In this post, I am diverting from my main blog theme to share a technical issue that I encountered with Wordpress.  Tonight, I opened up Wordpress to write a new blog.  To my dismay, the administrative pages for Wordpress showed up as completely blank pages, even though my actual blog was displayed correctly.  After searching the Internet and going through a few trials and errors, I finally found the solution to the problem: the functions.php file in the folder that contains the theme used cannot have blank lines on the top or at the bottom.  Deleting those blank spaces brought my administrative pages back.  I’m sharing this with my readers in case anyone runs into the same problem in the future.  During my research, I also learned that another common reason for such blank pages is the wp-cache plug-in. More information about that issue can be found at http://ibloggedthis.com/2006/05/28/wordpress-caching-wp-cache-plugin-blank-page-bug-fix/.

A student of mine shared this article on CNN.com with me: “Can second Life Help Teach Doctors to Treat Patients?“  It is an interesting illustration of the potential best use of Second Life, at least in the short-term.  While the original idea of Second Life was to create a virtual world where individuals can take on the role of an alter ego, the true business appeal of Second Life really lies in its capability to bring computer objects to life.  Within the 3D environment, individuals can reenact real-world scenarios in a semi-real setting, a departure from the 2D dominated Internet.  Thus, what is most useful about Second Life is not really the hundreds of thousands of users in the network, in contrary to other social networks such as Facebook.  Rather, it is the ability to simulate real-world scenarios that may be difficult or expensive to take place in reality.  Such applications include product development and demonstration; customer collaboration; teleconferencing; education and other types of simulation; and team work across geographic areas.  While businesses have entered Second Life a few years ago to build a “presence” in Second Life for marketing purposes, I envision continued use of Second Life to focus more in these other business areas and applications.

Together with Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, my research team is conducting a study on corporate innovation as reflected by companies’ participation in the virtual world Second Life.  In particular, we are interested in why corporations engage in cutting-edge innovations such as Second Life, despite the risks involved, and the benefits that are received through such ventures.  If your company has conducted any activities in Second Life, we would like to invite you to participate in a survey that constitutes part of the research project.  The survey will take only 10-15 minutes to complete, and we would be pleased to share the results of our research with you after the project’s completion in the form of an executive summary.  Please note that although Linden Lab has been working with us on facilitating the data collection process, we are not working with any commercial interests, and we will not share any data that can be tracked back to individuals or firms unless you first provide written permission to do so.

If you are interested in participating, please click on this survey link to launch the survey.  If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to contact us through the Contact Yuping form or via email to wjudge@odu.edu.  Thank you!