Archive for the ‘second life’ Category.
2nd March 2007, 12:53 pm
Second Life: John Edwards assaulted by poo-slinging communists:
Xeni Jardin:
John Brownlee of the Wired blog Table of Malcontents says,
John Edwards’ Blog has a wonderful account up about how their Second Life headquarters was defaced with “Marxist/Leninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obsenity, and a photoshopped picture of John in blackface.” John Edwards’ is apparently working with Linden Labs now to figure out the perps. I love it, especially the shrill, self-righteous tone of the post: they just can’t believe it, which is a riot. You see countless news stories about this, over and over again: the sorry gray drones of political parties or corporations rushing to establish a presence in Second Life because it’s the thing to do, only to find themselves staring in horror directly into the collective Goatse.cx of the Internet’s soul.
Link. (thanks, Howard Rheingold!)
This story isn’t about second life. It’s about politicians not controlling their branding and marketing.
Let’s list the Edwards ‘08 campaign’s errors here:
- allowed a non-official entity to create a presence in-world. Ok, that’s fine. Fair use, tribute, blah blah blah.
- allowed an unofficial presence to continue to represent you and persist in-world, at all
- Allowed an unofficial presence to persist on a shared piece of land
- Failed to limit visitor privileges at your unofficial presence
- Did not get a private island to host an official presence
Of course feces slinging marxists are going to show up… duh. This isn’t an issue of Second Life being a bad platform for politicians, to the contrary, it’s probably one of the best places a politician could set up shop to get the word out. It’s a great place to let disconnected people find connections to other people who share their interests. However, if you plan to come to second life for a popularity contest, don’t do it unless you know what you’re doing. Second life isn’t “Utopian life”.
Technorati Tags: politics, second life
15th November 2006, 07:30 pm
There’s all this hub-bub about CopyBot for second life: a program you can apparently use to copy anything you can see in second life for free. Obviously Linden Lab sees this as a problem for legitimate content creators, and it is… Long term, though, I think this is probably solvable in an ebay/amazon/google sort of fashion. You sign up to become an developer and get handed a developer key that you have to use to interface with the system. That way your application can be tracked if you start manipulating the market. I think the larger possible problem isn’t happening: manipulating the currency directly. Copying an item and doing the legwork to actually sell it is one thing… getting free money without effort is another, and I’m just glad that’s not happening.
OMG, people, please, Linden Lab should not be sued. I think that would be totally insane. Read your terms of service, it limits your ability to sue them because you agree to use the system at your own peril. It’s not real life, folks! Get over yourself!
Technorati Tags: copybot, second life
19th September 2006, 03:01 pm
~150 people in-world, ~1150 people listening to the audio stream (!) .. with.. *gasp* real live Skype call in questions!
Technorati Tags: second life
19th September 2005, 09:21 am
FREE LAND FOR KATRINA RELIEF?:
A recreation of New Orleans’ French quarter, a live music telethon with a 100+ live audience, a Mardi Gras march with avatars made up as floats– the possibilities are infinite. Springboarding off the gratifying success of so many SL-based Katrina relief efforts (scroll down this blog to see just a sampling) Linden Lab has offered to loan out a multi-simulator plot of 32 to 64 acres for benefits and events to help the hurricane’s many victims. If enough Residents express interest, this land will for a time be opened wide to the wildest events that can be conceived on such a vast space.
Details here– express interest in getting involved (in any capacity) here.
This is an excellent idea. charge a reasonable price for admission to a new orleans recreation sim, and have those proceeds go to the red cross. Wicked cool.
Technorati Tags: katrina, second life
13th September 2005, 12:35 pm
Can desktop software be continuously developed?:
Between the Lines comments:
» Bill: Give us the new Office 12 interface now | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
…the new model for software today is continuous improvement, not big bang costly upgrades that promise “better results, faster” in 18 months or two years…
Indeed.
But it may not be that easy. It’s the delivery mechanism, the Place in marketing speak, that gets in the way. Because desktop software typically doesn’t auto-upate on each launch, it needs to have fewer bugs at the time the user installs it. Server-based software can be updated anytime, and users receive the benefits of new features and bug fixes on their next launch without any hassle.
RIAs are the key to bridge this gap…
Welllll, sort of. Let me tell you a story about SecondLife. I’m not a daily visitor to Secondlife, but, I might pop in twice a week for a minute or two. Nearly every time I launch the app, there’s a new version. Seriously. Once a week. 20+ Megs of downloading, almost every time I launch the program. Usually to fix a simulator-critical bug that causes EVERYONE to have to upgrade before they can get in. It borders on ridiculous.
Then there’s Ecto… which updates every month or so, much more sane, but, if I don’t update, it’ll remind me to download the update even if I already have, but haven’t installed it yet. “remind me in a week” would be nice here. Or, even better, “remind me after my next reboot”.
Technorati Tags: programming, second life
9th July 2005, 12:54 pm
guess who! Go get a free second life account while there’s still time.
10th April 2005, 11:47 am
about 11 months ago, I posted a “stake in the ground” article for the map of the world. Here’s an update. Keep in mind, each one of these squares is 65,536 square meters. 16 acres each.
now, check out the math:
Land usage fees per month:
| 1/128 Region |
512 square meters |
US$5 |
| 1/64 Region |
1,024 square meters |
US$8 |
| 1/32 Region |
2,048 square meters |
US$15 |
| 1/16 Region |
4,096 square meters |
US$25 |
| 1/8 Region |
8,192 square meters |
US$40 |
| 1/4 Region |
16,384 square meters |
US$75 |
| 1/2 Region |
32,768 square meters |
US$125 |
| Entire Region or Island |
65,536 square meters |
US$195 |
|
|
10th April 2005, 11:33 am
Second Life, which i’ve been a member of for over a year now, has really come a long way since I started. I couldn’t be happier that this technology is growing and thriving.
Check this out: version 1.6 has quicktime streaming built in!
14th March 2005, 01:34 pm
Wow, wow wow. Can’t wait to see these things happen.
11th March 2005, 09:12 am
LINK OF THE WEEK!: “
Live photoblogging from Second Life! Cristiano Midnight recently unveiled a cool feature on his site that takes advantage of the client’s ‘Postcard’ function, which lets you send in-world screenshots to people via e-mail. With Midnight’s Snapzilla, you can e-mail such postcards directly to his site. For visitors, this means a near-real time visual document of Second Life as it’s lived. The potential for photoblogging (screenblogging?) is pretty obvious. In fact, I recently came across a whimsical visual update of the story I wrote here, and a picture really is worth the proverbial thousand words I’d otherwise blog about it. In the near future, I’d like to use a feature like this to re-do my ‘Day in the life of Second Life‘. (After I get a good night’s sleep, that is.)
”
(Via New World Notes.)
Very cool stuff. Maybe a good way to get people to check it out without having to log in. I wonder if there’s a way to set up a “web cam” in second life using this kind of tech? I guess you still need to be there to have the cam on. Well, still really interesting. Maybe a cool way to show my wife or my dad something in SL… I could just go there and turn on a cam, and then point the other person to the SLCam url. Very interesting. Oooh, yeah, I played around with this a little bit when I was absorbed by SL at the beginning of my experience. Maybe I could figure that out now that I’m a bit more experienced with low level mail processing.
1st March 2005, 10:19 am
Data That May Only Interest Me: “
As work on the 2nd generation renderer continues, I’ve had the opportunity to do some interesting queries into the world of Second Life. These data points may only interest me, but as I try to make time to update the blog, this was an easy way to start. All stats are for the entire world of SL when I slurped up data (575 active simulators):
Total primitives: 2,944,243
Total that violate a size constraint: 11,721
Total (scale independent) unique shapes: 26,088
Total unique textures: 126,188
Total 10m x 10m x 10m objects: 30.051
Total 10m x 10m x 0.01m objects: 53,698
Total < 0.1m x 0.1m x 0.1m objects: 101,879
“
(Via Prompt Criticality.)
ah, second life statistics. whoa, wtf, 575 active simulators. wow.
23rd December 2004, 05:20 pm
I’m just sitting here eating some oatmeal (…ok, tmi)… thinking about a headline I saw on fark. (yes, I’m back. it’s after the election, so, I feel like I can go enjoy the photoshop contests again) It asked something like… “Why do some men build model train sets?” and I was thinking that there’s not much of a difference between the draw of scale model train set builders and Second Life builders. There’s no point other than to create, escape, focus, craft, and enjoy a model of a system you put together with your own hands. But that’s quite a point. Some people enjoy the feeling of pride in crafting working systems… hence computer programmers, second lifers, train set builders, woodworkers…. Most of our modern employment requires building or maintaining systems of a different kind, and so very few people get to enjoy maintaining their own systems for a living. I think that’s why we like model trains and woodworking and second lifing.
although, in light of that, I did just sell my land 
I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I haven’t seen Jopsy in months, so when an offer for sell for about 80 bucks came along, I figure I made my money back for as long as I’ve been sitting on that land. Now I’m landless. But also at a zero-overhead for logging in since I bought my 10 dollar membership first, then bought land… now that I’m landless, no more land ownership fees. No more art gallery, tho Sigh..
But, with my new bandsaw, I figure I should probably spend a lot more time with that IRL instead 
24th September 2004, 11:40 am
Universities offering classes inside of MMOs
Cory Doctorow:
Second Life, the Massively Multiplayer Online world where end users can design and trade their own game-artifacts, is offering free accounts to university profs to disburse to their students for the purpose of conducting in-game classes.
In order to help teachers bring their classes to Second Life, Linden Lab donates accounts for each student, as well as an acre of land in the metaverse for the teacher and students to work and build on. Afterward, anyone wishing to stay a member can do so at half price.
To date, in addition to Delwiche and Beamish, professors from San Francisco State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Vassar College have used Second Life in their courses.
Link [Boing Boing]
Totally perfect. In fact, I wish you could do most meetings in SL as well. I wish SL was an adjunct for AIM/iChat. I wish you could pipe video chat into SL, or maybe just provide an interface for alerting you when someone wants to video chat with you. I wish Linden Labs would license the AIM protocol, or tie into Jabber, or something. That would be really awesome.
20th July 2004, 01:18 pm
whoa, check this out.. they put up some snow-only sims! They have a ski lift that works, and the beginnings of a snowboard. Pretty cool!
