Social Media for the Third Sector

Learning Package: Social Media for the Third Sector

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What is happening down at the Labs?

It has been a bit quiet here on the blog. What’s been happening down at Presence Labs? Well here’s the list that makes up for a month of blog entries:

• We’ve almost completed moving to the UK, with most things firmly nailed down. We’ve set up in Brighton (new contact details here) and apart from another cubic yard of required paperwork and a 20ft container full of furniture, we are, as they say, sorted.
• We are working in partnership with Richard Giles’ Clique Communications developing a very exciting, new (and thus currently secret) web and media application that we hope to bring fully to life this year. More on that as we can talk about it, probably when we get to a public beta or something. The concept is exciting and as we develop and test more of the components of the whole, it gets more and more exciting.
• There’s a bit of action emerging here in the UK for us to help with architecture and development for new web applications. It’ll be interesting to see just what happens here.
• Given the interest in new web applications, I’m putting a bit of thought into a methodology specific to the creation and development of new web applications from the innovation at the beginning to the operation at the end. Philosophically I’m fairly close to the 37 Signals Getting Real way of thinking, but I do like development to be a bit more controlled, at least based around a strong and up to date roadmap. Anyway, I’ll post that when I get it slightly more organised and hopefully can develop with others.
• I’m working with a group doing interesting things for business in Second Life. The part of this I’m really interested in is forging links between Second Life and the rest of the internet, to make Second Life connected rather than a somewhat-disconnected island application.

That sounds like a lot, but there’s room for more. We are looking for like minded people to work with on new web applications. So, if you have an idea and some funding, come and have a chat, let’s see if we can make your dream real.

Business Week on Second Life

Business Week Online article about business going on in Second Life: My Virtual Life.

Doing business in Second Life

Today, for the second time, I took part in a business meeting in Second Life. As we’ve grown used to IM and Skype for meetings, this was bound to be the next thing, taking it into a 3D avatar world.

As with IM and Skype, in Second Life you have to get familiar with the controls, and learn how to be expressive via your avatar. But once there and with practice, it starts to become more natural.

The next step is making things. I want to be able to build 3d objects to express ideas, then be able to hand them to people or point to them. The support is there in Second Life to do that. It is just going to take practice.
I get the feeling we are going to use this a lot for business in the future.

By the way, in Second Life I’m known as Gra Itoku. See you there sometime.