… you don’t know where the fashionable shops are!

Now, thanks to Ana Lutetia, you’ll know.

Thanks, Ana, for providing this crucial information

Just the other day, when I was at a RL event featuring Second Life marginally, a bright young journalist came over to me and my business partner Eggy Lippmann. He had been around in SL for a few weeks and had chatted with people, and was looking for the “latest scoop” to write “something extraordinarily interesting” about Second Life to sell to his editor, and wanted to know if he could interview either of us.

We were naturally glad to hear the local media writing something “interesting” about SL and I briefly went through the next things to come out in SL: Havok 4, WindLight, the new Search, Mono. Or perhaps the latest batch of companies joining SL, like CNN? Since the CSI:NY episode didn’t come out in Portugal yet, that might be of some interest too. And if all else failed, we always have our many projects to talk about, like the Theatron 3 project or how a Danish company, Grundfos, is using SL to promote ecological education in Second Life, the many educational approaches using SL even around our place, or, well, how tiny companies in insignificant countries can actually expand their operations world-wide using Second Life. We were sure we could cook up something interesting on the spur of the moment.
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Linden Lab is definitely spoiling us. One day after the release of a new Release Candidate with the awesome in-world Search, Linden Lab released a new WindLight client!

We all knew that they had it “almost finished” for previewing and gathering data, but I guess it was a surprise to have it released just a day after we got a new release candidate to play with! Fortunately for us, they’ve released WindLight with the new search, too, so you can experiment with both at the same time if you wish!
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So you haven’t downloaded the new in-world release candidate? You really should, it’s awesome! Linden Lab is converting all their object/asset data into HTML pages, feed them to a Google Search Appliance, and let us do complex queries on it.

If you’re afraid of downloading “unstable” versions, you can still get a hint on how it looks like, since these are pretty normal webpages, all you need is a Web browser and an Internet connection For instance, this is what Linden Lab returns when searching for Gwyneth Llewelyn. Isn’t it neat?

Congratulations to Linden Lab for this extraordinary development — it was definitely quite needed! And, unlike the worst fears of many residents, it makes teleporting to content actually quite easier… and since these are web pages, it also means they’ll get picked up on Google, Yahoo and other search engines, so, one day, you might be able to do a search on Google, see an item in SL, click on an URL, and be directly teleported to the place where that object is found. Now that’s quite fantastic!

Now I only wonder what this means for the dozens of “in-world search engines” like the ones I’ve listed on my blogroll, who use libSL and a pseudo-avatar-bot roaming the grid searching for content. I guess they will quickly become obsolete. Ah well…

The recent announcement that one of the most popular e-zines for Second Life, Second Life Insider — a year-old collaborative blog with SL’s best authors — was “transformed” into Massively deserved several comments from popular bloggers of the SLogosphere (I’m eagerly awaiting the opinion of Hamlet Au on New World Notes too). Second Life Insider had, as so many similar blogs on Second Life, a peculiar characteristic: it was not only about what happens in Second Life (thus, the same model as any of the other more popular blogs of AOL’s blogging network, like WoW Insider), but also about the impact of Second Life in the future metaverse-enabled society. In fact, this is what the most read blogs and sites about Second Life tend to talk about: what it means to be a resident of the metaverse.

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