Links for October 3
By Adam Reuters
- The Electric Sheep Company (full disclosure: a contractor of Reuters) is launching a virtual world advertising network, but details are scanty thus far. Clickable Culture has more. UPDATE: In a subsequent ESC blog post, Joel Greenberg asks if traditional online ad standards make sense in a virtual world. “At first blush, the answer is, ‘Yes.’ But if you dig deeper the answer is, ‘no.’”
- A new Metaverse Market Index is set to be unveiled at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose next week, spearheaded by Cisco’s Christian Renaud, Nick Wilson of Metaversed.com and Robert Bloomfield of Cornell University. TechCrunch reports that the group will “construct a database of statistics on each platform’s user activity, economy, and technology.”
- In related news, Bloomfield throws down the gauntlet over at Terra Nova, challenging Second Life exchanges to create a futures market that will predict the virtual world’s user base and economic activity. The idea of the “Second Life Indicator Contract” is to harness the wisdom of crowds, much as the Iowa Electronic Markets predicts the 2008 Presidential winner and other events.
