The Audience

This week (besides Blogger's new format, which looks a lot like Google Docs), I've been working on updating the list of virtual worlds and companies that make virtual worlds.  Our site supervisor provided us with a list of virtual worlds she had already collected and asked us to research and make additions to the list.  While I have found some additions, her list is fairly inclusive so much of what I'm finding is already included.  As is true of almost anything related to the internet, checking to make sure links remain active throughout a document's life (be it a text document, PDF, or web page) is very important.  What I've been finding is true of both the sources I'm using for my research and the document provided to me by my site supervisor is that some of these links are no longer active and the virtual world they refer to is no longer active.

This week's challenge? Scale.  When doing research on virtual worlds, I'm finding a lot of interesting virtual worlds that only serve China or Germany or Australia or some other non-North American country.  What is important to consider here (which I should have considered earlier but didn't think about it) is that in the vastness of the internet, there is a place for every place and documents we create here in the US may be viewed by many people from other countries so when creative a resource such as the one we're working on presently, do we include resources for other countries?  What is the scope of our work?  Do we build our resources and materials for our own community (in the U.S. in this case) or do we build for a global audience?  In this case, it appears that we are focusing on the North American audience.  I'm surprised this hasn't come up in discussion before.