A few weeks ago, I attended the SFBeta event in San Francisco and met Nik Bonaddio, the Creative Director of Spongecell. Guess what? He has another rich media ad solution but there was one simple thing that kept me from turning toward the bar to start swilling Anchor Steam - rich media ads that are socially aware.

I have seen other attempts - sloppy attempts, but Spongecell and Bonaddio pulled it off. Expanding on where they are now, imagine seeing an ad for a movie and then adding the local theater to your Google Maps and the show time to your calendar. Click-through metrics are so yesterday. How many calendar inclusions did your ad receive? How many MySpace friends did you gain? Those are the metrics I like.

Wherever people gather there is the chance for humanity to impart itself upon those gathered.

We should expect no less from Second Life.

In a garden pavilion on an island, I sat with an assortment of human beings - one clad as a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, another as a brazen vixen, a blue man, a tuxedoed prom king - and poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I’d created to engage here - I was participating in an “anxiety support group” in the free, virtual world of Second Life.

As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!

I saw my first instance of online group therapy in the form of an email list in the mid-90s. Second Life is no different really, it is just a more immersive experience than email. And that immersion could be the key to better connections and a more expressive group therapy experience. Gone are the vulnerabilities of speaking to strangers in person. Expressing issues is more important I believe than rubbing elbows at the local church.

Google today announced its new avatar 3D chat world called Lively. It could be interesting and fun but not a substitute for the more powerful Second Life.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional — they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google’s photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Inside Google, the product was headed by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager. Students at Arizona State University have been testing Lively for several months.

Now if Google came out with something for the Mac. As it is, Lively is Windows only.

Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, and researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason.

It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries. (full article)

Of late, many blogs on the Advertise Liberally niche have been unhappy with the lack of growth in terms of revenue. Some small to medium sites have seen zero revenue for months from BlogAds while the Big Ten always seem to be running full.

Enter Click To Blue. CTB is a new ad network whose ad inventory zones are on pre-approved sites that have progressive political content. Early adopters from Advertising Liberally have seen tremendous revenue growth compare to BlogAds.

Running on OpenX, an open source online ad network software package, Click To Blue is opening up a new frontier in ad networks - small, invitation-only, and niche focused.

Williams’ avatar name is StormBear Hitchcock and he was the last guest of the night. He discussed the the creation of Books For Soldiers and the technology used to bring Books For Soldiers to Second Life.

Angelico’s show is part of the MBC’ (Metaverse Broadcasting Company) 1600 in-world screens and the show is seen throughout Second Life and is also available on the web. If the below player doesn’t work for you, you can also see the show HERE.

CNBC ran a story on Second Life and how SL is creating a new economy much in the way eBay has. One woman profiled is on track to make over $80,000 in US dollars this year from the sales of her clothing line in Second Life. Her initial investment was a tad over $500.

The video is worth watching.

Massively thinks so.

major media outlets speculated that Google would use its then-newly-acquired SketchUp asset to turn Google Earth into some sort of Second Life-type experience. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was to acquire Adscape Media Inc., a company that specializes in creatively integrating advertising into games. In September, ASU students began testing a mysterious application very likely connected to Google, and observers speculated that the application could be a 3D virtual environment.

Google made a deal with Multiverse (the company connected to the possibly problematic Firefly MMO) to sync Multiverse’s flexible virtual reality engine with Google’s assets and tools. The Reuters blog MediaFile points out that au courant industry figures are taking the existence of a Google virtual world for granted at this point.

The fire keeps getting more fuel. Multiverse’s Corey Bridge was quoted in The Financial Times describing a future when people will use their real identities (rather than fictional character avatars) to interact with one another in virtual worlds that will be integrated into social networking platforms similar to Facebook or MySpace. Google is making a huge social networking push this month.

Google has a unique ability to increase market pressures and push users into new technologies. Second Life is adding about 1000 private islands a month. Imagine what would happen if Google ups and adds a thousand or so islands. Or, what if every Gmail account suddenly gets 2048 square meters of OpenSim space?

Once OpenSim can link into the SL grid, the metaverse changes forever and no one knows how it will change.

Yelp is a site where anyone can write a review on a local business. Nimbus founder Storm Williams is quite the Yelper! The biggest subject that is Yelped about is restaurants and some restaurateurs in the know fear Yelpers.

But in an unexpected turn, one restaurant has banned yelpers.

An owner of a San Francisco Bay Area cafe [...] has posted signs in his two coffee houses that read “No Yelpers!!”

Why? Apparently the cafe owner wants to discourage any (more) customers from writing bad reviews of his businesses on the site. I’m pretty sure that’s not the way to do it.

But more importantly, it seems like that first homemade sign in a coffee shop means Yelp has come up in the world, if only a wee bit. It’s joining an esteemed list of cafe no-nos: no cell phones, no skateboards, no bare feet, no Yelpers.

From a public perception point of view, once you start banning critics, it gives the critics credibility. Currently Rooz Cafe of Oakland has 4 out of 5 stars as rated by Yelpers. Not bad… actually, very good. Why Rooz began banning Yelpers is a puzzler. If the criticisms were invalid… the ones likening the Rooz staff to Nazi’s was clearly over the top. The smart play would have been to INVITE Yelpers to come in - challenge the insane reviews.

As a business, it is always better to embrace your customers than shun them.

What is a Street View car? Google is taking 3D images of all the streets in cities across the nation to show what the locations of a precise point on a Google Map will look like. To capture these images, they drive a fleet of cars around the nation with a 3D camera on top and a GPS computer to plot what photo goes with which coordinate. Today, one whipped by us in downtown Winston-Salem. Here is an example of Google Maps with Street View enabled - (Bay Bridge, San Francisco). From there you can navigate around the map with the real 3D imaging on the screen.