3pointD.com

Virtual world marketing and services company Rivers Run Red has chosen the Extreme Cred Card as the “payment card of choice” for Rivers’s virtual world services division, according to a press release. What this means, exactly, is unclear. From the tone of the press release, though, two possibilities present themselves: either Rivers will offer in-world products and services through Web-based venues that will support the Extreme card and use real-world currencies, or the Extreme card will be able at some point to record virtual currency balances. AnsheChung.com, which already has a tie-up with Rivers, will also use Extreme Cred, according to the release. (more…)

CNet’s Dan Terdiman has a great story today on a project at the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. The project, Scalable City, seeks to demonstrate the danger of treating human beings as data points, and reminds us that while there may be algorithmic ways to make things more efficient, that’s not the same as making things better. (more…)

This is one of those things that might not ever really get here (then again it might), but I absolutely love the idea: Adrian Holovaty, head of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek Interactive, had a story recently on XML.com in which he explains his ideas for dynamic news stories. Holovaty doesn’t get all that blue-sky in the piece, pondering things like dynamically updating time words (today, yesterday, last week), currency rates and other commonly taggable items, but at the end he toys with a really promising tangent:

Isolating people and quotes: How about marking up each quote, and associating it with the person who said it, so it would be possible to automatically retrieve all quotes by a given person, and all articles in which a given person was quoted?

Isolating individual facts: This is a pipe dream, but how about giving each and every fact a unique ID, and doing things like ? This would let journalists and readers create elaborate “fact trees,” which could display the relationship between information.

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