Get a jump on your next career in metaverse research

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Chances are, there are few regular readers of Hypergrid Business who aren’t aware that we’re at the dawning of the age of virtual reality.

The metaverse is coming. We’ll all soon be regular visitors to the Matrix. Snow Crash will be crashing. Our virtual streets will be paved with gold and free sex beds. And parents will be nostalgic for the time when kids listened to gansta rap and spent all their time texting and pulling up their pants — you know, the good old days.

If history is anything to go by — and really, what else do we have? — there will be a virtual boom, accompanied by an explosion of interest in everything and anything virtual. Remember the days of the dot-com boom when magazines were each two inches thick and filled with endless dot-com success stories and dot-com ads? When bookstores were filled with guides to the Internet? When every newspaper and television program had to add a special section for Internet coverage? And Yahoo and other Internet directories were hiring hundreds of people to basically sit and browse the Web, searching for interesting sites to point their users to.

Of course, after a few years, this era was over. Internet research was no longer the domain of a few cutting edge journalists, consultants and academics — everyone was doing it. And automated search engines like Northern Lights and Google replaced the human-assembled hierarchical directories of Yahoo! and its ilk.

So, assuming history is going to repeat itself, are you interested in getting a head start?

With the addition of a new advertiser — SASSO, an OpenSim and Aurora-Sim hosting company — Hypergrid Business now has a small budget for a researcher.

Work will include finding new hypergrid destinations, writing a one-or-two-sentence summary and taking a snapshot. You’ll also be collecting info on upcoming events and updating the calendar, and writing articles about hypergrid happenings.

Sounds like fun? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

The safari-themed Virunga Mountains region on OSgrid. That elephant was feisty.
The safari-themed Virunga Mountains region on OSgrid. That elephant was feisty.

We also need help with a site redesign

Hypergrid Business was founded in the spring of 2009 — that’s five years ago! — and the site hasn’t changed much since. We’re well past due for a redesign.

In particular, I’d like to switch the site over to a responsive design, so that it would look good on mobile devices and tablets. I’d also like to change the organization a little bit. I come from a newspaper background, so I naturally think of sections organized by type of article — news story, feature, column, editorial. That kind of organization benefits the folks who produce the content. But readers might benefit more from content arranged according to subject areas — business and economy, culture and virtual lifestyles, development, scripting and building, grid management, people, gadgets, and other platforms.

We don’t have the budget to pay for a redesign. Our current advertising revenues are fully allocated to grid hosting, web hosting, and coffee for freelance reporters.

But we can offer advertising space. If you are a developer or consultant who knows what “responsive design” and “child themes” are, and could use an ad in a publication targeting virtual worlds users with a total of over 125,000 unique visitors in 2013, drop me a line.

Maria Korolov
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