“Abbots Aerodrome is the place to go if you have a head for heights and a taste for adventure. If you’re visiting on a budget, arrive only to beat the crowds and then head to the top of the skydiving tower.”

You probably think that it is an excerpt from a Lonely Planet or another touristic guide… well you’re not wrong, except that it is a touristic guide to Second Life. Across 223 pages, Paul Carr and Graham Pond invite you to spend your holidays in Second Life in “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life”.

For somebody really down to earth like I am, I just don’t get it, even if I have spent some time in SL not to have a biased judgment. First, how can only 40K users at the same time (source: Forrester research) can spend so many time building touristic places in SL? And, even more worrying, how can people think that tourism in Second Life can be as great as in reality?

Anyways, I have been just amazed by the number of “places to visit” in Second Life, and I have made a quick selection of what I find the most surprising:

Svarga: it is a kind of SL paradise where there is an entire ecosystem such as in real life (clouds rain to make flowers grow, which are pollinated by bees… well you get it).

Virtual Hallucinations: it is a place aimed at raising awareness about schizophrenia, where your avatar can experiment the sound of voices, visual hallucinations, illusions of himself in a mirror… Really scary.

Hearts Enchanted: it is a place where you can simply have a really advanced experience of fishing. And you can even keep the fish at the end!

Regina Spektor Audio Kiosk: I am a personal fan of Regina Spektor’s music, and even if she is not so much known in real life, she is apparently a star in SL, as you can visit her virtual loft, listen to her music and even nip up the iron staircase and have a snooze.

Wheelies: it is a nightclub dedicated to disabled but also able-bodied clubbers (or avatars!).

Machinima: it is the burgeoning movie industry in SL, where movies are played by avatars themselves. You can even see kind of a SL teenage drama here on Youtube: definitely a new style!

Bruno Echegaray’s immersive spheres: Your avatar enters a 360° sphere where pieces of art are displayed. I kind of like those initiatives as they are a new way to show art (see my post about art in virtual worlds). I must also mention Kula, the Creative Commons Island, where you can find a lot of free art that you can even remix.

And finally, as it is common knowledge that one of the basis of SL is sex, you can go to Xcite to buy you some… genitals (and lots of other things I don’t even want to mention!).

So if you’re really interested in SL phenomenon, you should definitely buy this book, but you will have to keep in mind that with the number of users decreasing, it won’t really matter how amazing the places to visit are.

And finally, just to make this post a little bit funnier, here is a “real” video which shows all the bugs of SL which are for the moment a major problem for its expansion:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flkgNn50k14]

Fidji is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on her site. She enjoys real trips around the world, with real people, real seas and real fishes.

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What do books like ‘Freakonomics‘ and ‘The Long Tail‘ (which I haven’t read yet) teach us? That statistics is an immensely powerful tool for getting at the underlying behaviour of people. It’s rationalised observation really, for books like ‘Blink‘ teach us the same thing… minus some of the numbers perhaps.

In “real life,” so far I have found out several things through statistical collection and analysis: what percentage of businesses use what type of hardware set-up (in the 90s, so no longer relevant); what percentage of people is interested in luxury leisure services; and what percentage of businesses use what type of financing. I also found out many of the “why’s,” though in statistics, numbers speak louder than words. For example: An entrepreneur can tell me he doesn’t trust banks, business angels, and venture capitalists. But on the aggregate, I also see that his ambition-level is far lower than those that do “trust” and use these institutions. The more data you can collect, the less “talking” needs to be done.

A friend of mine told me about some of the statistical methods he uses on his successful e-commerce site, and I’m sure many others do too. The method is called “A/B split testing” and works as follows. You create several copies of pages, all with different looks (fonts, colours, levels of “noise,” etc.)  and you see which one is more likely to turn the visitor into a buyer. Very simple to do on a web-site, you can profile by region, browser, or just pick every 2nd/3rd/…/50th visitor, and very quickly, after a 100 hits or so, you see what works and what doesn’t. And you don’t need to concern yourself with the “why.” On a more negative note, A/B is also the reason why you also need to clear your cookies when shopping for your flight. More on A/B here.

Another interesting method is that employed by Amazon, Pandora, and Last.fm (I think). That of “collaborative filtering” Essentially, it allows you to quickly check what other products/services a user/listener/buyer of a certain product/service will like, based on the past behaviour of other users, and suggest it in real-time. More on that method here.

The advantage of (internet-)software is that everything is measurable and easily changed to match tastes and behaviour. With what I call “hard” businesses, those that operate with tangible things, it is far less easy to change and adapt, though companies like Dell or Toyota are certainly a forerunner there. The problem can also be observed with software-vendors. If they provide a static piece of software, which does not send back user-behaviour, they will have much more difficulty in adapting future products to users’ needs. That’s where software as a service (SaaS), which Jeremy has been raving so much about, has a real advantage, and will, technology-permitting, eventually replace the (crappy) desktop software we are so used to.

Imagine the kind of statistics Last.fm is collecting on music-usage; Facebook on social trends; Linkedin on business-trends; and Twitter on god-knows-what. And imagine both what revenue-streams can come from it and how these services can be improved based on that data. That is the power of statistics. But also don’t forget that, as these methods become and are already part of hard businesses, improvements happen there too. With it, you will get a better cup of coffee from Starbucks, a better burger from McDonalds (I’m sceptical), more logical product layouts in your local supermarket, and a better car from Mercedes. With the internet we are only scraping the surface—process innovation. The truly radical stuff will happen in the world outside your computer-room.

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy, and prefers getting shot to working in Excel. While he’s loading his gun, you can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on his site.

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