This past week I had the privilege to attend my first RL workshop on Second Life®… locally, at the University of Aveiro, on their 1º Workshop on Communication, Education and Teaching. The University of Aveiro is one of Portugal’s youngest universities — a bit over three decades old — and, due to its strong ties to Portugal Telecom’s research lab, it is one of the leading Portuguese universities in telecommunications and computer science.

They were closely tied to the very beginning of my country’s Internet and the home of the first Portuguese search engine (long since bought by Portugal Telecom) and it is not surprising that they were, once more, leading the other research institutions in Portugal with the sponsorship and organisation of this workshop/conference.

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Some apologies are in order to some of my unfrequent readers — not being very good with humour (I wish I were), I usually use irony and sarcasm instead.

Obviously it’s funny for me to see people commenting me elsewhere and misquoting my words as meaning exactly the opposite Sarcasm is usually hard to spot in written communication, even when it has some nice smileys or exclamation marks after it. But I’m not consistent in my use of them — caveat lector. (more…)

PART ONE: SL AND THE GRAY GOO PROBLEM.

When Second Life launched in May 2003, it attracted a citizenship not unlike the Internet’s Usenet group of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Toward the end of 2006, a software tool known as Copybot went on sale, and for a brief while our metaverse reflected the web of the late ‘90s with its Napster-related controversy of peer-to-peer and open source versus IP theft.

2003-2006. Three years, condensed into which were events that defined the growth of the web over more than a decade. I wrote in a previous essay (‘The Metaverse Reloaded’) ‘the pace of change is quickening’ and you might take this as further proof. But I want to talk about something else the Copybot controversy highlights: Namely, the fact that history repeats itself; it rhymes.
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Sadly, as most of you have noticed, there has been not enough time for me to keep the blog updated… and just when everything in Second Life® is about to change:

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