Group items tagged

Collective Tagging of Places in the Multi-user Virtual Environment of Second Life

Life is a multi-user virtual environment, i.e., a world made up of virtual places and avatars that move among and interact in those places. Thirty-one users of Second Life were surveyed about one place in which they are members: Terra’s Nude Heaven, a virtual nude beach. The purpose of the survey was to determine what types of terms users would select if they could tag a particular place and how these terms correspond to the tags actually assigned by the owners of the place. The questionnaire data was also analyzed for difference in tag selection by gender, educational level, age, and country of residence. The data indicate that keywords rated as most important by the users of a place differ considerably from the keywords selected by the owner of a place. The data, moreover, demonstrate that the choices of the study population remain consistent across groupings by gender, educational level,age or country of residence.

Barack Obama’s change.org website is accepting requests for ideas and projects to be implemented during his term. Knowing that he’s all for technological innovation, and that several successful experiments with e-democracy were done inside Second Life®, let’s try to push for even more. Andabata Mandelbrot is proposing that we vote to create an international metaverse - the Internet equivalent of virtual worlds. To get this implemented, we need 400 votes! And the deadline is… today at midnight, so we need to hurry… Voting is simple, you just need to create an account on the change.org account and vote (you can even log in with your Facebook or MySpace account) by clicking on the icon. If you’re willing to promote this idea, you can, of course, do more — add widgets, push it to your social network, and so on. With a surprisingly open-minded approach, voting is not limited to US residents, but it’s totally open to international voters too. The change is for America, but its impact will be global. A nice touch!