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Our Digital team has recently had the opportunity to work with Business Objects on the creation of a new community that is trying to leverage collective intelligence in a new way to tackle significant real-world problems.  It's called the Insight community.  They are partnering with a major environmental non-profit and some high profile public figures who will be presenting at the Climate Summit on May 15th in New York City.  Their goal will be to put Business Objects' data visualization tools in the hands of an open community to find new ways to raise awareness around, and ultimately solve, major global problems.

Insight takes the concept of an online community and moves it beyond transactional relationships, like MySpace and LinkedIn, to true collaboration.  Additionally, it's a way for number crunchers to gain access to some very powerful tools and network with others in their field around big issues that affect everyone.  There will also be ways for consumers to participate and eventually a mechanism to allow other non-profits to tap into the community's intellectual capital.

Here's a video where Business Objects CEO John Schwarz talks about the community.

Stay tuned for more to come next Tuesday!

Just the other night I attended the CNN Future Summit at Stanford where Linden Labs CEO, Philip Rosedale, Flickr co-founder, Stewart Butterfield (who might I add was wearing a sweater to match the r in Flickr... sooo cool) and a host of other leaders in this online space were speaking. It was a really cool event that surprising not a lot of people turned up to.

While there I ran into an old colleague from Cisco who has been involved with launching a product in SL. He was really jazzed about it but admitted there were a lot of difficulties with identifying who was at the launch, which customers, reporters, if any etc.. He also said that a lot of people were finding it difficult to maneuver through the space. I thought this was interesting because you don't hear too much about this side of taking real world business into Second Life. My old colleague also told me that he heard IBM was scaling way back on their presence and activities on SL because they weren't seeing the ROI they'd hoped for.

I still think Second Life is a great and fun tool, but it's important for businesses to understand not only the security and privacy issues involved but also the technological boundaries that still exist. For example no more then 30-40 avatars can be on an island at once, product updates that can take 30 minutes before you're even able to log in, a very high learning curve for simple navigation, which Rosedale admitted to at the conference, and one I've experienced several times is loosing parts of my clothes or even my hair. Despite it being an avatar and not actually me I get very embarrassed when my avatar looses clothing, can't stop dancing when there's no music or looses her hair yikes! (this would be hard for anyone to understand unless they've played)

I guess I'm still skeptical of using Second Life as an efficient communication tool for large corporations. I don't see a lot of high profile, and very busy at that, executives wanting to go through all of the above mentioned to communicate with their key audiences, especially when there are more seamless and efficient forms of communication. Thoughts?

By the way if you want to check out the CNN Future Summit it's airing June 13th online and on CNN International, I'm in the very front row!!  Here's a nice action shot of the panel during prep time.

Launching just this past Thursday was FirstWivesWorld.com, an online community designed for and around divorced women.  Currently the site features an array of blog posts from daily news to gossip to personal testimonials, and the first of many videos can be currently found on the site.  The particular videos now posted describe the personal divorce experiences of two women’s in their own words, and being placed to music and very fluidly edited, the videos are very engaging.  

As exciting as this launch is – showcasing the site in its current form – there is much development and growth that will come in the next few months as the site ramps up to the full social network launch in early May.

What am I referring to in the post title?  Is it the what was on the box of the DVD in the room of that creepy frat guy at college?  No.  Oh, wait, sure ... it's the premise to the new slasher flick from Quentin Tarantino, isn't it?  Nope. 

I'm talking about the campaign launched by Diesel Jeans earlier this week.  If you missed it, here's what happened:

Diesel put these three models in a hotel room starting a few days ago.  There are live webcams, and - although the premise is really dumb (the two girls have taken over the Diesel website by kidnapping a company rep in order to become "famous") - the site traffic grew like crazy.  Check out this graph from Alexa below.

All in all though, it's a reminder that no matter how far communication technology advances, and no matter how large the blogosphere becomes, how engaging social networks get or how un-virtual our virtual reality grow to be, sex will always sell.