My inner geek loves this: blogger and Second Life academic Intellagirl is working on a taxonomy of interactive environments. She's trying to "delineate between different types of digital environments in which communication/composition can happen."
Comparing spaces like blogs, Second Life, World of Warcraft, video games, and wikis, she catalogues how they differ on attributes like the level of interaction, content ownership, permanence, and relationship with other users. There are some good builds in the comments as well.
I think this is a great start. We need to develop a framework like this to help everyone understand and agree (as we already do with mass media) on what the strengths and weaknesses of different potential communication spaces are. This will help explain these worlds to a novice, or to decide which types of digital spaces might be right for your brand.
Thanks so much for the kudos. As an academic, I'm really trying to nail down the differences between these new environments. As a Web 2.0 junky and consultant, it just makes sense to know how they work and what they work best for.
I'm working on taking the idea one step further with a new blog (www.digital-ethos.com) where I and a group of other junkies can talk about self-branding and networking in the new Web 2.0+ world.
We live in exciting times.
Sarah/Intellagirl
Posted by: Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins | January 05, 2007 at 08:15 PM
For me, the most exciting, and still way to overlooked area is gaming. This is going to be massive. Next five years for games.
Posted by: Marcus Brown | January 06, 2007 at 10:42 AM