In the olden days, Linden Lab would put a list of events announcing its anniversary everywhere: on their webpage, on the forums, in-world, everywhere.

This year we have to rely upon my good friend SignpostMarv Martin’s information of what’s going to happen on what used to be one of Second Life’s largest and most-attended events. Under the theme of “History”, here are a few scattered links about what the celebrations are going to be:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SL4B

http://signpostmarv.name/sl4b/press-release.html

A partial list of events:

http://eventful.com/calendars/C0-001-000074791-5

A Google Docs document

Secondfest is a virtual three-day music festival inside Second Life realised by The Guardian and Intel, featuring live music from offline and online performers, theatre, ballet, cinema, animation and general chaos. It kicks off Friday 29 June at 6pm GMT (10am SLT) and rocks and rolls until midnight (GMT) Sunday night.

Three arenas for exclusive performances by Pet Shop Boys, The Aliens, New Young Pony Club, Groove Armada, Hot Chip, Hadouken, Simian Mobile Disco and DJs Rob da Bank, Gilles Peterson, Sunday Best, Bugged Out, Ninja Tunes and many more.

Two stages for exclusive live music from Second Lifers, including Doubledown Tandino, Clayton Road, Slim Warrior, Tony Moore and Wiredaisies.

Two cinemas, featuring offline blockbusters, BBC short films and Second Life machinima.

Characters, chaos and wandering minstrels! Rocky Horror and Ballet! Theatre! Human Mazes! Secret Stages!

Nine sims of festival entertainment.

IM Aleks Krotoski for more information.

Also, more information (including line-up) is here:
http://www.myspace.com/secondfest

The Mind Child is back with another essay Enjoy — Gwyn

Does the name Mitch Kapor sound familiar? If you are interested in the history of SL, the answer may well be yes, because he was one if LL’s earliest investors. “Mitch Kapor was the only person who got it”, said Rosedale in an interview with Inc. Magazine.

Personally, Mitch Kapor first came to my attention through an essay of his, published in 2002 on Kurzweilai.net. As with LL and SL, Kapor was putting money forward in anticipation of a future outcome, but this time the money was riding on a failure, not success. The bet centred on a question: Will the Turing Test be passed by a machine by 2029? Ray Kurzweil said ‘yes’, Kapor said ‘No’ and whoever loses will donate $20,000 to a charity selected by the winner.

In his essay, Kapor explained why he was sceptical of the possibility that a machine will ever pass the test. ‘To pass the test, a computer would have to be able of communicating via this medium (text) at least as competently as a person. There is no restriction on the subject matter…It is such a broad canvas, in my view, that it is impossible to forsee when, or even if, a machine intelligence will be able to paint a picture which can fool a human judge’. Kapor further elaborated on why a computer can never mimic a person, but what struck me as I reread this essay recently was this: Just possibly, SL may prove to be a crucial link in the enabling technologies of human-like intelligence.
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Linden Lab, when I was very young in Second Life (that’s mid-2004), had a policy of subsidizing content, since the world started “empty” and LL expected that residents would indeed fill it up, from corner to corner, with exciting and alluring 3D objects. This was already a third phase; during the first phase, there was no real “economy” (except for barter); the second phase followed up with the introduction of the Linden Dollar, and having the residents pay L$ for every prim rezzed. This soon proved catastrophic as people “hoarded” prims disallowing others to create content, and Linden Lab quickly changed to the current model: prims are tied to land, and people buy land to get an allotment of prims.

To promote more content, while still maintaining a solid business model, Linden Lab introduced two interesting notions: weekly stipends and (generically) ratings. The stipends apparently were as high as L$2500 per week; in mid-2004, basic accounts got L$50 (if they logged in once per week) and premium accounts got L$500; as time went by, basic accounts don’t get a single L$ from LL, while premium accounts now only get L$300, and, very likely, will get nothing at all pretty soon. A subsidy was also given out to anyone hosting an event (which naturally was very abused); later only to educational classes; today, none at all. “Ratings” included not only people rating each other and getting an increase in their weekly stipend (the idea being that better producers of content should get a higher weekly allowance) but also the notion that parcels attracting a lot of people (due, hopefully, to better content) should also give people a higher weekly allowance. Both systems were so much abused that Linden Lab slowly and over time got rid of them, as well as of the “leader boards” where the statistics of the richest people and the highest rated ones were publicly displayed.

Linden Lab, at the beginning of Second Life, acted indeed as a “welfare state”, providing avatars with a minimum amount of money to freely spend in SL, and actively promoting content with a subsidy (either through sponsoring places attracting more people or encouraging people to host events). This modelled not only the beginning of the SL economy, but also generated some expectations on how SL should “look like” and what role LL was to have in the Metaverse. Everything changed since then.

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Well, here it is. After two days of getting the open source code from Linden Lab to compile under XCode, I’ve managed to raise up to Zen Linden’s challenge and compiled the WindLight First Look Viewer for my Mac.

Zen Linden hinted that the next version of the WindLight FL will be under development (based on the input from a tremendous number of users who tested it) “for a few weeks”. For those of you that can’t wait until Christmas or 2010 for a new version, I’ve compiled my own from the sources.

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Blasts from the past: read this very interesting article from legendary John Markoff, written in 1996. Ok, so he was talking about VRML, but look closely about the references he has given for the “future of the Internet” in shopping experience. Second Life users will find this article boring — they’re experiencing shopping in SL quite in the way that John Markoff had predicted.

He writes:

Not everyone is convinced, however that three-dimensional environments will provide quality entertainment. ”The real problem is content, will always be content,” Andries van Dam, a computer science pioneer at Brown University, said. ”What are we going to say to each other which is meaningful? Are we going to be reduced to the same banalities that we exchange at cocktail parties? We can do wonderfully well on the tech side, but the content is still a challenge.”

Even Mr. Stephenson, the science fiction author, said that ”people still underestimate the kind of effort it takes to achieve the level of production value you see on television or the movies.”

John, I love you This is exactly what we have found out in the flesh, every day. Content produced by amateurs is of low quality; but it improves, if people have the patience (and the budget!) to do better content. And it’s true — we exchange banalities in SL every day, but that’s ok, since that’s at the core of social interaction.

Now take a look at what the New York Time says, 11 years later. This thread is picked by the New Scientist as well. So what changed in eleven years? Have people “lost the spirit”? Are they frustrated because things take so long? Linden Lab is quoted to believe that we’ll have photorealism in SL in five years — which I can’t argue against, certainly the 2012 laptops, with 10 times the computing power on their GPUs, will handle that — so what’s the point in giving up all hopes in 2007? Markoff and others already envisioned this possibility 11 years ago; we were just waiting for fast computers and broadband; and now we only need even faster GPUs.

We’ll get there and have retail shops all over Second Life. Just not by this Christmas — yet!

“Shirkying” – a singular word describing the style of Valleywag’s Clay Shirky when he attacks Second Life with a mix of bad statistics and biased opinions — seems to be spreading and becoming more popular. In effect, when talking about Second Life®, being able to successfully predict the immediate future becomes a pastime of many, not the least of yours truly, but so many others engage in this ever popular exchange of opinions, that you have no option but to adopt a specific style to push your views ahead.

Recent trends published by the New World Notes, GigaOm, or the Second Life Insider — and even BusinessWeek! — all seem to point in the same direction: corporate presence in Second Life is declining somehow. They come, see the hype, never gather enough attention, and go. What is to blame? Depending on who you read, the opinions differ.

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