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.

A regularly updated list of papers presented at conferences since 2003.

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.

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.

3D is better than 2D because people are not frogs. That is something that Jakob Nielsen wrote in November 1998, and I still think almost everything he wrote is valid today.

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

Marinetta is the capital city of Rosario, a fictitious island situated in the Mediterranean Sea. It is also the title of an ongoing educational multimedia project that began in June 2002 and is intended to last for a minimum of five years.

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

The Entropia Universe is another online synthetic world that claims to have a “real” economy. Currently it claims to have about half a million members.

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

When asked, students, almost without exception, reported that there was something wrong with the virtual worlds they had seen. We asked them to be precise about what they meant. Eventually we got two enlightening answers. One: there is something hollow at the heart of the worlds. Two: it feels like you are wandering around amateur stage sets. The consensus seemed to be that the worlds felt like cardboard boxes painted in one way or another. As one student said, “When I went to the Venice world there was no Venice-ness about it”.

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.

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…

KZero is a British virtual worlds consultancy who are specialists in connecting real worlds brands and companies with the residents and environments of virtual worlds. They have been collecting data since 2006.

Yesterday Lego revealed some more about their long-delayed multiplayer online world. It is now promised to launch “sometime in 2010″. What’s more, they have released a series of screenshots, and a very impressive trailer, so there are reasons to believe that it will actually launch this year.

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.

I got an email today fomr the people at Metaplace, a virtual world that started a few years ago with high hopes of making a platform that would make the 3D web mainstream. The email said that over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own. They failed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yesterday the recent instability inside Second Life (rule of thumb: anything not crashing will crash in the next two minutes) led me to look around at its possible competitors. I looked at Croquet, a heavy-duty open source 3D platform being written by Alan Kay, among others.

Smallworlds is a “casual virtual world” that has been designed and developed in New Zealand, using Flex. This means that it will run in any browser that supports Flash Player 9. It “integrates YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other Web 2.0 services”.

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.

is going to cook lunch as soon as he manages to check his mail
says, “Mail checked, Second Life unavailable; food coming!”
has discovered that the girls love tosca cake, despite pretending that they don’t
is checking out www.vivaty.com – another attempt to make 3D ‘worlds’ mainstream
has finished watching the sun set over the islands and is going to bed

has added the Flagfox extension, which may or may not be necessary
is about to start another online course about pedagogical possibilities in Second Life, although we will begin in SmallWorld

Over Christmas my eight year old daughter decided that she wanted “her own web site”, which turned out to mean her own virtual clubhouse, where she and her friends can meet, hang out, play games, and live the kind of life they live when they hook up their DS Lite Pokemon or Nintendogs games.

Jane McGonigal gave a keynote speech titled “The future of collective play: Fostering collaboration, network literacy and massively multiplayer problem-solving through alternate-reality games,” at the Serious Games Summit of the Game Developers Conference yesterday.

A few minutes ago Johnny Bistrom pointed out to me that the new version of Unity 3D has been released – and that it is free. Unity 3D is a game engine and development platform that can be used to build games & worlds online, on iPhones and on the Nintendo Wii. It has been around for several years and we have both noticed its existence, but done very little more.

Interacting with Immersive Worlds will be held on June 5-6, 2007 at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Later that same year, E-Learn 2007 will be held on October 15-19, at the Quebec City Convention Centre in Quebec City, Canada.

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

An explanation of assignment 1 of the Virtual Industries course, Business Opportunities in Second Life, organised and accredited through Arcada.

An explanation of assignment 2 of the Virtual Industries course, Business Opportunities in Second Life, organised and accredited through Arcada.

Virtual Worlds 2007 is a conference in New York at the end of March that is billed as the future of marketing and media. The keynotes speakers are from MTV, IBM and Nickelodeon.

This is a short piece that I wrote for the first session of the epedagogy course called Epedagogy, Learning and Second Life. It contains a set of useful links.