{"id":1215,"date":"2007-04-22T23:48:19","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T03:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/04\/22\/gaia-online-a-virtual-gold-mine\/"},"modified":"2007-04-22T23:48:19","modified_gmt":"2007-04-23T03:48:19","slug":"gaia-online-a-virtual-gold-mine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/04\/22\/gaia-online-a-virtual-gold-mine\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaia Online \u2014 a virtual gold mine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m glad Wagner James Au — who also writes about Second Life as an “embedded” reporter for New World Notes — has written a post<\/a> about Gaia Online for GigaOm, because I’ve been meaning to write something about it and I keep forgetting. Now I don’t have to. I think Wagner’s headline might be overdoing it a little by saying MySpace should move over for Gaia, but there’s no question that Gaia<\/a> is an interesting property.<\/p>\n

gaia.pngI would never have heard about Gaia Online if I didn’t have a teenaged daughter. As Wagner points out, the service began as a fan site for teens who were interested in Japanese-style animation, or anime (and may have started with some animation students from Toronto’s Sheridan College, according to this three-year-old article<\/a> from Forever Geek) and has been kind of flying under the radar — at least until it raised a bunch<\/a> of venture capital financing last year. Now it has two million unique users a month, many of whom come for the online games but also for the chat forums and the various anime-related, role-playing fiction forums.<\/p>\n

The latter are what my 13-year-old daughter spends most of her time on, although she does play games from time to time and has also accumulated a fair stockpile of virtual Gaia currency (which unlike Second Life can’t be exchanged for real-world currency — an interesting decision on the part of Gaia’s creators). But her favourite thing is to join a forum where someone has begun writing a story about a particular character, and to help expand and extend that story — with half a dozen other writers all taking part.<\/p>\n

I find it fascinating, and she clearly does too. And it seems to have a considerable amount of staying power, since she has been involved with the site for two years or more now.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

As he points out in a comment below, Jeremy Liew has a post up about<\/a> Gaia and some of the other “casual immersive worlds” that are gaining traction, including Webkinz, Club Penguin and Neopets. As it turns out, I have some experience with those as well, since my 9-year-old daughter is a huge fan of all three of them. We’re a virtual household \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m glad Wagner James Au — who also writes about Second Life as an “embedded” reporter for New World Notes — has written a post about Gaia Online for GigaOm, because I’ve been meaning to write something about it and I keep forgetting. Now I don’t have to. I think Wagner’s headline might be overdoing … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Gaia Online \u2014 a virtual gold mine”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}