Sorta weird, but I suppose some people are thinking of thought and mind transference into virtual avatars in Virtual Words like Second Life.  I didn’t hear anything about that last week, when I was at Virtual Worlds Hollywood, but the subject was brought up today in Social Media Today in a post titled Could we live forever in virtual worlds?

“… a team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York successfully created an avatar called ‘Eddie‘ who had the intelligence (if you want to call it that) of a four year old (or ‘AI boffins create four year old loser‘ as the trade mag the Inquirer memorably put it), pointing to the day when the digital representations of ourselves could indeed have a kind of existence of their own.”

I think there was an TV show from the 80’s or early 90’s about a dying scientist who’s mind was kept alive in a computer - but the model for this kind of continuance of consciousness is more something I saw a while back in Star Trek.

Personally, I’d not want to see myself or anyone else captured that way, but I could see something more in the way of avatars that help us figure out problems, as intelligence, that lives in a virtual world.   In other words, I don’t think we should really ever get to the point where we want to keep someone alive, and we can transfer what they do to some kind of sentient form, in worlds, but we could put useful knowledge in some type of embedded avatar where it’s easier to interact with.

Just a thought on this Sunday.

I came up with this idea about measuring Visitor Engagement from a panel I attended at Virtual Worlds Hollywood last week and which I wrote about here in a post titled Engagement Metrics:

I detected 2 measures of Engagement that can be charted using web analytics or Audience Measurement data:

1. Frequency of visits (of engaged users of your site) with time spent per visit going up. (appeals more to site owners).

2. Frequency of visits (of engaged users) going up with time spent per visit going down (appeals to advertisers more).

However, in both cases, we’re looking at the activity and behavior of “engaged users”, not all visits to any site are going to be “engaged”. We need to segment visitors first, before we can calculate Site Engagement got a site.

Without having ComScore Segment Metrix to work with, I decided to try a Engagement Ramp chart by using ComScore to divide the Average times a visitor visited a Virtual World site by the average minutes per visit - and came up with this chart, below:

Without knowing for sure what was happening in Second Life last May, it’s impossible for me to say if my “Engagement Ramp” is accurate or not - but when I listed to the session last week - what I saw in my mind was a “ramp” or co-efficent, that is created from the two measurements (times per month you visited divided by minutes per visit).

An accelerating “ramp” means “engagement” is going up, and vice versa.

If my “Engagement Ramp” is in fact, measuring engagement, then it’s fairly flat for the leading virtuall worlds.

I think I need to work on this idea some more but I wanted to try it out here first - and play with it some more, plus get feedback from my readers.

I took about 20 minutes of footage while attending Virtual Worlds Hollywood yesterday and today - and I was able to capture a lot of Jared Freedman’s talk on Virtual World Advertising: Lessons Learned

Virtual World Advertising: Lessons Learned
Marketing and advertising inside of virtual worlds can represent a challenge on many levels. Drawing upon over two years of practical in-world advertising experience, Jared Freedman of Code4Software will present hard statistics showing the results of advertising inside of one of the most popular Virtual Worlds, Second Life TM and some important lessons for those seeking to monetize their virtual world venues. Code4Software created the system that currently runs the largest centrally controlled advertising network in Second Life that logs over fifteen million impression minutes per month.
- Jared Freedman, President, Code4Software LLC

The show was interesting - while still pretty niche - there was enough new things popping up that if you attended sessions, you could pull out some interesting ideas, even if the specifics aren’t always there, yet.  I wrote about it earlier today Live Blogging Virtual Worlds meet the Web: The Present & the Future session at Virtual Worlds Hollywood:

Here’s the videos:

I’m going to be attending Virtual Worlds Hollywood next week (any readers who are going to be there, as well, contact me and we can meet) to assist Code4Software (speaking at the Technology Track), which is a sponsor for the show.

Virtual World Advertising: Lessons Learned
Marketing and advertising inside of virtual worlds can represent a challenge on many levels. Drawing upon over two years of practical in-world advertising experience, Jared Freedman of Code4Software will present hard statistics showing the results of advertising inside of one of the most popular Virtual Worlds, Second Life TM and some important lessons for those seeking to monetize their virtual world venues. Code4Software created the system that currently runs the largest centrally controlled advertising network in Second Life that logs over fifteen million impression minutes per month.
- Jared Freedman, President, Code4Software LLC

And that reminds me, BusinessWeek has a story on Second Life this week - Business, and Startups, in Second Life, which says that virtual worlds are succeeding as a prototyping tool for business projects:

“… The crucial advantage to working in virtual worlds is that they offer much more potential for customers to interact with new products, even ones that don’t exist yet, says Brian Mennecke, associate professor in information management systems at Iowa State University. The cost of entry is low, too. “It’s open to everyone from day one,” says Paul Jackson, principal analyst with technology researcher Forrester Research (FORR). In a report that was co-authored by Jackson and released earlier this year, Jackson points out that, even with collaboration software, sharing 3D or CAD models “has proven tricky, especially when much of the required data lives in proprietary design systems.” Working in virtual worlds helps solve that problem.

Curet is a fan of Second Life because it saved him time and money and made it easier to meet with his engineer in China. But other businesses are using Second Life to offer services not readily available in the real world or to build products they couldn’t otherwise afford to prototype. And some entrepreneurs are using Second Life to test ideas—such as a mass transit system with individual pods for riders—that aren’t feasible to prototype any other way.”

I did a lot of work with Metrics while I was working at IBM and on the Virtual Business Center - and while I don’t spend a lot of time in Virtual Worlds right now - I do see that has an application of Social Media and worth studying.

In fact, the Web Analytics Association is in the process of drafting a standard for Virtual Reality - metrics wise (what we can measure and how we can measaure it) and it will be released, in draft form, later this year.

Since I left IBM, early this year, I haven't been quite as active in Virtual Worlds - my work at Monster Worldwide does not involve Second Life or any other Virtual World at this time.

But I still keep my hand in that community and attend some of their meetings locally, which is the case for a Metaverse Meetup that happened last Wednesday, 7/23/08 here in Manhattan - and this is a video of the entire Meetup (it was about the Open Grid).

Metaverse Meetup: OpenSim & Virtual Worlds Interoperability 7.23.08 from Metaverse Meetup on Vimeo.

Here's some more information:

"…The topic for this Metaverse Meetup was OpenSim and virtual worlds interoperability and we were very fortunate to be featuring leading pioneers of OpenSim as presenters: David Levine of IBM Research (Zha Ewry in SL) and Adam Frisby of DeepThink Labs (Adam Zaius in SL). Tish Shute (Tara5 Oh in SL), who writes about OpenSim on her blog Ugotrade, was guest moderator and Global Kids generously hosted us in their space."

Lately, my Web Analytics work has not focused so much on Second Life as it did when I was working at IBM, but I still am involved in Virtual World Metrics and follow what is going on in the field, including Code4Software.com.

In fact, news that Code4Software Parts Ways from Simuality and Slippcat was not entirely unexpected.  According to Virtual World Weekly:

… Jared Freeman announced over the weekend that his Code4Software had severed all ties with Simuality and their joint project Slippcat "Due to substantial and irreconcilable differences in business philosophy." Simuality and Code4Software joined together in March, using Code4Software's virtual worlds metrics package, V-Tracker, to build a pull-based system to advertising in Second Life. Freeman notes that Code4Software will retain all rights for the Promotional Object Marketing Platform, V-Tracker, AdSoft, and The Advertisers Guild affiliate based Virtual World display advertising network. Slippcat will no longer use V-Tracker services.

I've used V-Tracker quite often when I worked on IBM's Virtual Business Center in Second Life - pulling metrics, creating new metrics, in fact, perhaps the best analytics created in Virtual World, to date, was done via my work with Code4Software.com. 

Been working with www.Code4Software.com V-Tracker while I was working at IBM and providing metrics and metrics strategy for IBM's Virtual Business Center.  I left IBM this month to work at Monster.com, but I haven't stopped working with Code4software.com since they're part of the Social Media Committee at the Web Analytics Association.

However, the real basis of V-Tracker, which is similar to Google Analytics for Virtual Worlds, at it's heart, was to power In World Advertising Metrics and Analytics - which it now does - and that network is called AdSoft.

I have the early results of a campaign run for the American Cancer Society Race for Life Campaign  Code4Software is running in Second Life, for the Red Cross, over the last few days has quickly surpassed all expectations and shown the very beginnings of what Advertising Metrics for Virtual Worlds can do:

AdSoft runs a few advertising networks on the Second Life mainland with several hundred terminals in a few sizes - using measurements provided via Code4Software.com's AdSoft network we're able to measure impressions (an avatar seeing an ad - usually for at least a minute), Clicks on the Ad and Actions associated with an Ad (including custom URL's with full control of tagging - for those of us into Web Analytics …. and a few of us are).

You can contact Jared Freedman at www.Code4software.com for more detailed results, but I want to show you the creative that went along with the American Cancer Society Race for Life Campaign (below):

While Relay Front Kiosk was running on Kiosk ads sized for that ad in Second Life

There's much much more to tell and show - and one blog post can't cover it all - but I can say the first chart shows the Large Format Relay for Life AD (first ad, above) got 12204 Avartar Impressions over a period of a few days - and the ad was clicked on 104 times, or 0.85% Click Through Rate.

All in all, there were 24 signups generated in the first few days, when only a couple were expected.   

Jared Freedman at Code4Software.com can give you a much more complete demo of AdSoft - I would like to see a YouTube video showing AdSoft in action to embed here, soon, but I think what I've shown is enough to re-ignite interest in Virtual Worlds as a viable platform for business.

What Large Corporations in Second Life and other Virtual Worlds lacked, was a real way to measure results - much of that I accomplished for IBM, while I was there - but often, the results weren't that good, honestly.  

In my opinion, the problem was first - what was being presented needed a bit more work to appeal to the audience that might come to the Business Center and there was an issue with traffic.

An advertising network like AdSoft - which only Code4Software has, along with the metrics, and a rate card, that will soon be available, is one of the keys that can/will transform Virtual Worlds to a large, viable commerce system - and this is the very  beginning of it. 

Virtual World Advertising and Virtual Ads, according to ClickZ are "…the ultimate combination of user-generated content and social networking – except you're not just creating videos, posting profiles, and communicating via email or IM. Participants basically create an entire society within the construct of the game."  I would argue the Virtual Society ought to have Virtual Advertising:

"…. As soon as you enable people to buy land and build structures, there's a need for skills like architecture and design, specializations and services that other participants are willing to pay for."

When Google bought AdScape, earlier this year, it was assumed that In Game Advertising would be red hot, or else, why would Google invest in an In Game Advertising platform?  Certainly, last year, advertising in Virtual Worlds seemed promising, and companies built islands to sell real world products virtually.  But does Virtual World Advertising actually Work, and if it did, how would we be able to measure the success of Virtual Advertising?

"…the problem with SL marketing doesn’t seem to be rejection of advertising in general, just indifference to the kind of virtual advertising they’ve seen thus far."

But it all comes down to Metrics - if you can't measure impressions, touches and click throughs (punch throughs) you can't really do analytics - and for all the hype of what Virtual Advertising promised - including Branding, there was not viable analytics to measure the outcomes, and no real strucured testing either.

 Adsoft enables Virtual World Advertising to tracked with the precision of high end Web Analytics.

Earlier this year, at the first Virtual Worlds 2007 in NYC, I met Jared Freedman (Ancient Shriner in Second Life), President of Code4Software, a Virtual World Development firm, that created V-Tracker, and I wrote about V-Tracker several times, including the work I do at IBM, providing metrics for the IBM Business Center in Second Life. 

In fact, Jared Freedman and I co-presented on Virtual World Metrics and Virtual World Advertising at the last Emetrics Summit in Washington DC this fall in a session titled "Old & New Together Again for the First Time".

Rick Wehrle, Monster.com
Marshall Sponder, IBM
Jared Freedman, Code4Software

We've been calibrating the business impact of the Internet since before the browser. Rick will relate stories of taking the measure of FTP, Gopher and USENET postings in the early '90s. Marshall is a Director of the Web Analytics Association, tasked with getting a handle on social media and Jared has written the first application for analytics for Second Life. What do these people have in common? What's changed? Come learn about much we've learned and how little we know, how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.

The In World Advertising Platform, what Code4Software named AdSoft, was talked about generally, at Emetrics, but tonight, for the first time, I was given a personal tour of the AdSoft platform running in Second Life by Jared Freedman and I think it's light years ahead of what anyone else has come up with yet.

First, I am under a non-disclosure agreement for the Web Interface of AdSoft; however I can write about how, using AdSoft, Virtual World Ads can be created, queued up, rotated, displayed (controling it's location) and measaured.   

If you desire, Urls can be tagged for tracking, using standard web analytics, when you have an analytics platform on the destination site - and your goal is to move people from Second Life to a Web Site; but you can do a lot more than this with AdSoft (which contains a version of V-Tracker), which is an in world adverting platform, much like Google AdWords is in the 2D Web.

I will be able to speak more about the AdSoft platform in the near future; it appears to be unique, no one that I'm aware of has anything even close to the power, complexity or stability of Code4Software's AdSoft in Virtual Worlds.

In addition, the AdSoft platform is portable to many all the major Virtual Worlds; pretty much any platform that uses http protocol can have a version of AdSoft ported to it.

One of the problems of many Corporate Islands in Second Life, is the low number of unique visitors that come on a weekly basis.  It's not an exaggeration to say the average visitation numbers are in the hundreds of Avatars a week - with perhaps, 750 Avatars a week being an unofficial corporate average.

But users of AdSoft have been able to achive 5 times more traffic, easily, running no events, just by using AdSoft.

I think this is the beginning of a wide open field, and a new level of metrics precision for Virtual Worlds, and I'm glad that I was among the first to know of it, see and it firsthand, and write about it here at Webmetricsguru.com. 

Missed the CSI-NY Episode last Wednesday CSI:NY Down the Rabbit Hole but I did manage to download the OnRez Browser and try enter the crime scene and orientation - however, as I re-entered with my normal avatar I found I could not transport anywhere else outside of the CSI-NY island.

Also heard that Electric Sheep was bought by CBS, but I don't know if that's true or not, or it's more of a partnership.  

I see the CSI:NY Rabbit Hole Second Life connection as an experiment to see if you can take a crime drama, or any drama, and extend it beyond the boundaries of the show itself.   It seems to me that, in this sense, the CSI Crime Scene is more of an extension of the 2D Web - you could have done most of the things that your doing at  the Official CSI:NY Virtual Experience from CBS from any Flash website.

But the trend to move online to Virtual 3D games is more telling - and illustrative of the kinds of things Brand Managers were talking about doing at the first Virtual Worlds 2007 that I attended in New York earlier this year.

I would think CBS would be finding a way to connect people who say the show (and perhaps saw it on Cable vs. Online vs. those who heard about it but didn't see the show) and entered into the CSI:NY Virtual Experience with web metrics or whatever analytics they could get ahold of. 

Based on what I've heard, The Sheep don't have any real analytics - so I'm wondering what they're using for Analytics?  

You'd think, if someone is going to build a new browser, they'd all put some metrics collection in it - at least, that's my thinking.

As far as the OnRez browser - I don't see it as any major advance or much of an improvement over the standard Second Life Browser - perhaps more useful for the CSI:NY Virtual Experience but not for much else.

I wrote about the Brain-computer interface for Second Life in SmartMobs yesterday in a post titled: Using Brain Waves to control Avatars in Second Life which I thought was pretty cool - and reminded me of Wild Divine, which used Biofeedback to do, just about, the same thing (but there were differences in the Wild Divine approach, which looked exciting 5 years ago, but never really took off).

"…A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines moving his/her right and left arms. "

That's truly amazing - that you can think about moving your right arm, or you left foot, and it moves and you can see a movie of all of this at http://bme.bio.keio.ac.jp/01news/images/BCI_secondlife.wmv.

According to The Pink Tentacle: "….a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle."

I take it that each person would probably need to train a program that adapts to their own brainwaves (calibrate the program much as voice recognition software needs to be calibrated to each speaker) and the price of the interface, gadget, whatever it's called, lowered to where someone can buy it (IE: 130 dollars USD) and then, I think, you'd see a large number of people using it.

Wild Divine was able to make a biofeedback device that worked with its own software for about 150 dollars, and for what it did, it was/is very sophisticated - the problem for Wild Divine - they never bought into Second Life or User Generated Content - they kept their "game" so closed in and "occult" that it's appeal  was far too narrow, and too limited to be satisfying in any real way, beyond a couple sessions of playing the game.

But this new Brainwave device, along with Wild Divine, are part of what could, if used with Web Analytics, determine real engagement - because they measure response of a human being where as analytics along, measures just the response of what a person does on page, does on a site - and often, not that well.

Not only do Brainwave analysis and biofeedback devices improve online situations where and interactive response is called for - but they can be decoded and added to web analytics data in an overlay that …measures real visitor engagement - which is the holy grail of most brand marketers …this is the thing they most want to know - and hardly anyone can even figure out how to do it, much less what engagement really is.

In fact, that's part of what my committee at the Web Analytics Association is working on right now …. a set of definations of Social Media and how it would best be measured…and to read more about the Social Media Committee of the Web Analytics Association - here's the link - http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/cmt/?16 .