The Metaverse

links for 2007-10-31

• Virtual Worlds News: Age Play Report Prompts UK Investigation of Second Life Pedophilia
  "Home Secretary Jacquie Smith said that she was planning to publish a consultation paper on whether to outlaw virtual imagery of child abuse used in virtual on-line worlds."
  (tags: sex virtualworlds secondlife)
• CNN wants citizen journalists within Second Life
  Reuters’ presence in Second Life is well established, but now the news organisation has competition, with the imminent entry of CNN. However, it’s taking a different tack: rather than opening a fully-fledged bureau, instead it wants to sign up Second
  (tags: secondlife cnn)

Katherine Berry scaling down SL commitments

File under "double plus ungood'. Katharine Berry, creator of the remarkable AjaxLife, is effectively leaving Second Life. The reasons that she cites are simple, and pretty rotten:

• "A significant portion of the grid seems to hate me.
• Many of my friends have already left, making SL rather dull.
• (The main one) Linden Lab continue to neglect the Teen Grid:
  • Signup is still impossible.
  • Upgrading to premium is broken.
  • No website update in two years.
  • No MapAPI.
  • (list of generic complaints that have built up over the last two years go here)
• I actually can’t afford the extra 17.5% due to VAT"

Someone should be running to give Katherine a job doing metaversal development Real Soon Now...

In which Prokofy fails to understand dual licensing.

Second Thoughts: Sheep 'Dance on Eggshells':

"Now Satchmo delivered the real story: that in his/ESC's interpretation, if Linden Lab had a dual license under GPL with their OS code for the viewer, which they released both as an OP code and, as he claimed, still claimed the right to sell it as a proprietary item (and they must have gotten some payoff, too, when they licensed the Sheep to have a 'commercial use viewer), then by analogy or by precedent, the Sheep, too, could turn the open into the closed."

Hard as this paragraph is to parse ("word salad", indeed), it's pretty clear that Prokofy doesn't understand the concept of dual licensing.

OnRez at last

After what seems like an age, the much-promised - and occasionally maligned - OnRez browser is with us. Was it worth the wait? In some ways... yes.

There's much to like about OnRez. As an interface, it's cleaner and more obviously simple than the regular browser. The simple search option is easy to use, and typing a location in at the top to find something makes a huge amount of sense.

What's weird is that, thanks to the addition of a web browser within the client, you can almost live your life within it. The web browser isn't perfect though - it has some problems with things like Typepad's 'rich text" mode, for example - but it works.

I'll post some more thoughts about this later, but initially... I like it.

links for 2007-10-23

• Linden Lab to be changing “Search” soon
  No doubt Prokofy will be claiming this is the end of civilisation as we know it.
  (tags: lindenlab secondlife search)

The Ginko story is finally all over

Ginko really and truly dead, WSE launches "WTF" fraud fund. Pundits unimpressed. - Second Life Insider:

"According to this announcement on WSE, Ginko is finally, totally, absolutely dead. Nicholas Portocarrero can't make the interest payments and has shut the Ginko Perpetual Bonds, transferring them to WSE Trader Funds (WTF - honestly!) which are the new fraud funds from WSE.

Hopefully, this will at least teach some people a valuable lesson in "metaversal economics": Don't invest real money in a virtual world.

Technorati Tags: second life, ginko

links for 2007-10-19

• NCsoft Director of Product Development: Wii Will Eventually See Virtual World, Home Won't Sell PS3s
  "I think Home is very interesting, but I want to see how people use it. Again - content. If there is an incentive for people to go into Home, beyond just customising their avatar, then it will be very, very...
  (tags: virtualworlds nintendo wii)
• Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Play: One Year or Nothing
  Microsoft hints at a plan for a virtual world play.
  (tags: microsoft virtualworlds)

links for 2007-10-17

• Second Thoughts: Greed Shepherd's Big Fleece: The Sheep Grab the Search
  Sometimes, Prokofy twists herself into little knots trying to prove that black is white. She really is the most tiresome person in Second Life.
  (tags: prokofyneva electricsheep secondlife)
• Call me Ishmael
  Proof positive that it's still "your world, your imagination" - a giant, flying blue whale.
  (tags: secondlife)
• Chatted Up: Resident creates brilliant chat-to-voice hack running off SL's VOIP server
  Not safe for work!
  (tags: secondlife voip voicechat)

links for 2007-10-16

• New World Notes: Worldwide World: OnRez integrates Web browsing into metaverse experience
  It looks like the Electric Sheep Company might have done something amazing: create a Second Life client which anyone can use. Oh, and it does the web too.
  (tags: onrez electricsheep secondlife browser)

links for 2007-10-14

• 15-year-old gets into financial trouble on the adult grid
  Whoops. Smartvest turns out to be run by a 15 year old, using his mother's credit card.
  (tags: secondlife money)