This afternoon, when I met with Stefan, he showed me the 0100101110101101.org virtual version of the Joseph Beuys project 7000 Oaks, which they had enacted in Second Life.

The official opening ceremonies for Helsinki’s new Aalto University are being held today at Finlanditalo, and they are being broadcast in Second Life.

Aimee Weber is the name of the avatar of one of Second Life’s best known clothes designers. She (or the person behind her) is, I believe, one of the thousand or so people who now earn their full-time living in SL. Today I saw an article on New World Notes pointing out that she is the first person to apply for a US registered trademark on her Second Life name.

L’angelot made a video for the Eurovision Song Contest. It was banned. Here it is, along with a short biography of the man himself.

I have been interested in, and concerned about, the nature of identity in virtual arenas such as SL for some time now. My interest bubbled to the surface again last week when I responded to an entry in Bryan Alexander’s blog Infocult called Towards Third Life.

In the past few days there has been a spate of announcements by businesses of one sort and another to the effect that they are opening branches in Second Life. This has given “residents” something to do while Second Life crashes and burns, and generally acts as though it has been bound, drugged and beaten.

Duran Duran have decided to rent an island in Second Life. You might want to know this.

According to Yahoo News sometime yesterday afternoon, Electric Sheep have just scored a major financial success.

When you have logged into Second Life you can find Rosario using the following steps.

I have spent a good deal of time in the last couple of months searching for the kind of online scheduling tools that I wanted; and I think that I have finally found them. Or, more specifically, I think that I have found a set of tools that will form the basis of what I need: AirSet.

There has been a thread on the Second Life Education mailing list about griefers, of which there have been a plentiful supply recently. This set me thinking and I posted the following note, which I will expand at some point into a more considered piece.

This is the outline for a project for the course ePedagogy: Issues Management / Strategic Specialisation. It was written by Owen Kelly & Camie Lindeberg in June 2006, and revised in August 2006.

There are two controversies currently causing apoplexy and distress in Second Life. The lesser controversy concerns so-called mega-prims, which are now available for sale or for free. But should they be?

More than fifty shops have closed in Second Life as a result of the copybot and the fact that “Linden Labs are doing nothing about it”. I found this discussion at Pixel Pinup. I found at least three aspects worrying…

has had a talk with Pluti that may lead to interesting new developments
wishes that Second Life scripting worked as advertised because setting up 9 time controllers is absurd!
has multiple sidebars working. Now to fine tune them

Two themes emerged at the LoW conference last week. Neither had been planned in advance, although some people who attended suspected otherwise. The first theme was Second Life as an educational tool. The second was identity.

Here is a page that has a lot of links about machinima: how to make them, where to show them, and so on.

Two Dutch students, Sebastiaan Schelfaut and Matthias Buyle, who are studying architecture at the University of Ghent, Belgium, wrote to Arcada last week to ask if we would take part in a survey about our use of…

I saw a script today in the Second Life scripting library for a script that generates mazes. This was something that I was thinking of doing at some time in the very near future – because solving mazes might just prove the basis of a team sport on Rosario.

For about a year and a half Linden Labs have been planning to run Linden Scripting Language on the Mono runtime embedded in Second Life.

A tool for screengrabbing your Second Life avatar so that it can be stored and used locally.

The makers of Plopp, modelling software designed for children have released PloppSL, which “allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily”.

While catching up with the weekend’s backlog this morning I found a link that led me to the website and blog of the Second Life Liberation Army.

I had first heard of the SecondLifeLink application about a week ago and had determinedly ignored it. Finally, however, I had three invitations in Facebook to install it and “meet my friends virtually! see my friends’ avatars! share my favorite destinations!” So I stopped to think about it a bit more.

Today Wagner James Au discussed his appearance on two Second Life television shows: SLCN.TV’s Tonight Live, and Metaverse-tv.com’s Late Show. Both of these are machinima-based, and his blog entry includes links to clips from the shows.

This morning I found out about the new beta version of the Second Life Viewer 2. It is now available for download. I have played with it for about an hour and (so far) it seems as stable as the allegedly stable “stable version”. It also has several important new features, including Shared Media. I shall continue to use it as my viewer until I find a reason not to.

Arcada’s work in Second Life is at a crossroads. I know where we have been, I know where we are going; but I am not sure anymore how we are going to get there. What follows is a set of preliminary reflections based on reading, thinking, practical work in Second Life with Catharina Gröndahl, and a series of long conversations with Lindy McKeown and Steve Bronack.

A step-by-step guide to getting a Second Life account and then finding, and getting to, Rosario.

We have just completed a forty hour festival in Rosario, our virtual culture experiment in Second Life. It was a night-time festival that lasted for ten consecutive nights and, because SL has four hour “days”, this meant that, in reality, it lasted for ten one-hour sessions, which took place every four hours.

I have recently read about four books about Second Life that I should probably ask Santa to bring me.

When you first join Second Life you will choose from a number of standard avatars. However, the point of the avatar is to represent you (or the character you are playing) in the world. A standard avatar is probably not a good idea then.

There are a growing number of designers who claim to be making most or all of their living working with clients in SL. Some work with real life clients to build content for them that they can place in SL. Others work entirely inside the world, where their avatar makes objects or runs services for other avatars.

Jutta found a clip on YouTube that documents (or more likely recreates) the creation of the acoustic guitar that Suzanne Vega used when she gave a concert somewhere in Second Life.

Cory Ondrejka (who is Cory Linden in Second Life) posted a series of predictions for 2007 to Terra Nova. I have extracted some of them here.

According to the BBC news site, Sweden is opening an embassy in Second Life.

I read an interesting article this afternoon about the recent round of hype around the Second Life economy at Capitalism 2.0, a blog written by Randolph Harrison.

In the kind of ideal world where you could do everything that you wanted, even if they were apparently contradictory, one of the things I would have been doing over the weekend is attending the State of Play conference in New York.

Daniel Livingstone posted to the Second Life Educational Mailing List about a snippet he had found concerning the legendary inventor of hypertext himself.

hass arived at Arcada in the rain, and expects to take off for sunny Rosario soon
has installed Firefox 3 on both laptops, with only a minor loss of add-ons (Furl, and Box.net)
believes that the signs suggest there will be a major earthquake on Rosario in the next day or so – followed by the return of The Fog
has got a long way with the rebuilding, with Catharina; and is very happy to know that Eva has got a long way with the web site too
discovered Balliwick at www.spinmass.com – it makes creating RAW files for SL terrains a MUCH more intuitive process…

is waiting for news
has a first draft of an important plan ready, and awaits some reaction
is testing out a wireless network. Second Life, anyone?
has been dogfighting in Rosario in the name of enhanced pedagogy

There are four steps that you need to complete before you can even start the course assignments. These are listed here. Each step links to a page with more detailed instructions.

The course will be in two parts. Each part will consist of a task or set of tasks. There will be two end dates. The details are here