04.27.07
Posted in media, tech at 4:42 pm by mridley
I signed up for a RadioDaddy.com account ages ago. This is an online exchange for people to trade radio promos, and is also popular with the podcasting crowd.
I received an email today from Leo Ashcroft announcing VoiceDaddy.com. An excerpt from the email:
I just wanted to let you know about the new site we have created for free voiceovers. From the creator of Radiodaddy.com comes VoiceDaddy.com! As a current or former RadioDaddy member, we would like to invite you to be the first to beta test the new site and help get some posts built up. Right now we’re naked! Youch! And everyone knows you don’t want to see me that way! So pop on over and give us a look, and help us get started.
Sounds interesting to me.
Tags: RadioDaddy, VoiceDaddy, Podcasting
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Posted in books, business at 4:31 pm by mridley
I finally finished Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. It took me a while to complete, as I have also been reading The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More and Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days in parallel. All three books are reccomended.
I’m still reading The Long Tail, so I’ll have more information on that when I’m finished.
Founders at Work is a series of interviews compiled by the author which detail the experiences and struggles of a variety of tech company founders and early innovators. Definitely worth picking up, and it’s a great book for the time challenged as you can read the interviews one at a time and in any order, so it’s easy to consume the book in small managable chunks.
Wikinomics is a must-read. When I have more time I’ll write up more of a review, I hope, but if you haven’t read this book and you are at all interested in the nexus of technology, communications, media, and business you’re doing yourself a disservice by not reading it.
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04.20.07
Posted in tech at 2:54 am by mridley
I haven’t updated here recently mainly because I have been spending a lot of time on the Second Life Voice Beta. It’s really cool. The 3D panning works well and definitely creates an interesting and realistic experience.
I also have found that I am actually meeting people and making real connections on the Beta Grid. I tend to get lost in the shuffle on the Main Grid, but since the Beta Grid is a smaller and more tight knit community I don’t find that to be the case.
It will be interesting to see how Linden Labs chooses to release this functionality into the Main Grid from a product marketing perspective. It’s a killer feature, but I don’t know that island owners (and certainly not residents) will want to line up to pay for it. But it may drive SL adoption in such a way that it’s still beneficial to Linden Labs to go forward with it as a basic feature.
Hopefully we’ll get Voice IM and Voice Group Chat released in one of the beta clients soon. Those are key missing features, but I’m sure the Lindens are hard at work.
Tags: Second Life
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04.03.07
Posted in design, tech at 6:29 am by mridley
I’ve installed Snap Preview Anywhere on the site. I’m not sure if that is going to be annoying or helpful. If I get negative feedback, I’ll take it off.
For the time being, if you hover your mouse over the SPA icon next to any off-site link, you’ll get a popup JavaScript window with a preview of the web page linked to. Seems like a lot of web sites are using SPA these days; let me know what you think.
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04.02.07
Posted in tech at 1:51 am by mridley
Linden Labs announced the availability of voice chat in certain areas of the beta grid. I’ve been playing around with this for the past several days. I never had occasion to actually use the Second Life beta grid previous to this. I have been a First Look user, but never gone off the main grid.
I have several initial impressions of the voice capabilities of Second Life. First is that, over all, it’s quite impressive. The audio panning and stereoscopic effects really do work surprisingly well. Push to talk should be enabled by default, however.
I’m not generally a fan of push to talk, but in this case it’s almost a requirement. Although the beta program tells you that you have to use a headset, in practice there is no way for them to regulate that. So there are newbies showing up with voice blasting out of their speakers and then feeding back into the mic creating quite an annoying echo. It’s a simple fix to set “push to talk” to enabled, but it should be the default before they roll this into the main client.
Additionally, in the current beta there is no IM or private conference voice capability. It’s just public proximity based. This is fine for beta testing, but I think when this goes live on the main grid the real use case will be in small group conferences or voice IMs.
While their technology does mix multiple voices together fairly well, it still sounds better when one person talks at a time - CB radio style.
As far as applications of the voice technology - I’ve already heard several people mention karaoke bars. Unfortunately. I also think this could be useful for foreign language instruction in Second Life. The voice piece will help with learning and practicing a more natural accent.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and speculations on the possible use cases for voice in Second Life.
Tags: Second Life, Voice
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