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

Share this:

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

Share this:

~150 people in-world, ~1150 people listening to the audio stream (!) .. with.. *gasp* real live Skype call in questions!

Technorati Tags: second life

Share this:

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

Share this:

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

Share this:

now, check out the math:

Share this:

Check this out: version 1.6 has quicktime streaming built in!

Share this:

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.

Share this:

to Bruce Sterling:

hey, Bruce!

I thought you’d be interested in something I’m discovering about the pseudo-MMORPG Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) …

Second life is an _excellent_ ten dollar 3d modelling/virtual prototyping environment. I wanted to create a laptop stand for my treadmill so I can dork out while I’m getting a workout.. due to changes to the powerbook line, the magazine rack no longer works very well on al-books, so a stand became necessary.

prototypes in second life:

http://www.earthorbitdesign.com/oow3offline/index.php?album=2005%2F03_march%2F01_laptop_stand&dispsize=800&start=0

end result with real wood and metal:

http://www.earthorbitdesign.com/oow3offline/index.php?album=2005%2F03_march%2F06_laptop_stand&dispsize=800&start=0

What’s cool about second life is that you can log in with some friends and they can suggest ideas, or collaborate in 3d. Seems like this might be an interesting tool to try out in the classroom?

Hey, I love what’s going on with your blog! I’ve been keeping up since the veridian days, so thank you for such an interesting read!

my blog… http://www.earthorbitdesign.com/wordpress/

Share this:

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.

Share this:

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

Share this:

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.

Share this:

You know what we need is a CLUB SIM.. where it’s a.. well, a lot like real life.

in real life:
When you throw a weekly event, you’re usually throwing it at a club or bar somewhere.. Somewhere the community as a whole agrees is a good and un-annoying place for one. You go in, put up your day glow crap and black lights, set up your turntables and speakers, and handle promotion.

Usually what you get back from this venture is a percentage of the bar take. Or you have to pay for the space for the night. Or the bar/club gets a percentage of your cover charge take at the door.

So, what’s the analogy for second life? So far it’s mirroring real life. People down your street want to throw a party every week, and they’re attracting a lot of people and making (not a lot of noise, but) an annoyance to you in the form of server lag and access problems.

What if we had a sim specifically for clubs? Or any event where you’re drawing a huge crowd and you’re not a majority land owner in your sim.

As LL, you could auction off primetime slots. Fast fast fast club server time slots for what.. 0 event L dollars to start off with. Instead of the $500 for you and $500 to raffle off, you forfeit that as your fee for the fast club sim.

If it were a situation where you had to swoop in and set up shop the night of your event, so much the better because it would make you as the event planner better at being efficient about how your club is constructed. If you’re not in it for the money of throwing an event, and dwell is apparently a non-issue as far as bonuses go, then that justifies you having your slot machines and texture shops and model searches and violence events.. or whatever it is that you do to make money.

If you have these events in one sim, it’s in a predictable location for people to go to so you get “contact marketing” like Bourbon Street in New orleans, and.. it keeps the lag outta the backyard of people who don’t want you there.

Of course that means regulation on the part of LL.. and that costs administration dollars and generally looks like censorship. “you can’t have a club here. it’s against the rules” .. and someone will get pissed and say “facists!!” probably.

oh well.. the search continues.

and basically where the conversation ended was that the general populis wants basic things (sex, violence, gambling), and solving problems with your head is too hard.

Share this: