Avatars

One of the things we are spending time on in our quest to look ahead is virtual worlds and avatars.

I’ve spent some time in Second Life and have created a persona called Flat Plasma.  I haven’t spent any money there yet and am not yet as addicted as Scoble and Kent Newsome.

But there is something really interesting in the intersection of virtual worlds, social networking, and the ability to create almost any reality you want.

So in an attempt to add some virtual reality to this blog, I created an avatar of myself at SitePal, a cool service that allows you to create a hosted avatar and put it anywhere you can place some javascript (like my blog).

I annoyed a bunch of readers this morning with the audio and so I’ve cut that out for now.  I intend to allow you to play my avatar’s voice if and when you choose, but I haven’t worked that up yet.  I will, hopefully this week.

And I plan on changing the look and feel pretty regularly.  Ideally, I’d like to put this avatar everywhere I’ve got a picture on the web; last.fm, myspace, flickr, etc, etc.  It would be cool if everytime I change my avatar, it instantly changes everywhere I’ve put it.

Jackson says in the comments to my MP3 of the Week post today:

I think Virtual fred should lip synch to the mp3 of the week.

I might try to make that happen too!  Cheerios has something like that called Cheerioke.com.  I’ll have to check it out.