As reported on Community Mobilization, a recent Forester Research report states that virtual worlds and spaces a re a key component of the knowledge workspace. The report identifies several Web 2.0 technologies that companies should adopt for stronger information connections: RSS, blogs, rich Internet applications (RIAs), tagging, wikis, and virtual worlds. The article goes forward and suggests that to get these current technologies integrated companies should look inward before they turn to consultant. Virtual Worlds Weekly catalogs the Seven Tenets of the Knowledge Workplace as:

The seven tenets are that:
1. Work should be contextual: Forrester envisions RSS feeds pushing information to workers in their portals instead of forcing them to go to multiple applications to catch up on work. Forrester sees virtual worlds as a bonus here, where workers can interact in a 3D environment and access files in the same way they would in the real world.

2. Portals should be individualized, allowing users to customize their space in a wiki, RSS, or virtual world.

3. Work should be seamless. Virtual worlds aren't mentioned specifically here, but the idea is that instead of clicking between applications or folders, information should be tagged in one location. A virtual space makes for an interesting way to browse. See, for example, projects the intelligence community is working on for a virtual work space.

4. Information should be presented visually, which seems like a pretty clear tie-in to the previous tenet for virtual worlds.

5. Technology should be multi-modal. I.e., it should allow for mashups.

6. Information should be social. Again, this has been one of the major arguments for a 3D virtual work environment that allows users to collaboratively access and edit information in real time.

7. Information should be quick. Instead of working with local software, businesses should focus on Service-Oriented Architecture.

The electric-shock obedience experiment sent Stanley Milgram into infamy. It also was the catalyst for American Psychological Association to adopt ethical considerations when performing psychological experiments on people. Plus One reports that a group in London re-ran the same experiment in a virtual world and the results were eerily similar. The participants showed comparable stress and anxiety levels. Their conclusions?

Our results show that in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioral and physiological levels as if it were real. This result reopens the door to direct empirical studies of obedience and related extreme social situations, an area of research that is otherwise not open to experimental study for ethical reasons, through the employment of virtual environments

My conclusion?  I am not all that concerned with the world of obedience studies but what I am concerned with is the empirical proof that a virtual world can have a comparable emotional impact on is residents as real world activities. This being said it lends additional support to engaging in psycho-significant research and therapeutic activities in the medium. For the human service sector it provides further credence to the Asperger's therapy work that is currently experiencing success in virtual worlds such as Second Life.