It was good to see The Gamer Disposition by John Seely Brown & Douglas Thomas, Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality by Jane McGonigal, The Metaverse : TV of the future? by Miklos Sarvary, Giving Avatars Emotive control by Judith Donath and Happy Metadata trails by Jan Chipchase making this years list.

All are recommended reading and food for thought as we enter the Meta Age. For those interested in linking the above ideas together I recommend listening to this podcast. Adam Pasick interviewed Mitch Kapor at Davos last week and touched on many of the above themes.

The second was Getting Real Work Done in Virtual Worlds by Erica Driver and Paul Jackson. It predicts that within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today. Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds. Both reports provide useful reference points as to what lies ahead.

BBC recently ran an excellent three-part series titled Visions of the Future. Futurist Dr Michio Kaku hosted the series and explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond. Part one is titled The Intelligence Revolution and looks at what will happen when ubiquitous computing converges with the Internet.

In this century, we are going to make the historic transition from the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the ‘Age of Mastery’, a period in which we will move from being passive observers of nature to its active choreographers.

Ronan and I both share Michio’s worldview that humankind is at the beginning of the beginning of a major transition. Runtime of part one is 50 minutes. For those interested part two titled The Biotech Revolution and part three titled The Quantum Revolution are also recommended viewing.

Catching up on news over the last week three pieces caught my attention. The first was Draxtor Despres video report titled Media in SL : old vs new? An indigenous media sector was already well established prior to the arrival of Reuters, AvaStar, Sky News and iCNN over the last year. Draxtor speaks with representatives of each camp on how they view each other in this 5 minute clip.

The second piece was Sir Tim Berners-Lee commentary on the social graph meme doing the rounds. Paul Miller has an excellent post which follows the conversations which have taken place since and is recommended reading. Looking forward to seeing what semSL, a project to combine the virtual world of Second Life with semantic technologies, holds in store once it goes live.

The third was Anne Eisenberg’s NYT piece on EveryScape with details of its upcoming December launch. The mapping services provider will offer virtual street tours for ten urban areas including Aspen, Boston, Cambridge and New York. Unlike other providers within this space it will also offer interior views. Harvard Square was profiled with a preview of the browser based service here.

A video recording of Mike Liebhold speaking at the first Stanford Metaverse Meetup last week is now available for viewing. Mike speaks about the Geospatial Web, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality and how they all fold together. Runtime is 65 minutes. As Mike rightly points out and as Ronan continually remarks here at Mobil Avenue many of the concepts have been around for some 30 years now. Blended realities is something we are going to be writing alot more about in 2008.