Monthly Archives: July 2008
Immersion or Isolation?
Not even three months have passed since Virtual Worlds 2008 presented some 150 or so companies, eager to join the virtual world bandwagon, and showed off what these companies think the future will be: roughly speaking, web-embedded, isolated virtual worlds, almost all targeted for kids and teenagers. And a few have indeed been popping up lately. It’s not only Lively, which grows by about 2-5,000 new rooms per day (the second most…
Blog upgrade under progress!
Yes! It’s time to do a makeover on my Ole Blogge, and see if I can make it easier to read, easier to navigate, while still keeping all the functionality, and adding a few new nifty features! See you in a few hours… if this works at all [UPDATE 9:22 AM SLT] New theme in place; now to the tricky bits: getting all the widgets back! [UPDATE 11:47 AM SLT]…
Ctrl-ALT R 3: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva
‘Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the slug’s cosmology’ -Charles Stross. In the discussion concerning science fiction, we saw how such stories can occasionally predict the future. However, like most forecasts they are rarely completely accurate. Jules Verne anticipated submarine warfare- but against wooden vessels rather than armoured battle fleets. The 1950s visions of space exploration missed out the role that digital computers would play in such…
The Mighty Linden Dollar
Thanks to Prokofy Neva, I read the interesting analysis on RightAsRain Rimbaud‘s blog (and the comments in it) about the state of the land crisis in the Second Life® world, and how strangely Linden Lab® reported a massive increase in land sales and income from land. RAR actually shows that the growth comes pretty close to a new island per new active user! One thing that always worries me in…
Not So Lively: Chronicles of Day One on Google’s Virtual World
So by now it’s not news any more, but a fact: Google has entered the profitable (?) world of virtual worlds (pun obviously intended). A much awaited development, at least by the faithful believers that Google will save the world. I don’t think there are coincidences. In about 24 hours (not in the same day for the timezone-impaired), Sun’s Wonderland gets slashdotted, Linden Lab announces the massive growth of Second…
Google launches IMVU clone?
Breaking news, Google’s now a player in the virtual world market: http://www.lively.com/ Watch the movie, it looks nice! Better than IMVU, if the movie is any indication of how it works… as a Mac user, I have to try it later though. Send article as PDF to
Disrupting Second Life®, The Loco Pocos Way
What does it take to completely revamp Second Life® as an immersive platform that has little or nothing to do with the environments we’re used to see all around us? Well, the answer by Damien Fate and Washu Zebrastripe seems to be: not much, except for a lot of creativity and a huge amount of detailed, professional work. So bear with me in this journey across the redefinition of what…
Interconnecting Virtual Worlds
While this post got Slashdotted (Sun’s Wonderland is old news; we all watched the movies, we all were fascinated how cool HTML is rendered in-world, we all were tremendously disappointed on the whole rest of the interface and visual environment, which, frankly, is very weak — no wonder Sun has 1,500 employees registered for Second Life), Linden Lab’s announcement on the interoperation between their grid and IBM’s OpenSim-based grid did not…
FICbert
Prokofy Neva reveals the Big Announcement for SL5B: the FIC 2.5 list is out. And guess what, almost everybody is in it! Dilbert characters are by Scott Adams and ©2008, United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Mashup created under the Collaborative Content License of The Official Dilbert Website terms, from where the above images originated. The inSL logo is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc. Definitely no infringement is intended; it’s just a…
How Journalism Works
Last week I was at Portugal’s largest conference on the Second Life® world, and it deserves a bit more thought than this teaser. One of the sessions was about “Media and SL” and the lesson the audience learned was that we SL evangelists cannot cross our arms and expect positive feedback to drop from the sky and get the media’s attention. No, we have to actively lobby for it! What…
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