Across the radar
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Snippets of news:
- Second Life guide for newcomers - says Katicus Sparrow: “Ariane Brodie gives examples and links of what to do after you figure out good skin, hair and clothes, including teleport scripts, camera controls, jewelry creation and attachment scripts”
- Life in the Metaverse - interesting blog by the aforementioned Ariane
- Wagner James Au (WJA) discussed how SL ‘life’ crosses over into the Web2.0 world: “There are hundreds of blogs about Second Life; there are nearly 1000 Flickr groups devoted to SL; there’s a few SL Facebook widgets, an active SL-oriented Twitter community, and searching “Second Life” in YouTube returns over 21,000 videos.”
He links to a cultural/personal nexus development that Gartner’s Adam Sarner dubbed “Generation V” and Botgirl Questi evocatively illustrated on her blog. [image repeated below - original on her blog). I’m going to print out the image and attach it to the door of my office.
WJA wonders how many SL-themed hours are spent outside of SL itself; “Right now, about 550,000 Residents are in-world an average of around 50 hours a month. How many hours do you suppose they spend in SL’s many Web 2.0 nodes?”
- WJA also points to two tv shows worth catching: Paisley Beebe of SLCN.TV’s ‘Tonight Live’– watch his interview here. There’s also Angelico Babii on Metaverse-tv.com’s ‘Late Show’, talking virtual political campaigns, the birth of the metaverse, and beyond. Watch that one here. Both shows originate from Australia
- From a couple of weeks ago (apols for missing this): the LA Times ran a front page story on the corporate use of Second Life and how companies like Sun Microsystems and Intel are embracing SL to hold company meetings and such. Nothing newsworthy there, you would think, and the journalist Alana Semuels did a good job. But WJA goes into the backstory:
“In 2007, Alana Semuels was also the author of two widely-cited LA Times stories that depicted Second Life as a disaster for corporations. The first dubiously suggested companies were under attack by anti-globalization vigilantes; the second was an equally questionable report arguing that real world advertising in SL had utterly failed.
…
“In recent months, Forbes has written favorably about practical uses of Second Life for education and innovation; before that, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a reconsideration of the negative article he commissioned, and last December, was spotted citing SL as a model for the future of business. Taken together, they represent a decided shift in the outside narrative. It’ll be interesting to see the ripples of this move pass through the tech world, as all those who dismissed Second Life out of hand on the basis of those earlier reports slowly realize their rationale has eroded out from under them.”
Personally, I hope the back-backlash keeps out of SL for a bit longer; one of my research partners has very definite views about the long-term prospects of SL and we want to be ready for the return of the crowds
- A heap of great ‘how to’ videos are available on the SL wiki, courtesy of Torley Linden, the Linden Lab employee who has responsibility for resident education. You can either watch the shows in your browser, or download into iTunes for later consumption (say, on the plane or whilst waiting for your train/bus)
