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LEGO.com has a press release flagging a new MMO for kids it has in development with NetDevil (who worked on the mediocre Auto Assault, among other things). Due out in 2008, according to NetDevil, there aren’t any details available about what gameplay will be like, but you can bet it will involve some very cool snapping together of virtual plastic blocks. If this works well, it could be awesome. I’ve blogged before about how much I’d like to see a fully functional virtual LEGOlike in some place like Second Life (especially if it incorporated Mindstorms-like qualities, but I’d be more than happy to see it come to pass in LEGO’s own virtual world. It’s just the kind of thing that could make a world of world-builders out of the next generation, which is quite an amazing prospect, when you consider it. [Thanks, Micah!] (more…)

After the metaverse meetup we held recently, Jerry and I and several others have been pondering how to help some of the ideas that were kicking around there take shape. On Saturday, Jerry got together with several interested parties (I couldn’t make it), to discuss some approaches. I’d been talking about an “idea farm,” but what seems to have emerged from Saturday’s jawboning session was the idea of an idea factory, which is described very well by Bill Ward:

. . . An “Idea Factory” to leverage the newfound connectedness of society towards solving problems of all sizes. . . . [A] combination of social networks, semantic markups, peer review, incentives, and “knowledge visualization” could improve the effectiveness of ad-hoc collaborative teams. We’d like to harness the power of the community. . . . [We] covered ground related to facilitating open idea exchange, ranking those ideas, and mapping their relationships in a format which would facilitate the sort of ad-hoc collaboration that thrives in the open source community.

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I missed this on Friday, but it makes a nice fulfillment of something I was pondeirng a couple of weeks ago: what if a bank started offering real-world financial services through the virtual world of Second Life? Reuters’ Adam Pasick has the news that just such a thing is coming: “Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies,” he writes. It’s still in an early stage, but it sounds like Saxo will allow people to access their real-world trading accounts from within Second Life, and perhaps eventually give them the option to receive a portion of trading profits in Linden dollars. Saxo sounds interested in creating a forex market for Lindens as well, though it won’t do so at the moment because of serious doubts about how the L$ is managed. Having real-world financial institutions get into the services market, though, should help push the Linden-dollar economy forward. This will be an interesting one to watch.

Now that is the face of a lifelogger. One of the earliest lifeloggers, in fact. That’s Gordon Bell, lately of Microsoft but before that of DEC, with a couple of other mildly important stops along the way. A 3pointD reader reminded me of Bell the other day by linking to Microsoft’s MyLifeBits project, which I’d last thought about before lifelogging started taking up so much of my brainspace lately. A project of Microsoft’s research labs (not still known as BARC, I believe), MyLifeBits is essentially an experiment in logging Bell’s life in as much detail as possible, with Microsoft developing logging and storage tools along the way. For much more on this, read the long piece by Bell and colleague Jim Gemmell in the latest Scientific American. What I was particularly happy to be reminded of, though, was the fact that lifelogging — which we tend to think of as an outgrowth of MySpacing — in fact has its roots more than 60 years ago, at the dawn of the computing age, in or at least around the time of this July 1945 article in Atlantic Monthly by computing pioneer Vannevar Bush. Interestingly, the problems Bush was grappling with are not so different from those we ponder today: “The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.” (more…)