ABC Second Life island not attacked

According to Abigail Thomas, Head of Strategic Innovation & Development, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC island in Second Life was not damaged due to a cyber attack, as previously reported. There was a server error which caused problems with the site.

Abigail mentioned this at the start of her talk on "Technology and Media in 2020" at the National Library of Australia today.

One of the points she made that many of the new hot web applications sound very "lame" and uninteresting when described. You need to try the application and its social aspects to understand the impact. An example is Twitter.

Abigail pointed out that many of the examples of "new" web applications are not new at all. They existed on the Internet, but were only used by a few geeks before they had a slick web interface.

Some other interesting points were:

* Artificial intelligence will be used on-line.
* User generated content in real time and geo tagging,
* Your on-line activities will be recorded in your "life log",
* Each person will have multiple identities in different on-line worlds to preserve their privacy.

The questions were:

* How do we make money out of this?: How are the content creators compensated for their work, if all the content free and DIY? Abigail's answer was to work out how to integrate professional and user generated content. But it sounded like she was just going to let us rearrange the content from the ABC a little.

* How are professional journalists coping with integration of TV, radio and print: ABC staff now think about what they want to produce first, and the format (TV, radio, web).

* Tell us about ABC's second life island: Was an experiment. Started with an Four Corners program on TV and in second life, with discussion afterwards. Volunteers oversee DIY construction on part of the island.

But there will be some limitations to the future. One image of a phone shown on screen had on the bottom: "Available color: Jet black". While technology may expand our horizons, fashion will still dictate that black is the new black.