YES. the palace, where i spent some of my formative days before eventually working on a 3D virtual world community platform over a decade later. surprisingly, online communities have may have changed contexts over the years but the basis of user behavior remains large the same.

see also the excellent collection of essays and articles The Psychology of Cyberspace (1996) by John Suler, Ph.D.:

• The Basic Psychological Features of Cyberspace
• From ASCII to Holodecks: Psychology of an Online Multimedia Community

via users.rider.edu

The Hula Party

I accidentally stumbled on this Hula Party one night while cruising the Palace. Apparently, the party was a spontaneous event. Note the use of theme specific avatars, props added to the background image, and painting onto the background - all as decorations to visually enliven the event. Although I didn’t have any Hawaiian type props in my collection, several of the members generously gave me some of theirs. Here you can see me attempting to assemble the props onto my avatar. Once appropriately dressed, I changed my name to “TanakaOwl.” Members often alter their names, as well as their props, to match the situation at hand.

(1996)

Fear, organized. Brian Rea, organizer of worry, “I discovered like most people I had a lot of fears — after a few months, I began to catalog them: physical fears, natural fears, political fears, random, emotional.” After 11 years in New York, he made lists of his own and those of the people around him to fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter wall, an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona called Murals.

Results: What Personality Types Are Designers? | Michael Roller

My inner chart police doesn’t like the inconsistent dominant characteristic placement and reversed P/J coloring, which kind of distracted from the whole point of the article for me. It’s neat to see his little experiment, however. Note that the sample size is quite small and is comprised of a self-selected audience, so take it at face value.

I thought it would be interesting to see how this small project’s results compared to the distribution of Myers-Briggs personality types across the general population. I made a quick n dirty stacked bar graph in Google Docs, so forgive the ugliness.

The figures for “Everyone” (the general US population) above are from a random sampling of 3009 people culled from a total pool of 16,000 using the 1998 MBTI Form M. (“Dolphin Cove”. Retrieved 2008-06-25.)

Wired 15.04: Mixed Feelings

See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones.