Virtual Worlds News posted a great article with the BarbieGirls.com developer, Studiocom. I especially liked the way they broke down contents. Viewing content creation tools as toys is an interesting angle to encourage accessibility.
Studiocom breaks content down into four categories. There’s explicit creation like text or images that provides a very direct, open-ended form of communication, and also life-caching, a constant stream of self-reporting with cameras or audio. But more important for Studiocom’s work are the last two: mediated development and relationships.
“In mediated content, you work with existing tools,” said Santos. “You make music through your mixer or you decorate your room. A room is an incredible piece of content. In Coke Studios, we created 17 environments but then users created over 2 million rooms of their own. And the fourth type is content created through relationships. If you think about Facebook, people have profiles, but more important are the connections of who knows who. You filter that by adding friends or groups, but it’s a piece of content that the user never has or creates, but the system has it.”
