Reuben Steiger's Weblog

Eclipse Pics

I put the kids to sleep last night and sat  up patiently waiting for 2 am to arrive.  And then I woke up.  I had slept through it -- unforgivable.  My only consolation was the pictures on Snapzilla, which sometimes can capture the spirit of a missed event.  Not so here -- I  missed it and that's that.  There's  nothing to say  other than that I'll have to wait another 4 - 6 years.  It looks like it was incredible.

SF Exploratorium Simulcasts Total Solar Eclipse in Second Life

A few months ago, a guy named Rob Rothfarb called me from the San Francisco Exploratorium.  He said they were interested in simulcasting the upcoming solar eclipse in Second Life.  I remember thinkin gto myself, "Hmmmmm, I wonder what that would look like?"

Well, I introduced them to the multi-talented Aimee Weber and the rest, as they say, is history. It starts at 2 am PST and runs until 3 am. So, for those of you with insomnia (or very young babies), I encourage you to login and join the rest of us as we make history.  One of the prime viewing spots for the eclipse (in Real Life) is in Turkey so Aimee built an amphitheatre  -- we'll be assembling in these stony ruins to watch a live video of the eclipse.  Remember, eclipses like this only happen every 4 - 6 years, but the chance to be part of history is a once in a lifetime thing.

Here's a direct link to the event.  Other viewing sites are in Midnight City and Lukanida.

Microsoft Video about Second Life

Laura Foy visited Linden Lab last month to make This Movie about Second Life for the newly-launched 10 Site .  She interviewed me and Philip and all in all, I think the piece came out beautifully.  Kudos also go out to Eric Rice  Here's a Link to TEN Island courtesy of the building mastery of the inimitable Eric Rice. Nice to see a bunch of things come together like this with such a positive outcome.

Google Video's new Blog feature

Cut and pasted this from Google Video -- snippet of a 1972 film on the future of Internetworking.

Chocolate and Peanut Butter

I rarely have the chance to mix my two most recent postings, so now I do.  SLurl and the StyleHive -- two great tastes that taste great together!

Here's the SLurl that takes you to the StyleHive's virtual headquarters in Second Life.  Since the Hive is all about fashion, products and shopping, they decided that Second Life would be a great place for their users to get together to discuss the things they love.  Wisely, they hooked up with Aimee Weber to do the build for them and she's done a really beautiful job.

The folks over at StyleHive are planning to have a fashion show as their first major event where they feature not only real world fashions but also Second Life fashions in a big mixed reality mashup.  See the recent MTV Overdrive Coverage  of a Second Life fashion show for inspiration.

Got great ideas for this?  Want to show off your designs?  Want to film the event?  Want to project manage it?  Please contact sabrina@stylehive.com

The StyleHive

I've been playing a lot recently with a new social bookmarking site called the StyleHive .   (If you're asked for a login and password, the username is "hivedemo" and the password is "bumblebee) Before you make the obvious and snarky assumption such as "Fantastic, just what the world needs, another Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking Site ", let me explain why I think this is one is cool.

First, it's very graphical.  One problem I have with de.licio.us  and related Folksonomies is that they look like shit.  Sure, function over form, simplicity and all that jazz, but the fact remains that their UI's blow.  Here's My StyleHive Page  .  Looks a lot better, which brings me to my next point.

The Hive is shopping-focused.  Like social networking software 2 years ago, there's been a huge proliferation of companies doing every flavor of tagging, community and user-created content.  Underlying it all, is some value, but as we know, the business model for most of these folks is an acquistion by Yahoo. 

Here's where I'm going with this. Recently, it's become interesting to rollup a bunch of popular blogs into networks like Weblogs Inc. -- the idea being that as a conglomeration, they manage to acheive enough scale to interest major advertisers.  But their sales pitch to advertisers is still a hybrid of two opposing pieces of logic -- The first is an early adopter one " Blogs are where trends start -- 1 blog begets 10 blogs and so on and so on" and the second is a mass media one "We've stitched all these early-adopting fringe blogs together and now have the scale of Yahoo"

The problem is, as John Battelle beautifully points out in The Search that the further you get from the Search Box, the less valuable your advertising/eyeballs/online real estate is. That's because when someone's doing a search is often at that magical moment where they're ready to buy -- they enter the name of the thing they want in the search box, and . . . . that's when you advertise to them.  It's the power of owning the user at that moment that allows Google to deliver the killer feature to advertiser, Cost-per-Click pricing. 

Now obviously none of these Web 2.0 services are in that enviable type of position.  In fact, most of them are hard pressed even to get strong CPM rates.  But for the few that have really compelling audiences, StyleHive has the potential to stand head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of value. If I have the choice to advertise on say, Digg  or the StyleHive, the Hive is much more interesting.  Why?  Because people will be tagging and sharing the web and forming communities around the stuff they aspire to own.  And, if the folks at the StyleHive exectute correctly, those people really will be the precious tastemakers that brand marketers am desperate to reach.  And because it has viral characteristics and a mainstream aesthetic, they may actually be able to achieve scale.

If they don't become huge, they'll at least go down in history for having created the first Web 2.0 service that my wife likes.  Take that, Flickr .