extensions

Last night on The Office, Second Life made an appearance:

Jim: You playing that game again?

Dwight: Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn’t have points, or scores. It doesn’t have winners or losers.

Jim: Oh, it has losers.

Good stuff. Dwight goes on to explain why he started using SL:

Dwight (direct to camera): I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great, that I literally wanted a second one. In my second life, I was also a paper salesman, and I was also named Dwight. Absolutely everything was the same. Except I could fly.

For those keeping score, this is the second time Second Life has been prominently featured in a television show, in about as many weeks.

Does this mean Second Life has jumped the shark?

More ads:

A start-up called Ad-Air…said Monday that it had created what it called the “first global aerial advertising network” — giant, billboardlike ads that will be visible from the air as planes approach runways.

“What an incredible marketing opportunity — all these passengers with nothing else to do, staring down at the ground below,” said Paul Jenkins, managing director of Ad-Air.

Yes, incredible.

I assume everyone googles their names, and the various forms of their names they use to identify themselves online. Well, at least, I do. And I just found my name on a web site I’d forgotten about, a place I registered with several years ago.

Now, I’m not all that interested in being associated with that site, but there’s no easy way to delete my account. Maybe it’s an obvious point, but it hit me today — on many sites, it’s actually not easy, or not possible, to remove your digital ID.

A quick search turns up: it’s easy to delete accounts on both google and yahoo, although for both, if you don’t cancel and delete things in the correct order, you can linger (even for some chargeable, premium services); on myspace, you can, but they don’t make it easy; for Facebook, apparently it’s not possible to delete your account.

In the blogosphere, it’s also not possible. The Daily Kos FAQ, for example, states that user accounts there “…are forever, or at least as long as DailyKos remains in existence.” This is because, unlike social networking sites, comments in blogs (or, more specifically, political community-based blogs) are primarily public speech, although public speech with a digital “memory.” It’s a kind of Habermasian public space, with a automatic, permanent record.

There are some obvious questions: How long should our identities linger in cyberspace? Who controls our identities, and who *should*? What does privacy even mean these days?

No obvious answers…

It reads like a pre-i-bubble-burst marketing sheet:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans.

…Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device’s central innovation lies — in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer…The device also has a keyboard, so its users can take notes when reading or navigate the Web to look something up. A scroll wheel and a progress indicator next to the main screen, will help users navigate Web pages and texts on the device.

As the Times article points out, the new e-book offering from Amazon may end up like the host of dot-com failures that came before them. For while the pitch is persuasive — “Digital readers are not a replacement for a print book; they are a replacement for a stack of print books” — yeah, yeah…we’ve heard it all before.

People like books. People like the tactile quality, dog-earing the pages, marking up the sides. People like a book’s transportability, so you can read them on a beach, or on the roof deck. Or, yes, crass as it is, on the toilet. Books on a bookshelf, are, in a way, art; they look cool. They’re certainly also an expression of who we are, and what’s in our brains.

And if you lose it, oh well, it’s a book. $14.95, not the $400 to $500 Amazon plans on charging for their new Kindle.

Now, if the thing allows me to vote on American Idol…they may have something!

The culinary world seems to swirl around Anthony Bourdain these days. A renowned chef and writer, Boudain is on my television all the time, with his own show, “No Reservations,” on the Travel Channel, and his guest judge appearances on Bravo’s Top Chef.

But Bourdain’s also all over the blogosphere, as both of the above programs have blogs on their associated web sites. He also makes appearances on author Michael Ruhlman’s blog. Bourdain’s a scathingly good writer, and a blog seems like the perfect medium for his up-front, in-your-face style. In fact, all of the Bourdain-related sites are seeing a strong fan base develop, with terrific commentary from hundreds of participants on these spaces.

Bravo, for example, has created blogs for all the judges, but, if comments are any measure of fan interest, Bourdain seems to be the biggest draw. (Although Colicchio’s no slouch, either.) But certainly it’s Bourdain’s writing that makes his Bravo blog worth reading:

What the hell is with Casey’s knife skills!? During the Quickfire, I was absolutely gobsmacked watching her methodically sawing away at those onions like Ina Garten on Thorazine. No. Let me correct myself. Ina Garten on Thorazine would be faster. MUCH faster.

You know, Ina Garten…Food TV? Oh, forget it. Trust me, it’s funny.

On the No Reservations site, there’s even more going on. The network is using both a discussion board and a wiki to create a sense of community through user participation and interaction. The latter, it seems, is not all that popular — the “Stories” section, for example, only has one reader story posted. So, it’s a fledgling wiki, but a wiki…

No matter. All this food writing and TV watching is hard to keep up with, but it’s fun. It’s providing an outlet for talented chefs to move beyond the kitchen, and it’s providing an outlet for foodies to interact with some celeb chefs, and each other. The commentary on these sites is often as well-written and entertaining as from the “pros.”

If you’re not acquainted with Bourdain, you should be. I suspect he’ll be hanging around our televisions, and our blogs, for a long time.