Will digital addiction clinics be big in 2013? 6 January 2013Last updated at 20:06 ET Mobile and social media are the driving forces of the next wave of digital change. But these advances are reducing our attention spans and creating new dilemmas for the way we live and work, says Nic Newman. It used to be the case that British people had a reputation for buttoned-up restraint. Today we are some of the most active social networkers in the world - sharing our party pictures, our music playlists and our deepest secrets with hardly a moment's thought.
More than 60% of online users actively maintain a Facebook profile, and social networking is our favourite activity online in terms of time spent. Sir Tim Berners-Lee's tweet to the world at the Olympics opening ceremony was a reminder that social networking is now a key part of our national culture. And in terms of mobile, the UK now leads the world in its use of data. There is, of course, a link between the two. So what will the potent combination of social and mobile bring in 2013? From Euro 2012 to Gangnam Style: what Britons Googled most this year | Technology. Like the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year (2012: omnishambles), Google's annual Zeitgeist list of the year's top UK internet search terms is becoming a handy barometer of what is on the nation's mind. In 2012 the top UK search terms included Whitney Houston, Kate Middleton, Gangnam Style and April Jones, the Welsh five-year-old who went missing in October.
Zeitgeist measures the year's fastest-growing search terms, rather than the largest volume of searches. The top 10 overall list of trending terms features familiar online preoccupations – sport, celebrity, the royal family, viral videos, Apple product launches – along with others relating to big stories of 2012, including NatWest Online, which went down in July leaving customers with no access to their internet accounts and unable to use debit cards, and the disappearance of April Jones, who remains missing despite a massive search effort. Philip Rosedale on Second Life. Nyla Cheeky Second Life Couture Fashion Boutique One of a Kind Avant-garde Designs, House of Nyla, Vancouver Canada.
A Second Life success story: Nyla Cheeky « Second Arts. I’m not sure why Nyla and I met each other – I think it was from our mutual love of SL sculpture (and, in particular, the works of SL sculpture legend Starax Statosky). She told me that she was a designer of high fashion womens wear from Vancouver, Canada, and she showed me a few of her outfits. It was pretty clear that she wasn’t selling the standard SL women’s clothing styles of grunge or princesswear. She had a style and flair all her own as is clear on her website, House of Nyla. Nyla takes the notion of Real Life-Second Life transfer to the next level. With a few bucks and a lot of faith in herself, Nyla set about turning the SL fashion world on fire.
Read on after the fold for the more serious moral to the story… I went a little harsh in my assessment of the fundamentals of Second Life in yesterday’s post, “Not Ready for Prime Time.” Now, look at this video that Canadian television did on Nyla. Done? Nyla’s work stands as the reason WHY Second Life should succeed. Like this: YouTube. Second Life. Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool based on simple geometric shapes that allows residents to build virtual objects. There is also a procedural scripting language, Linden Scripting Language, which can be used to add interactivity to objects. Sculpted prims (sculpties), mesh, textures for clothing or other objects, animations, and gestures can be created using external software and imported. The Second Life terms of service provide that users retain copyright for any content they create, and the server and client provide simple digital rights management (DRM) functions.[3] However, Linden Lab changed their terms of service in August 2013, to be able to use user-generated content for any purpose.
The new terms of service prevents users from using textures from 3rd-party texture services, as some of them pointed out explicitly.[5] Users can also photograph in Second Life with the camera technology the client programs have. History[edit] 10th anniversary[edit] Whatever happened to Second Life? In the mid-2000s, Second Life was one of the most talked-about things in tech. Singer/songwriter Regina Spektor used the virtual world to conduct listening parties, while rapper Chamillionaire conducted virtual meet and greets. MTV sponsored in-world fashion shows, tech firms set up training centres and hip brands rushed to set up virtual storefronts; in the real world, Second Life was a business magazine cover star and the subject of breathless dozen-page spreads in tech titles. Things have changed. SL hasn't been a cover star for a while, and reports tend to concentrate not on exciting new possibilities but on real-world concerns, such as SL creator Linden Lab laying off 30% of its workforce in 2010.
Many brands' stores have been deserted for years, and concurrency - that is, the number of people using the service at the same time - has been slipping. So what went wrong? Don't believe the hype Part of the problem is that the gentlemen and women of the press got a bit excited.