all tangled up, though I seem to remember “a” and “e” getting caught together quite a bit. Remember the details we needed to use that technology properly? It was important to use the striking force setting to get through carbon copies.  The memory of those carbon copies is still vestigal on today’s emails as “CC:”.  And what about white-out/typex (that made Mike Nesmith’s from the Monkees mom a millionaire btw)- the only way to delete and revise without retyping?  How quaint that seems now. But even with all the advances we’ve made, we still use this same keyboard layout, even though a pc keyboard is digital. In the future, new generations of users could be sent off to more speedy layouts such as the Dvorak keyboard patented in 1936 (with an eclectic following of some 100,000′s of users today and used apparently by Steve Wozniak).

What is less well known about the QWERTY keyboard is that it was also designed to make it easy for typewriter salesmen to demo their fancy new machine to potential buyers. Imagine someone being confronted by a traveling salesman with a fancy, shiny new typewriter as asking why it works any better than paper and pencil. There should have been discussions about how typing would make people lazy and not learn how to write properly (which has probably happened). Of course people would need to learn a new skill to install a ribbon and be strong enough to pound out some words. The advantage would be consistently professional looking documents that would be much easier to read. Then the salesman would crank in a fresh piece of paper and with one finger peck out the word “typewriter” using just the top row of keys. Probably like most tech salespeople they didn’t really know how to use their own technology beyond the demo.

Decades later we are still are bound by the legacy of mechanics and simple demos.

But as the Web becomes more complex, offering more varied types of media, more people are spending more time online.  In this new era, use of the mouse and keyboard are  becoming major obstacles to offering new kinds of user experiences. The browser is also a limiting factor as it is forces us to scroll a “page” at a time – scrolling that we have to do with, you guessed it, the mouse.

Breaking the Constraints and Releasing the New Online Experience

People increasingly want information on demand in the form they want. This is much more of an active process than zapping on tv. Further people want more threads running at once. It can hit overload at times, but compare multi-tasking to channel surfing and you will see the difference in pace and content consumption.

So, let’s fast forward a few years: what does the online world look like without the mouse? We’ll be using touchscreens and movement sensors to control our access to information, much in the way smartphones do today. The iPhone has really made a big impact by allowing people to be away from their desktop computers, but still have the ability to interact online.

People will still want something personal–in the way that their pc is theirs (sorta even now as hardware is shared quite a bit). Yet it won’t be the computing power or the screen that is theirs–it will be their online presence and data assets and the physical device that enables navigation. Gartner guesses that by 2013 there will be more smartphones in use than PCs for the first time. More than 1 Billion people will access the internet from a mobile device as well (much more good stat porn here at TechCrunchies thanks Anand!).

I can see where “wearable” devices will be more useful to link us to the net and authenticate us.  Finally the Dick Tracy watch? The content online will also be more visually oriented to convey more information faster, and better. Now could well be the moment for the avatar to start to be more significant, as online content becomes a richer environment to explore and consume. Instead of page views, we will become focused on immersion. In effect it will be the collision of the 2D, browser web with multi-player online games controlled by an iPhone. I guess you can call it the 3D wii web?

The direction of something like Natal is amazing may show us the way to a more natural human-machine interface. It would be even cooler to have goal-oriented behaviours integrated. For example, wouldn’t you like to buy the cheapest copy of a book from a trusted supplier without having to search and compare so much? Or, to ask for the best value at a local restaurant for something that agrees with your diet (without already having dined on similar fare?). The challenge then is to enable lighter touch, but more powerful interactions that get people much better results than they can otherwise. Science fiction novels long ago laid out the solution to this type of interaction with information.

Then you must add in the social dimension to truly see the future.  Distributed social networks have grown and evolved since the days of the CB radio – and they will be very much a part of how new content and online experiences will be distributed and how they should be designed. The combined dynamics of collaboration, competition, and status are really what seem to engage and drive exciting new online usage. The one thing CB radios have over current online communities is that they delivered real-time communications, while most of today’s online social networking is delayed (asynchronous) to a greater or lesser extent.  But not always – online virtual communities found in games and in virtual experience do allow for both real-time (synchronous) and asynchronous communication – and this is important for the future.

The future of the web should be better results for “social transactions”.  Social transactions are things you do with other people, rather than solo, or things that vest you into a community that then enables you to do more.

The future then – the Net net means online information that is more cinematic in detail, deep in quality, smart ,and ubiquitous across access points will open a massive appetite for mainstream consumption of immersive, rich, and social content. And you won’t need to use your mouse or be tied to leftovers from the mechanical revolution.

Avoid the Noise – Find Real-Time Communities

While activities like shopping, buying books or making travel plans are normal for many online users, in 2010 we are hitting the puking point with spam and linkbait—at least the hard-core online users are. The casual users and noobs are still good targets for scams and will click on even the most annoying pop-up ad.  Online content is growing—but low quality content is growing most quickly.

Within all this noise and potential for risk/wasted effort, people are starting to look for relevant communities that can be trusted—trusted to de-clutter information and protect their time from useless crap. People are also taking some time to choose sites that can be trusted to hold personal information and data including images, video, and blogs.  Flickr is an excellent example here (not a surprise it was started then by gamers who now have a new 2D MMO coming out called Glitch).  People come to the web to do something specific—ie buy something or research something. The ways in which they do things need to be more relevant and value-adding—as well as more entertaining and potentially a place to  meet people (not bots or scammers).

Creating new online communities that are focused, media-rich and vibrant is not easy today. I like two sites that have something going on these days the Daily Beast and Livestrong. They have the mix of commissioned and UGC. You can feel the energy of the contributors and the interaction of the visitors.  Yet, these are still “publisher” sites though even with the UGC load. They are missing the real-time components that will/should define online communities.

Within our work on Heritage Key we are starting down the road to address some of the initial opportunities that may be unique and compelling enough.  Our ambition is to make Heritage Key a community enabler/manager as opposed to being another online publisher. The site is media-rich featuring original video, maps, images, directories and thousands of pieces of content. Yet, what will make HK most unique is the  real-time social interactions in the 3D, virtual online areas.

At Heritage Key, you can visit the ancient world –either as it exists today in the real world, online, or virtually at various periods in time. You can plan your trip to Stonehenge on the website—or explore Stonehenge across time with other people through the virtual environments. You can study images and watch videos about King Tut—and you can go discover the tomb and see artefacts in photo-realistic 3D immersive spaces.  While there is an element of casual gaming at play, there are also the real facts and accurate historical information. (check out the coverage on CNN iDesk)

The act of exploring is both active and interactive.  Exploring, both with and without other people, makes the content more stimulating because one is primed for discovery. In the future at Heritage Key, explorers stand to enhance their online identities and gain status as they achieve goals within the environment, thus making their efforts pay off for them online.

The end result should be more engaging, more accessible and more social experiences that ultimately yield faster learning and deeper understanding. If we get it right, then visiting a museum  or an archaeological site should be more interesting and relevant. And then when it is, people should want/need to share back their experiences with the appreciative community.

Yet isolated online communities won’t be enough either. We will want to move freely between thenm as we do across web sites today. Yet there is a more involved process of avatar activity and managing digital assets. We will need a sort of community of communities to make this work perhaps (more on this topic in future posts).

While the web may really start to look more and more like the “Matrix” in the next few years, the answer to why future online content engages users will be less about flashy graphics and more about what users gain by visiting and interacting.  Users keep wanting more and more and only solid communities will be able to deliver satisfying experiences.

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Visit King Tut's Tomb online now and make your own discovery of the most amazing artefacts ever discovered.

Tech Radar did a nice little piece on Heritage Key recently saying:

It’s a mainstream application of a once niche feature that reminds us why we all thought it was such a good idea. While Heritage Key is predominantly an educational website aimed at amateur historians and fans of archaeology, its heart is the 3D virtual exhibit.

They hit the key point really here, about what will bring virtual online to mainstream users.  At the core of any community-site there must be something to do and for Heritage Key that is about exploring and understanding more about ancient world places.  The virtual online experience will give people a great insight into places, artefacts and the overall history.  Virtual Tourism is becoming an interesting area also. It allows for a better visit or give a sense of place you may never have the chance to really go to. When people GoVirtual they will also meet other explorers and then the real-time social interaction kicks in.

Dinah Greek commented about Heritage Key for Computing.co.uk:

An interactive website devoted to historical studies offers visitors more than the chance to explore ancient civilisations using historical recreations.Wonderful those these 3D reconstructions are, the Heritage Keysite also offers people the chance to join live online lectures, ask questions and join forums where they can meet like-minded people.

Dave Bailey in his write-up about us asked a question more about how virtual online can be used by CIOs in future:

So the question for businesses is how big is the opportunity to monetise commercial web sites by introducing a virtual world of online activity?

UK firm Rezzable is one company pushing the boundaries of virtual world technology, both technically and in identifying how such a business model could work.

virtual online environments can deliver high photo-realistic objects and immersive activities now.

What are some of the issues blocking mainstream adoption for online virtual experiences?

So why isn’t everyone with a computer and good broadband trying out a virtual online experience? Well, they are doing other stuff online that sucks-up a lot (maybe too much even) of their time. More specifically there are some issues in the way:

• Lack of quality 3D content – 2.5D just isn’t good enough for non-kids. We think there are some interesting changes in flow now that will make it easier/faster to create photo-realistic content that can be streamed online. Watch Unity. Watch for the SL mesh viewer. Watch Web Alive.
• Variety — one thing that SL sorta has right is the way in which you can zap between different experiences. People don’t want to have to log-in/out and remake their accounts just to look at something for a quick blast. We are looking at this issue now and expect to have a good enough solution to move between our grids = Rezzable and Heritage Key with one identity and consistent avatar. Once this is in place we can extend to other grids.
• Something fun enough to do – We have released King Tut Virtual on our OpenSim-based grid and in general someone can wander around for 1-2 hours checking out some of the most amazing objects ever discovered. They can be seen in incredible detail. But we also think mainstream users and gamers need more goal oriented activities, like quests or contests.  Our new work on Stonehenge Virtual is starting to address this, but I think there is still a long way to get the mix of realistic content and activities right.
• The Avatars are not good enough — sure they move around in a jerky way that actually you can get used to. But the avatars are not the online proxy for real people ye. Mainly they are not expressive enough or smart enough to do stuff.
• Tech Stack is still unstable — it has gotten dramatically better, but we still suffer from random crashes and lag and generally high enough levels to exhaust enthusiasts. It seems clear though how to make the tech work better. It will just need focused work to improve key things like physics, viewer, scripting. See my OpenSim issues list here.

Visit King Tut online here.

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More brains the better? Sorry this is sorta disgusting. But the point is about getting more people involved via online communities. (French brains, not human btw).

It is of course ideal to have community members enrich content–but is UGC to hard to deal with online? Is it too random and too much spam? How to get to the next level = Community-Inspired-Content (CIC).

What is Online Community Content Co-Creation?

There are 3 main participant groups need for a co-creation program: 1) Brand 2) Community Manager 3) Community Members.  The Community Manager (which is how we see our role at Heritage Key) needs to create the focus and deliver the program.

The Brand and the Community Manager should frame the focus of the content and outline the mix (video, articles, interviews, virtual, real world events). The real new area is to get the right balance between commissioned work and user generate content (UGC).  UGC needs to be on-point with the focus, but more importantly needs to allow the Community Members their own space to participate.  I think the real world events are an important part of this.

The Co-Creation program should run over a period of time like 3-6 months. We think of it as a sort of series. People can then catch if from start or  catch-up through referrals or web buzz around the activity.  You can also have an endpoint where you can convert content into a final package.

Benefits to Brands

• New Relevant Web Content – Content is unique and will fit major interests of the community members. It should also be branded and embeddable off the main microsite (via widgets or YouTube players).
• No Other Brand Interference — it would be exclusive to the sponsoring Brand. No noise, no unexpected placement. And the microsite area would be much more engaging than an Brand controlled site.
• Community Interaction — program should offer people chance to contribute (for free or payment), share opinions, contests, join real w0rld events.  Ideally there should be some time-based momentum designed into the program.
• Leverage Existing Brand Assets – Brands can repurpose or simple use existing assets and place them in proper context/linking to new content.
• Fresh Ammo for PR — Program should give PR/Marketing teams new materials to work for customer and media outreach.
• Destination to Drive Promotions — Brands can use their existing email lists to drive customers/prospects to microsite for targeted promotions. Surveys can also be very useful to learn more about customer needs.
• Speed to Market – Community Manager should be able to deliver program rapidly and across 3-6 months time period to build momentum.
• Innovation – Brands should seek Community Managers that offer web site, websphere, and interactive applications that when combined with new content will be very exciting.
• Lower total costs — Co-Creation should not be massively expensive. It will have potentially high CPM metrics, but you would expect reasonable total costs and good CPA downstream.  It is key to understand that co-creation right now is a way to access the early adopters and thought leaders within the communities, so it should also be considered as a strategic play.

We are working on Content Co-Creation programs for Heritage Key that will be focused on visting/experience history of ancient world sites. These programs  will mix video, virtual and article content.  More info will be shared soon!  Get RSS or follow us on twitter @xlent1 or @heritagekey or for virtual content @rezzable .

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Great quote from the Guardian piece on this event: “The milestone marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century. It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.” It sure seems like the last ten years have been the warm-up to the more revolutionary impact of internet technology.

Times Online points out something interesting: “Interruptive formats, which include pop-up adverts, fell by 9 per cent to £6.8 million.” Yes, pop-ups, pop-unders and other annoying stuff is not that productive or brand endearing for advertisers.

But I really wonder if the internet is gaining faster than tv is just losing audience. TV programming seems lost and confused–or US driven here in the UK.  (although the BBC series on Darwin is awesome). We have Virgin cable at home and I think I spend more time looking for something to watch than actually watching something. (actually maybe I need a digital set-top box recorder).

We believe that online will accelerate its dominance over print and TV in 2010 and beyond. The media landscape will change completely, forever when more people start browsing from their slick new HD TV’s–watching HD video from YouTube. TV will just be something embedded in a browser. The Convergence is upon us soon enough. Yet, the main driver is the pace, immediacy and interactive nature of online. You can have multiple threads of activity and you get relevant stuff faster. And online is portable to iPhones (=ubiquitous).

From the content creation side, the big difference between online and TV/print is the cost of production and distribution. It is hard to see how the established media players can compete against the longtail armed with HD video cameras, DSLRs–and their passion. Distribution cost are zero! (ok maybe $100/year if you use Blip.tv)  It should not be a shock that advertisers are looking to move to the new wave of reach, relevance and interaction. Sure, the reach is not the same, but really that just means the advertisers need to change how they buy if they want to find the right brands to support.

Of course we see Heritage Key as an example of the innovative edge of new media. It is a content-oriented community with real-time social web interaction. It is a web2.0 plus virtual.  The site adds value to real-world travel and education in an entertaining, sticky manner. People can share their travel adventures to ancient world places and make their own discoveries.

But we are not alone at all. There are other sites to study that have strong UGC and innovative interactive applications–look at Livestrong with their Daily Plate ( and you can check other Demand Media sites here). Or look at the podcasters like Cali over at Geek Brief TV running very tight, focused, regular video.  On the grand scale, it is also very interesting to watch how CNN is mixing broadcast with online in a serious way.

It would be really interesting to look at demographic data for the under 25′s to see where the online hours/week compares to TV viewership. If I had to guess it would be 10 hours plus online and 1-2 TV per week.

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