TU PANTALLA DIARIA

“Linden dollars are the currency of Second Life. The virtual money can be exchanged online for real US dollars. Imagine the possibilities!” as read on About.com’s Second Life portal. Second life is one of the most played massively multiplayer online Role Playing games, or in short, MMORPG. But the time that you can say you have a ‘second life’ is over. Virtual games come into reality more and more!

Even Reuters, an news service providing articles to the whole world, has a Second Life division, reporting on the last events in the artificial world. They do this because the game goes beyond cyberspace boundaries. You begin by making an avatar, a cyber version of yourself. Then you can go off and discover the world. You meet people very easily, chatting, that will help you find your way around. To lose you status of novice, you should first buy some new clothes, which you can only do with Linden Dollars, the currency of Second Life. It’s gotten so far that people now are earning money through Second Life, by performing with their band. You see, it’s not only possible to buy Linden Dollars, you can also exchange them back to US Dollars! At Reuters Second Life site you can calculate how much your Linden dollars are worth. Reuters did tell us of the second time ever, that people have played less on Second Life than the month before. The first signs of the end?

An addiction for all ages

“I’ve come across players of all ages in these games, including seniors, couples, and even entire families.” Dave Spohn is what you’d call a gaming addict. At his worst moment he was playing three different MMORPG’s. As a result, he sais, he barely found time to sleep. Gamers get completely absorbed in a fantasized world where they truly have control over what’s going on! And the commercial world knows it. Here we see yet another way how these games know to move themselves into everyday life.

Coca Cola uses the popularity of World Of Warcraft in their commercials. World of Warcraft is very similar to Second Life with the one very important difference: fantasy! Your avatar belong to one of ten races like orcs, dwarves, elves or trolls. You go on quests and battle monsters to gain strength and reach the maximum level. The game already has more nine million subscribers!

These MMORPG won’t disappear. They are already part of our own world right now and there is just to much money in it. As well The Simpsons as South Park have episodes tackling this issue, even winning Emmy awards for it! Will people keep losing themselves in a fake reality? Or isn’t it that fake anymore?

Close that e-mule. Ban Kazaa. To hell with Limewire. You love music? Their is a whole network of musicsites out there that is waiting for you. You get to enjoy great, undiscovered music, legally!Aren’t you to bad on the guitar yourself? Dreaming of a fan site, especially devoted to you? In the article 39 Ways to Put Yourself on the Web you find various ways to publicize your very own song. Of the sites listed, I can seriously recommend Jamendo. On Jamendo you can upload your whole CD, which people can then download. Don’t fear though! You put copyright on your songs. Shared that is! Lean about the Creative Commons!

They have their very own community called ccMixter. This site is made for artist to post their own remixes of Creative Commons licensed music! This site has gotten so popular, that they are thinking of a way to make it even better. Their blog holds more info as to what you can find there, and what and why they want to change the site. Especially if you are into electronic music, you should visit this site! ccMixter is often used to find licensed music to put on videos. For example, the music I used in Trippin to Paris with Constitution: Chienne de vie from dupo-x-y, I found on ccMixter. The music for the video of Málaga, I found on Jamendo.

Off course you sometimes just want to enjoy your favourite artist. You can check their Myspace site. MySpace music is by far the largest music community on the web. You find the commercial and well know pop bands there, but also the girl next door who likes to play her guitar, or the friend that gives concerts on open stages. For them Myspace now also provides a download service, so that fans can listen to your music on their MP3’s. Through the service you can even sell them, as you can read here.

If you don’t mind spending a bit of money for good music, you want to know what you buy. Eric Dahl tells us of Better Propaganda! A music review site that offers previews of the latest songs in a very structured way. Don’t go there for music from the past though. In this site you can also find some free songs.

And then of course you have programs like e-mule, Kazaa, called Peer-to-Peer programs. These are programs that allow you to search for files you need or you want, that are shared by other people. It is very clear that we enter the grey zone here. There is no control, and therefore no precision of copyright. Which makes you might be downloading illegally, whether you’re doing it consciously or not… We’ll finish with this video on peer-to-peer networks. Just remember that you now know way more effective ways to get good music, in a legal way.

This week was the international congress for digital content in the giant IFEMA of Mardrid. For me, Yann Mauchamp, ambassador from Xing, was by far the most interesting. He explained us the web 2.0 concept. It is a new form of internet, as if it a whole new version.

Today, we have a lot more input in the internet with the concept of web 2.0. Mauchamp explains how it is us that determines what there is to see on the internet! Profile sites pop up like mushrooms. Who these days has only one profile site? Also, you can compose your own home page using platform like iGoogle of My Yahoo!; you can bother people with your own insignificant opinion, pretty much like I’m doing, on blogsites like Blogger or WordPress. And if you go to whatever news site, you will be able to post comments or rate articles.
In Web 1.0 this interactivity was inexistent: the webmaster provided content and the surfer had nothing to say in it. Now, with web 2.0, not only does the surfer provide feedback, they also provide content to each other and give feedback to each other.
Mauchamp elaborated on the profile sites with an interesting point of view. Next time, you get an invitation to join a network on the internet like Facebook, ask the person who invites you why. An electronic network takes time to establish and you should know if it’s worth it, if it’s going to save you time in the end. If they can’t give you a good reason, don’t join.

Ana Pereda told us about internet versions of magasines and newspapers. As in the beginning the most interesting written articles were put on the net at night, now the most interesting online articles get a elaborated version in the written press the following day! According to Ana Pererda from free newspaper Qué, an electronic version has following components: an informative component, an audiovisual component and a social component, which is typical for the web 2.0 concept: feedback from the internaut.

Ficod was very interesting, even though it’s a bit funny how technology failed on this conference about new technology… The automatic translators only worked once, the screen in the auditorium always was behind on reality, and I don’t think I’ve seen one conference with all microphones working without problems. But this just puts everything in perspective for me. Technology is great and means a great deal of help to us, but we must remind ourselves not to rely on it completely. And I can always appreciate a bit of irony!