Posts Under SL Society Category
Working for free for Linden Lab’s blog
By the time you’re reading this, it’s old news: Linden Lab, in an unexpected twist of sudden inspiration, called for bloggers to submit articles to their own official blog. Unless you’re an avid participant on the LL forums, you might have missed that completely. Fortunately, thanks to people like Chesnut Rau, the message quickly spread among the SLogosphere. And if there is a common trend among all the articles, it’s…
SOPA/PIPA revisited
Well, the breaking news is that the US Senate has postponed the voting on PIPA. This should give everybody a good reason involved to think twice on this whole issue. I was replying to Prokofy Neva’s pro-SOPA article but unfortunately his setup tends to eat up my long-winded comments (it’s not his fault — I blame it on the technology). His argumentation is based on a few reasonable assumptions. Second…
Virtual worlds research conference in Second Life
When Linden Lab removed the land tier discount for academic and non-profit institutions, and most organisations simply moved to an OpenSim-grid instead, one started to see less and less announcements about academia in Second Life — with research grants cut to a bare minimum, SL tier, specially for long-lived projects requiring a lot of virtual space, is simply not affordable for most research projects. Still, OpenSim is not Second Life. It’s…
Democracy in Action: Protest March “I Want To Vote NOW!”
When Government does some measures that the citizens dislike, and appealing to other branches of Government is faced with indifference, what do citizens do? They protest. First, in public forums. And then they come to the streets. What could be most important to protest for in a democracy? Well, most people in the West are currently worried about the financial crisis and its effects. But much more serious — as…
1000 Avatars project — the next step
Are You Your Avatar? 2000 avatar portraits explore identity in online environments The largest ever documentation of Second Life® avatars has reached another milestone. Gracie Kendal, Los Angeles artist, Kristine Schomaker, in real life, has photographed her 2000th avatar and she has declared the project finished, at least for now. Begun in October 2010, the 1000 Avatars Project is part of Gracie’s ongoing examination of online identity and anonymity. Her…
Harper Beresford “Your SL Evolution” Challenge
I have to admit it — I love anything to do with Second Life®’s history. Putting into perspective how far we’ve progressed in the past eight years should give us pause to thought. So I enthusiastically joined Harper Beresford’s “Your SL Evolution” challenge. It’s very simple to join: just grab a few pictures of your avatar and show how your look changed over the years; then upload the picture to…
Humble Governance
Early this year, my good friend Hiro Pendragon pointed out that I’m no good at predictions any longer, because I happen to be so disconnected from Second Life® these days that I “lost touch” with it. At the time he wrote that, I was actually shocked. I have one job which is about development content and applications for Second Life exclusively, and, unlike many Metaverse Development Companies (who have dropped…
Open Letter to Google’s Larry Page
Video courtesy of Botgirl Questi Dear Larry, I don’t remember your handle in the days you were an active participant of the USENET, over a decade ago, when “web crawlers” and “search engines” were interesting mathematical problems to be tackled. To be honest, I don’t even remember my own handle those days. But what I remember very clearly is RFC 1855. Those days, we all abided by the Netiquette —…
How my 2010 predictions failed, and what to expect in 2011
It’s that fun time of the year again, when one looks up what predictions for last year actually came to be, and what the new year might us bring. Let’s take a look at what I have predicted last year and see how good those predictions were!
Now is the autumn of our discontent
It’s been a long summer around here, but it’s now over. For the first time in 5 years, I managed to take some vacations — which for me meant spending 4 days with my parents in the Portuguese Highlands, where the country is rough, the people are rough, and Internet and wireless telephony is shaky — but the food is nice, and we can grab apples, figs and grapes directly…
Identity crisis!
Fun days are ahead of us, as Linden Lab rolls out a much-awaited feature: the ability to change one’s avatar name at will, just like on every other platform, and to decouple the username (which is unique in the system) from the Display Name (which is what other users will see displayed on the screen), as announced by Jack Linden on the Official Second Life Blogs last week. Interestingly enough,…
Kiddie talk
And so it came to pass, that the Lindens saw that they couldn’t afford to support two grids at the same time, and lo and behold! The Teen Grid was no more, and teens were allowed to enter the Main Grid. And the Lindens saw that it was good. Well, perhaps. Residents, however, have a slightly different opinion, as can be seen by the more than thousand comments on Terrence…
What have you achieved??
I found it rather amusing that Hamlet Au, a.k.a. Wagner James Au in RL, did generate a lot of fuss with his proposed achievements system for Second Life, published first at Social Times and later on New World Notes. While some of his other suggestions are mostly fine (“better text chat” will definitely be an improvement worth developing, specially when Philip sort of promised to remove it from the sim…
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