I’ve noted in a number of posts that the reason businesses should jump into Second Life is that the web at large is going to evolve into a 3D world. I’ve also noted that several business publications have made the same prediction. The current issue of BusinessWeek features a two-page spread on the subject. From BusinessWeek.

Second Life has had the 3D social world pretty much to itself, but that could change as Multiverse launches. Based on the way Multiverse works, it could become (or serve as the model for) the platform that trasforms the web into a 3D environment.

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People who don’t like or understand Wikipedia always start with the same complaint: “Anybody can post or change an article. How reliable can it be?” Researchers at UC Santa Cruz may have come up with an answer. They’re developoing a program that analyzes the realiability of a Wikipedia contributor and uses color codes to alert readers. The reliability of an author whose entries don’t get edited at all is higher than the entries of those who get edited a lot. From BoingBoing.

Plaxo is launching a social network meant to go head-to-head with Facebook. (Doesn’t anybody talk about MySpace any more?) From News.com.

The Annenberg School of Communications’ Online Journalism Review has an article detailing steps for conducting your own web usability test. The story is here.

I’ve caught the local news channel reporting on a study claiming that fumes produced by laser printers can be worse than smoking cigarettes. HP—which bore the brunt of the study’s focus—responded, and the response is analyzed by the guys at ZDNet. This is also an example of transparency—the public scrutiny of a company’s response to criticism. Read the analysis.

A lot of us who blog have stumbled upon our own posts on blogs that are riddled with Google ads. In my case, this is a direct violation of my Creative Commons license. There are people trying to do something about these content scrapers. From the New York Times.