Entries Tagged 'GV Stack' ↓

Eyeballs help build community, but their impact on revenue is indirect. What ultimately drives revenue are the experiences that occur when people participate in a story. This is what the book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage is all about and why communities and commerce are tightly linked. Here are a few related links:

Google’s business isn’t really about monetizing eyeballs; it’s about monetizing clicks. That may seem like a small distinction - you have to attract the eyeball, after all, before you can spur the click - but I think there’s actually a very big difference. Eyeball monetization is the traditional media strategy: publish or broadcast content that attracts readers or viewers, and then intersperse ads among that content. The content, in this case, serves not to prompt action directly, but merely to draw an audience that’s attractive to companies looking to promote their products and services. There’s a natural distance, in other words, between the content and the ads - a distance that’s good for the content producer but often frustrating to the advertiser. The click monetization strategy removes that distance. In Google’s AdSense program, for instance, a media company, or other content producer, earns nothing by simply attracting eyeballs. It only brings in cash by getting viewers to click on an ad link.

Rough Type: The Click Economy

yes, in an attention economy, you have to get the eyeballs first. But the money, as many found out with internet stocks, does not automatically follow the eyeballs.

Interview with Richard Lanham

all the crap about attention allocation is primarily because that’s one of the best ways to build a community.
Community Value

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.

People tend to view TV and film as the ultimate form of media. However, media is evolving beyond these limited formats into the realms of the immersive and interactive. In her ground-breaking book Hamlet On The Holodeck, MIT researcher Janet Murray explores the future of the narrative and how storytelling will be impacted by immersive technologies. One can see the handwriting on the wall of sports video games. More and more sports fans are choosing to participate in the game instead of being passive observers on the couch. Consider that the latest NFL TV deals bring in about $3.1 billion dollars per year which is $93 million per year for each team on average. Now compare that with the revenues from the most popular NFL video game:

… the success of the latest Madden game illustrates how lucrative the video game industry has become. Its opening-week gross sales rivals some of this year’s biggest movie box office draws: “The Da Vinci Code” movie, for instance, drew $102 million in its first week …

CNN Technology

What’s this got to do with GriotVision? TV is a single, static format whereas GV is about convergence - video feeds of live games within virtual worlds where multiple participants are competing in simulations.

In the definition of GriotVision, the term G-Stick is used. A G-Stick is a device for navigating virtual worlds and interacting with objects therein. It currently exists in software form only but I’ve always envisioned that a hardware version will be created since “hardware is really just software crystallized“. As GVScript is based on Squeak, it is suitable for embedding in hardware devices. Back in 2003, on the old GriotVision site there was a fully functional prototype written in Squeak Smalltalk you could download, but this was really only usable by knowledgeable Squeak coders. There’s a new version coming out this summer that has been greatly enhanced and is much more accessible. In the meantime I’ve put some videos of this early G-Sticks online here for people to get a sense of how a G-Stick works. NOTE: For the best resolution, download these and play them back full screen rather than in the browser.

• The G-Stick Presentation is an actual GVScript production that explains the basic elements of GriotVision.
• Navigating With G-Stick demonstrates that the G-Stick Presentation is a living, interactive piece of software and also shows its use in 3D navigation.

G-Stick is the next phase beyond iPod video, Treo and other hand held devices.