The Facebook Generation panel at Online Info

I just finished a panel presentation with Roo Reynolds, Metaverse Evangelist at IBM UK, and Ewan McIntosh, From Learning & Teaching Scotland. Roo is definitely the most charming and articulate person I've met lately, not to mention a great speaker, and he gave a great presentation about 3-D worlds (Second Life, of course, but also the internal IBM metaverse). A few of my notes from his talk:

World of Warcraft is the new golf. It's got its own specialized rules, etiquette and clothes. And - just like golf - it's used to make deals and to establish/broker relationships. Extend this analogy to Second Life and other virtual worlds...

IBM's internal employee directory (which really understates the tool) allows people to tag other people's entries. It's a cool way of seeing how other people find you useful / noteworthy / weird / whatever, as well as being a way for you to find that person who worked with you on a project two years ago.

We need a context in order to spark conversations. Give people in a virtual world a place to play, and it will spark conversations. So, for example, Roo set up a labyrinth in the metaverse, as a way to get people interacting. This reminds me of how I learned how to use a mouse way back in 1980-<mumble> - my new laptop came with a bunch of card games pre-installed and that gave me an incentive to figure out how to use the damned thing.

I also learned about "sport stacking", which I see from Wikipedia has been around since the 1980s... Hard to explain and completely fascinating to watch played, the idea is that you start with a stack of cups (think of plastic beer cups), which are then stacked into pyramids and other configurations in a specific order. There are loads of YouTube videos of the top players; search for cup stacking.

My presentation was on the impact of the Millennial Generation (Gen Y / Digital Natives) on information centers. My PPT slides are here.