blog.msurveys.com

via Business Communicators of Second Life:

"The land grab for agencies moving into Second Life is officially on. Leo Burnett London announced today that they are opening The Idea Hub for its 1,600 global creative personnel to collaborate in Second Life. This follows the announcement earlier this week that advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty is setting up shop."

Who will be the first MR agency to open up in SL?

BuzzLogic made its debut at the DEMOfall '06 conference on the 25th in San Diego. Looks like this will compete with services such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics and similar Word-of-mouth measurement offerings.

I was thinking about incentivising survey participants in virtual worlds, and looking at Second Life in particular, it couldn't be easier!
It took me about 5 minutes to add instant payment of an incentive to my prototype survey object, so when a respondent completes the survey, they are given the incentive payment on the spot - in my example I'm giving L$1 (1 Linden dollar) to the avatar after he/she answers the final question in the survey.

So the survey object can automatically handle inviting passing avatars, running the survey itself through the chat interface, and paying the respondent when he's done... I imagine this is a hell of a lot easier than managing incentive payments in real life.

You can read more background info on the Second Life survey prototype in my original post, or come and visit yourself - the object can be found on my island in Second Life (slurl). You'll even get paid for doing the demo survey! :-)

Answering the "where are the MR wikis?" question that Ray Poynter posted in his blog, Mike Macleod has launched the Everything MR wiki.

It's a MediaWiki installation, and - obviously, as it's just been launched - without much content yet. Will be interesting to see how this progresses, and if it's possible to gather sufficent momentum and commitment to make it work.

Nature reports:

Psychologists find real-world social rules mirrored in 'Second Life' interactions.

"According to a study of social interactions in one online world, some quirks of how people interact in the real world have survived the digital transition.
While that may put a dampener on visions of online liberation, it's good news for social scientists. They say that, if social rules map over into artificial realities, virtual worlds will offer a new platform for doing experiments."

Via textually.org:

"According to Keita Watch via RFID in Japan, NTT DoCoMo recently developed a system that utilizes mobile phones and RFID tags to monitor and infer people's behaviors and deliver relevant information. "The system uses mobile phones that have the RFID reader capability. Those RFID reader phones read tags embedded in retail stores, for example, and the software running on the phones sends out information such as the stores people visited. Then the system infers people's behaviors and deliver information based on the inference results."

Potential MR applications for RFID are fairly obvious (not least being able to collect data about respondents without having to physically ask them).. has anyone done something MR-related with RFID tags already?

Steve Rubel posts an interesting piece on Wikipedia's impact on brands, noting that...

"Wikipedia articles on the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. are consistently among the most highly ranked pages in Google on direct searches. This is according to an informal study I have conducted over the past week. The study was compiled by simply taking the largest 100 advertisers from AdAge, entering them into Google and then tallying the results.

Question to marketers: Do you know what Wikipedia says about you?"

Via slashdot:
"In the 2004 Presidential race, the website electoral-vote.com tracked individual state polls, providing a map of the changing political scene. The map, updated daily, was a phenomenal success. The site is back for the 2006 Congressional elections. It is providing descriptions of the top 40 House races, and all 33 Senate races, as well as valuable information for prospective voters."

The site tracks polls from various polling organisations, organised by state.

Research Magazine has posted a news item mentioning my Second Life survey dabblings... (for article click on title link).
If you're interested, my original blog post with details is here.

If you're wondering what all that Second Life malarkey is about, Popular Science has a nice introduction to Second Life and Linden Labs (the company behind it).

Via MocoNews:
"The first U.S. 2008 presidential election mobile service has been announced…expect a lot more activity on mobile for ‘08: Associated Press has plans to offer election coverage to mobile phones with a service dubbed AP Mobile Election Results."

Full story in title link.

This makes me wonder about mobile polling during the next US election. Last time around, one of the few I'm aware of that was using mobile phones and text messaging for polls was Zogby, but this was 2004, so surely there will be more interest this time around?

A piece/ lenghty overview on marketing in Second Life by Henry Jenkins (Comparative Media Studies at MIT).