The Second Life Future Salon continues on Tuesday, September 26th at 6 PM PST with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett. We’ll be talking on Skype and streaming live into the Sheep Tower 5th floor conference room [<–SLURL] on Sheep Island. The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information.

Justin Hall has been working on a framework for what he calls passively multi-player online gaming or PMOGing. See his short video presentation here for a succinct introduction, and an MP3 of his inspired keynote at the Mobile Games Conference for more. PMOGing asks that you make your online activity transparent to others in order to turn the web itself into an MMO of sorts, one that we play simply by behaving and performing for the networked public eye. From PassivelyMultiplayer.com:

Description

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing
play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their
unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they
interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles,
contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents,
digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual
fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous
people, gangsters, soldiers.

Summary:

A system for using user data and device-use history to generate avatars and/or game moves in an online multiuser environment.

Mark Barrett came on the Second Life scene relatively recently and made waves with his site SLStats.com which tracks how much time you’ve spent inworld, where, and with who. After initial controversy over people’s SL information being posted to the web without their explicitly opting into the SLStats system, Mark quickly modified to the service to only track those who’ve signed up themselves. Mark is also the creator of SLBuzz and SLTags. From SLStats.com:

Second Life Stats allows you to see how much time you spend playing
Second Life, and can even keep statistics on other interesting things,
such as tracking your whereabouts. It does this using a small
attachment that your avatar can wear.

SLStats is completely passive, and doesn’t require you to do
anything besides wearing the SLStats attachment. You can browse
statistics of other Second Life residents using SLStats, rate them, and
also write blog entries straight from within Second Life.

I also find myself now working on an SL side project that juggles opt-in etiquette, transparency and privacy. What is it? Well, I kid you not, it’s a kind of mix between the old SLTV, Subservient Chicken, and "Someone keeps stealing my letters…" (a kind of massively multi-player alphabet sandbox). More on that soon, and at the salon.

And so the three of us will discuss our projects and visions, issues and expectations around privacy and transparency, and work with saloners on defining some groundrules for lifelogging etiquette on the web and in virtual worlds. There’s been a lot about this in the news recently. More background posts coming soon.