Virtual Worlds – a playful history part 1

In the Disney movie "Tron" – the first movie to use computer generated imagery (CGI) extensively back in 1982, the hero (a computer games developer) gets sucked into the virtual reality world of a huge computer matrix. Most of the action takes place as he struggles to win against the evil central controller and get back to normal reality. Throughout this encounter he remains aware that he is real (and even some of the virtual characters get to know this) but at the same time he is totally immersed within the virtual world. Fast-forward seventeen years to 1999 and the first of the "Matrix" trilogy is released. Here human beings – in a distant future – live out their entire conscious lives within a virtual reality generated for them by a massive world-wide computer matrix. Only a few humans have escaped from this to find out that the real world is in fact very different – a dark and menacing reality where human beings are essentially "farmed" to provide the energy needed to sustain the matrix.

Social Media roundup

In my series of posts on using social media I've mentioned a number of sites. There are so many now that it's almost impossible to track them all, but one social media expert, Brian Solis, has created a useful visualisation tool which he calls the Conversation Prism.

Social Media part 13

In this last post on the current series, I'll give some examples of "Embracing" the customer using Social Media. In fact some of the examples I've already given in previous posts relating to supporting, etc. overlap into the embracing arena. This is because Social Media tools are just that - tools - and the use you put them to can vary.