jeremy snyder's meta|remix

on the latest jeromecast about happiness vs success and in what order, i highlight a great tedxtalk on the subject. enjoy!

who chooses the image? listen and give your thoughts.

just a fun little episode about a qr code done in concrete and paint, visible from a satellite camera.

listen to the latest episode on speeding and harsh fines.

a few years ago, i heard a story about a chinese musician who was touring in europe. i don’t remember the story perfectly, but i believe it was a woman, and she was being interviewed on a german talk show on television. it went something like this:

tv host: i’m asking you some controversial question about china.

artist: ok.

tv host: please consider this question very carefully. this is a very important show. we have approximately 10 million viewers.

artist: hmm. if you had 10 million viewers in china, you’d probably be canceled.

i don’t know if this story went exactly like this, or if the story is even true. if anyone has a link or confirmation of that story, please let me know in the comments. but that same story came back to mind last week, as i was discussing the status of cantonese in china (recently protested) relative to the future of the finnish language.

me: finnish will probably die in about 50-100 years. (nb: i didn’t mean that it would completely die, but that it would go from being a strong national language to being kind of secondary language and that finns would generally speak english more)

him: that would be shocking. it’s a language rich with history and culture.

me: isn’t cantonese also?

him: well, maybe, but it’s just a dialect.

me: how many speakers does cantonese have? around 100 million, right?

him: maybe. maybe less. (nb. turns out it’s less, closer to 25-50 million by various estimates)

me: finnish has 5 million speakers.

him: oh.

that was his reaction, based on our conversational evidence of 100 million speakers. so why do i think finnish will have such a struggle? well, first of all, finland has already had a wave of nokia immigration recently. that’s made life in helsinki in english completely possible. couple that with europe’s upcoming demographic problems, and english will just continue to gain strength as the lingua franca. i hope i’m wrong, but it puts a light on critical population masses and the perspective you might have on it, coming from different backgrounds.

give it a listen and you might learn something new about facebook comments.

probably a lot of readers of my blog have also read neal stephenson’s “snow crash”

of course, working in virtual worlds, this is basically mandatory for us. but what’s interesting to me is that the concept i see from it more and more is not so much the metaverse, but the ability to buy citizenship in different countries.

consider this – as a citizen, you are automatically a customer of your country’s government. you pay for government services via your taxes. and more and more, with countries having more liberal, or even aggressive immigration policies, you can feel like a consumer. for instance, i saw ads saying “hey singaporean, immigrate to new zealand”. that’s openly soliciting business. mind you, i don’t feel that bad about that. i certainly don’t always feel that i get the value-for-money that i’m looking for. anyway, just an interesting thought for me…

i’ll be at the virtual worlds fall conference next week in san jose, california. if you’re interested in meeting up or chatting, drop me a line at jeremy dot a dot snyder (at) gmail dot com.

one of the blogs that i really enjoy reading is sanya weathers‘ eating bees blog about community management. i’ll say right off the bat that she’s been at this much longer than i have, and she uses more colorful language than i might , but i almost always agree 100% with her opinions on community management. her most recent post about 5 things you can do to “mess” up your community got me thinking a bit about whether it was possible to give 5 guidelines for not messing up your community. i’m not really sure, but i thought these would be a good 5 to start with:

1. be as honest and open as you can be. honesty is about telling the truth; openness is about disclosing what you can disclose. when you work for a company, things like confidentiality agreements, internal policies and also the fear of putting a bad message out and offending customers or scaring investors sometimes limit what you can say. but anything that you can say that will answer a question, help a customer or generally improve the situation, you should.
2. over-communicate. you’ll always make changes to your world or game for various reasons, like adding new features, balancing the game dynamics or whatever. whenever you do, someone will be upset. but more than people being upset, people will be uncertain about its impact on them. it might change their inventory, or affect their score or who knows what. any side-effects that you know (e.g. documented and proven through testing) you should post. you’ll answer a bunch of questions right off the bat and if it’s bad, you’ll get all the anger out right away rather than be ambushed by it later.
3. avoid talking like a politician. sanya weathers talks about the danger of talking like a marketing person, where you use buzzwords and build hype, regardless of what the actual situation is. talking like a politician is trying to get everyone to like you. you make promises and empty statements. this doesn’t help. again, back to point 1: as honest and open as possible.
4. stop and think before hitting send or submit. ask yourself if what you’re about to write (and yes, any email, posting, etc is public) will help. will it help clear up a question? will it help make a customer happy? if not, re-work it until it does, or find a different message.
5. be among them, but not of them. a lot of people talk about the importance of developers playing games, and for the fun aspects, it makes a lot of sense. for community managers, who generally have to deal with upset customers, when you share their pain, you can represent them much better internally. after all, as a community manager, you represent the community to the developers and business interests. you can’t fight blindly for what would make you the player more successful in-game or in-world, but you can explain rationally what will help the majority of the community to be happier or more successful.