The State of the GriotVision Platform

Last fall, I said that the focus of this blog would shift to content and for a brief moment it did. The first GriotVision channel was launched as a sci-fi thriller played out in Second Life and on the web. While most people who saw it thought it was at least interesting if not innovative, it was a long way from fulfilling the vision and promise of GriotVision. It was nowhere near interactive enough and required too much centralized administration. I wasn’t surprised or disappointed because it was intended to be an interim, evolutionary step. However, shortly after launch, the lead writer was seriously injured in a car accident. This stopped the flow of new episodes and exacerbated the centralization problem. Then several months later, there was a major outage at the hosting provider resulting in corruption of the databases. While backups do exist, restoring the system would require a great deal of manual configuration of servers and I’ve chosen to stay focused on evolving the GriotVision platform. You may be asking just what is “the GriotVision platform”? The GV platform can be viewed as a stack of technical capabilities/services:

Various amounts of information about most of these can be found on the Sister Sites in the right column. Over the coming weeks I’ll be tying these pieces together here on this blog in preparation for a December roll-out. The first layer you’ll hear about is BOP which is due for a new release next week.