• The future of virtual worlds will be about story – http://tinyurl.com/cvhp8p #
• Finding the right social media message isn’t that far removed from Steven Blank’s Customer Development model #
• Heading to Facebook Developer Garage tonight in SF. Wonder if the topic of story will come up at all? #
• Waiting for Facebook Developer Garage SF to kick off #
• Facebook’s growth coming most recently from over 35, almost no growth for under 18 #
• The hype around virtual goods might be waning – http://tinyurl.com/cgbmaf #
• Oh boy, seems like Bluehost is down #
• A game with a story we all know – http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/27/videogame.losing.virginity/index.html #
• Watched Fat Girl – French are great at showing something unique but can’t seem to take it anywhere, tossing in an open ending doesn’t fix it #
• Debate – go out tonight or work on the screenplay? It’s a never ending battle #

Related posts:

1. Another experiment in collaborative writing via Twitter
2. Hardcore gamers down, perhaps it’s time for something new?

Years ago the question was, “Why do I need to start a blog, what would I say?” The blunt answer was, “just start one and you’ll find your voice.” I found mine after a few false starts, but it never hurts to do a sanity check every once in a while. It’s beneficial for you and your readers who are sacrificing their most prized possession – their attention.

Drawing up the next few posts I found a common theme – screenwriting. What can I say, I have a lot of story knowledge having failed to become a screenwriter.

Fail faster to succeed sooner.- David Kelly, CEO of IDEO

So with that in mind I’m going to refocus my blog around screenwriting. Not the art of screenwriting but how the principles of crafting a story can be applied to tech. In the past I’ve blogged about social media, virtual worlds, cloud computing, etc. but that doesn’t make me any different than the next guy. The unique voice I have is my screenwriting knowledge.

A decade ago I listened to Richard Newton, the former dean of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifelong champion of innovation, at a small private function in Silicon Valley. One of the things he said has stayed with me: Innovation opportunities going forward will be at the cusps of different disciplines–biology and computer science, information technology and health care, semiconductors and medicine.

- Barriers To Innovation

Related posts:

1. Thirteen hours of Slaying the Dragon
2. Interactive drama won’t be about the technology

I’m heading back to the start-up life and joining Vivaty as a Senior Product Manager. My friends already mock me for my fascination with virtual worlds so they see it as my dream job. And when you take virtual worlds, add start-up, add a great team, and plop it down in Silicon Valley – it pretty much is my dream job. True it’s risky to be leaving a stable company like Experian in this time of economic meltdown, but to me it isn’t risky at all. Vivaty has a lot going for it.

• Great technology built on an open format - X3D
• Plans to open up the platform
• A great distribution model
• Has developers in mind - Vivaty Creative and Vivaty Studio
• A great team with the right perspective
• Great backers - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures

That looks like a lot of opportunity rather than risk.

It’s exciting to be getting into the virtual worlds industry on the ground floor. The whole industry is still looking for the killer app that will attract a mainstream audience. I of course think that the killer app is immersive story. But even if I’m wrong, I have confidence in myself and the Vivaty team to discover whatever the killer app is.

Related posts:

1. Want to innovate, start with a profitable business

I’ve since begun a blog on TapBot to cover immersive story and it’s related issues. Although I’m into disparate things, I got the feeling that my audience was having trouble following them all. I think this hurt immersive story find a bigger audience and so moving it to its own blog I’m hoping to correct that. – August 7, 2008

Since I’m starting afresh with my blog after it unceremoniously exploded, I thought I’d give a quick intro to my blog and some recent history. Some of this is a rehash of a post I made a week ago after being inspired to return to more of a rant style.

First, this blog isn’t the easiest to get into as the concept of immersive story itself isn’t easy to grasp for many.  Sometimes I wish I was blogging about a topic that was well known, but then again what’s the fun in that. To try and help visitors I tried to keep the blog focused and explanatory. However I think I sacrificed some of my personal stake in doing this. After seeing Dusan’s rant on small worlds and oddly enough Scoble’s post about how the blogging community has failed, I feel the need to move to a more rant style. To be less concerned about my audience every day and just post – I know, what a novel idea, maybe I can call it a blog.

So to be clear, this blog will revolve around:

• Immersive story
  • Concept and requirements
  • Requirements for an immersive story engine (TapBot)
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) to make it work
  • Other technology that might be useful
  • Moving intelligent virtual agents to intelligent virtual characters
• Interactive story in general
• The metaverse
  • The industry
  • Platforms
  • Concepts
• Marketing
  • Methods in immersive story
  • Metaverse in general
• Social media marketing

I included social media marketing as I think it’s relevant, especially after the explosion of small worlds that revolve around social networking features. It’s also my day job as a Social Media Strategist at Experian.

One thing I’ll try and stay away from is re-reporting stories that most people discover through other means – FriendFeed, Google Reader, etc.

All in all I hope this will allow me to knock out posts at a quicker pace and ultimatley spend more time writing my screenplay. I know I’ve failed so far in the screenplay department, but I just can’t seem to give up the dream.

Related posts:

1. Social media is the death of old media
2. Social media can get you in the conversation, but are companies ready?

I spent all last night porting my Drupal blog over to WordPress. I did this for a few reasons.

One – To avoid having to manually update Drupal to the latest version. My host, Bluehost provides SimpleScripts which makes instillation and updates a one button process. This will greatly cut back time spent doing maintenance and give me more time to work on my screenplay.

Two – Drupal is built to be more of a powerful and flexible CMS rather than simple blogging tool and consequently has a broader feature set. When I started the this blog over a year ago I thought I would use some of those additional features but as it turns out I use less of them. And if Failed Screenwriter is just going to be a blog, WordPress is the better suited tool. For one, the plugins that I’m most concerned about are updated quicker and many nice to have features are defaults in WordPress.

Three – I want to get more intertwined with the community while at the same time not get buried in spam. Features like Trackback and Pingback are great for this and are supported natively on WordPress.

So I bit the bullet and switched last night. I even moved most of my older blog posts even though I didn’t worry too much about keeping their original URLs. Then today I noticed my RSS feeds weren’t being updated in Google Reader. In trying to trouble shoot the problem I completely forked my WordPress instillation. My whole blog basically exploded. Boy was I not a happy camper. Not being a developer I wasn’t about to waste more time trying troubleshoot everything, so I decided to start again fresh.

This time instead of importing my old posts I decided to make this a clean start. I also believe that my old posts were the reason for the original RSS update problem. My original concerns were not being able to keep my original URL structures and my RSS subscribers. I wasn’t so worried about the URLs yesterday as anything older than a week is pretty dead in the land of blogs, for a lot of people on FriendFeed anything over 12 hours is old.

RSS subscribers I am very concerned with. I hate the thought that people might have to resubscribe but if I’m ever going to make the move, today is a better than in a month.

I’m trying to keep a positive attitude about all this. One thing it will enable, is for me to have a fresh start on my message. I’ll get to review what I’ve written and only carry over the most pertinent pieces. An essential step whenever trying to focus a message.

If my site is causing you to get broken links or you have to resubscribe to my RSS feed, I apologize but the thing kind of exploded on me – what was I to do.

No related posts.