What: New York Times article on the use of virtual meetings.
Posts to which it is related: The Mind Has a Body of Its Own, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, Freeing Yourself from Email, So You Think You’d Like to Telecommute
Bottom line: This article begins with the premise of virtual meetings (specifically, teleconferencing) increasing in business, as a way of dealing with the high cost of travel. But it’s more thorough than most articles (which merely suggest this idea) by quantifying for the reader the number of international and domestic flights avoided in one organization with the use of virtual meetings. Kudos for including some actual data, rather than just a vague idea. Also of crucial importance in this article, it emphasizes that meetings can be very effective even when done virtually. Virtual collaboration or telecommuting is currently offered as an option that solves the problem of high travel costs, but virtual meetings have merit independent of cost savings. This article talks about the feeling of presence in a virtual meeting – one employee says that within a few minutes a participant forgets they are in separate parts of the world.

What: PC World article on the current state of virtual business.
Posts to which it is related: Wonderland: A Tool for Online Collaboration, A Mashup for Virtual Team Collaboration, The Future of Virtual Teams: Collaboration in 3D Web
Bottom line: The basic update is that people still suspect virtual worlds could really take business in an interesting direction, but there are few organizations using it in a profound or new way. In fact, many early adopters of a presence in Second Life or other hyped virtual worlds have shifted focus away from their virtual stores or businesses. But, there is a shift on the way, and we have a clue of it in this article. A woman from one organization says they have realized the importance of togetherness, and that meeting in a virtual world, even when they are physically separated in the “real” world, provides a shared experience. This is precisely the thing that attracted us to the study of virtual worlds initially – people seem to experience virtual worlds in a way that is similar to how we experience the real world. Since virtual worlds and avatars are so new, we still have a lot to learn both from academic research and practitioner experience on the details of how people experience virtual worlds.

What: Guardian blog post by Aleks Krotoski on using virtual worlds for experiments in group behavior.
Posts to which it is related: The Mind Has a Body of Its Own
Bottom line: Related to this point of people experiencing virtual worlds in “real” life ways, Krotoski notes that economists are finding that virtual worlds can be used for economics research. Apparently people make economic decisions in virtual worlds that mirror patterns in the real world. If we can begin to understand how, why, and under what conditions people behave in and experience virtual worlds in a “real” way, the blogger points out they could serve as environments for high risk or marginally ethical experiments.

What: WebWorkerDaily blog post suggesting that businesses are approaching virtual work in a less-than-optimal way.
Posts to which it is related: Emergent Collaboration: The reason why email should not be used for collaboration, Rethinking the Value of Virtual Worlds for Virtual Team Collaboration, A Mashup for Virtual Team Collaboration, The Future of Virtual Teams: Collaboration in 3D Web, Wonderland: A Tool for Online Collaboration
Bottom line: These authors provide more or less a counter-point to what we are saying. They believe there is too much focus (and too much money spent) on presence, and that strong relationships can be built without it. They may be right. Though the Leading Virtually authors suspect otherwise, we certainly concede that it’s possible – only research (including findings from the field) will tell!

What: WSJ blog post by Kelly Spors about baristas using tailored social networking to help their businesses.
Posts to which it is related: Freeing Yourself from Email, The Leading Virtually Digest, July 14, 2008
Bottom line: This blog entry talks about a group of baristas who are using a social networking website. But this site is different than the well-known social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc). This site has features that aren’t available in the well-known sites, and it was tailored to the needs of baristas. This seems to be an important lesson for managers who look at the major sites and don’t see how they can improve business processes.