Have They Even Been There Yet?
Apparently, launching streaming radio inside Second Life is on some sort of “new media initiative” list. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced a round of recipients of its Public Media Innovation Fund Program, which encourages experiments with emerging platforms.
They seem to think that people will log on to Second Life to come and visit their “concert hall/music café” and listen to public radio. Hell, if somebody would give me $20,000 to throw down the tubes, I’d probably fake it, too, and invest the rest in a high interest SL bank, so I could screw around on SL and pretend that I’m doing something important. Do they understand that people have to actually be “at” your property to hear your media, there? /me doubts it.
WGBH/Boston wants to think that Second Life is some sort of “Web 2.0″ thing where “if they build it, they will come”. In an effort to predict the future, I will say that once it’s built and running, they’ll see that they need to actually have somebody there all the time, even though there’s nobody else around. They will come to a point where they will realize that the amount of visitors coming to their little music café is not worth the time spent on building the place. They will quietly fade out of SL, with no huge announcement, to avoid being “wrong” about the whole experiment.
It’s sort of funny, if you think about it. A public radio station opening up shop in a place where the rest of the mass media is reporting rampant sex, beatiality, fraud, and overhype. What a great public service!
Malignant Narcissist @ January 18, 2008