Always Invest in Virtual Property

Yahoo ran this story earlier this week about a man who sold his virtual property inside the game Entropia Universe. This was top news at Yahoo because he sold it for $335,000! That's not virtual money but actual US currency! Stories like these show how the line between real and digital is being blurred. Yet is this story really that outrageous? When people buy things like digital music on itunes aren't you doing the samething?

This video explains the value virtual properties have in the games themselves:


When I first read this I thought it was kind of crazy but if people spend a majority of their time on these online communities it makes sense to invest in them. I am a gamer, though I rarely play MMORPGS (the kind of games where you can own virtual properties), but have seen the strong bonds that form over such communities. I guess a person's reality is what they chose it to be, and a virtual home maybe better to some than a real home.

Vlogging: An Evolution

This week we talked about vlogging. Vlogging seems to be the natural progression of regular blogging since it provides a visual component to the ideas and opinions that are normally seen in blogs. Vlogs have the same general focus of blogs and even use such conventions as linking to other websites and incorporating outside video clips. But being able to see the vlogger adds a different component to the mix. On the one hand it makes the vlog more unique since you're able to match a face with the vlog. On the other I feel it kind of seperates the audience from the vlog itself because with blogs it was the individual audience member's voice that narrated the blog. In this sense vlogging adds a degree of separation between the audience and the vlog but vloggs also increase audience interactivity by having the audience respond not only with text comments but with video comments as well. Many vloggers have a closing thought or question for their audience and typically ask the audience to respond via a video clip comment. It seems like vlogs are the natural evolution of blogs but if history is any indicator text cannot be easily replaced, just like we still have newspapers, magazines (even if they're online), etc, co-existing in a world with television and online video, we will have vlogs and blogs. I will end this post with a clip of a current commercial that uses vlogging as a way to advertise their product; I find it interesting how the mainstream views vloggers.