Digital Planet May 27

Listening to Digital Planet podcast for May 27th, I learned a few things:

1. Virtual worlds are more pervasive than I thought. Previously, I used to consider only Second Life as a virtual world and not social networking websites. But coming to think of it, there is significant overlap between the two, and for many reasons, people are creating new virtual worlds, often targeted to specific class of users, like young children, students, teens, etc. E.g., Lego Corp. has a virtual world where you can play with legos. BBC has one for kids, and so on. In fact there was a whole "Children in Virtual Worlds" conference that this edition focussed on. The podcast mainly discussed safety, "active moderation" (moderator is a character in the VW himself), "CCTV moderation" (moderators is outside but silently watching - considered a bad thing).

2. Another interesting item was the psychological analysis of friendships and relationships in the virtual world. The conclusion was that in a VW, like in a real world, friendships happen based on shared experiences. So, to create a "tighter" social network, you need more shared experiences - yes, it's all about the experience, shared ones.