AN ESSAY BY EXTROPIA DaSILVA.

Extropia’s back with more delightful reading — Gwyn

It is a fair bet that any company releasing a 3D social space to be inhabited by customisable avatars, who shop for virtual furniture with which to furnish their similarly virtual houses is going to find itself compared to Second Life. And that is what has happened to Sony’s new online service for the PlayStation3, which it calls ‘Home’. Not everybody agrees that such comparisons are applicable, and among those who think they are not is Sony’s Phil Harrison: “The approach that Second Life takes is that they provide the tools, and they are entirely server-based. It’s a very different approach, and it’s really inappropriate to make any direct comparison”.

Wise words. After all, in Home, you can customise your avatar and place whatever furniture you deem desirable wherever you want in your virtual private living space, but you cannot make your own furniture in the way that SL allows you to. The fact that SL is continually created by the collaborative efforts of its residents is, strange though it may seem, simultaneously its greatest strength and biggest weakness. The strength obviously lies in the fact that it never stands still and seems to be beyond easy classification. Is SL a ‘game’? Yes, if you want it to be. Is SL a 3D MySpace? Again, if that is what you want, that is what it is. In fact, Linden Lab have done user-generated content so brilliantly well that SL is both nothing and everything. It is almost as flexible as your imagination. A few limitations aside, it is a metaverse that adapts itself to be what you want it to be.
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Imagine that you would have an awesome technology that allowed you to create an universe you have just pictured in your mind, to the extent of detail you wish, and that you could get realistic characters walking around your universe, so perfect in its minutiae that their behaviour and looks would be completely impossible to distinguish from real human beings. Now imagine if that technology were available to everybody in the world and that anyone, anywhere could have access to it.

Actually, that technology does, indeed, exist. It’s even quite old, having first been developed over 6,000 years ago. It’s called a book.

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UgoTrade is yet another community of meta-thinkers about online communities and online business.

From their site: “Ugonet.org is a free video/photo sharing site and social network for off the grid folks, social entrepreneurs, digital pioneers, traveler activists, anthropologists (pseudo or not), media makers - photographers, film makers, artists, and musicians world wide. Ugonet will be an online hub - a tool, knowledge base, showcase, and meeting place for everyone interested in finding new ways to connect across digital and economic divides - an inside look at positive global development, a place to imagine change where your vision counts. ”

They’re now focusing on Second Life as well…

Thanks to the fantastic people at Info Island, sponsored by the The American Library Association (ALA), namely Rain Noonan — who does opera singing iRL as well — Moon Adamant’s old project, the Royal Opera House of Lisbon (a building opened to the public in April 1755 and destroyed in the big Lisbon Earthquake of November 1755) is back again, this time on the ALA Arts Info Island sim, where it can be visited.

There are projects to do real, life opera events on this masterfully built place! Stay tuned for more news.