Duran Duran are hitting Second Life!
Given the age profile, many of us are going to have fond memories of Duran Duran from our school days. Well they have bought an island and are coming to join us all in Second Life. Wild Boys….. I can see a windmill and a Le bon dunking 🙂

This follows closely on the news of channel 4 entering as mainstream media

The massive increase in mainstream media paying attention to Second Life continued today with Second Lives
Whilst there is a microsite on the tradtional web, the launch event was help in Second Life. I could not be there for various reasons, but Hammy Takakura from eightbar, and later yossarian seattle attended. It was hammy’s first event as he has been busy building.
Hammy said the event was well attended as Channel 4 and Rivers Run Red showed the opening films, also lots of Lindens where in attendance.

Pictures by Hammy Takakura of eightbar

Over at New World Notes is a full report of the first major recoding artist, Suzanne Vega, to do a live concert in Second Life. Yes I missed it, but the great thing is that Wagner James Au always gets to these events and does such great reports from them. So check him out.
I will go back to playing with Yossarian Seatle’s updated language translator and hope to write a suitable article detailing a proper foreign language conversation that we are doing some experiments with. i.e. set up some non Second Lifers and see what happens when they just start chatting to people.

Yossarian Seattle of eightbar popped by this afternoon to show me his new language translator. A hud attachment with a lot of potential.

So I asked in english and got an answer in french, how much is that costume.

Update Pictures:

Well last night was another late one. Having been out of electronic communication standing in on a completely unrelated bid meeting I had to compress my quick 5 minute daily patches blogging, SL and metaverse thinking etc into a much longer block at night.
Not least becuase of feeling the need to help some collegues understand some of the extra benefits that metaverse approaches such as Second Life brings.
Anyway, I realized something beneficial in the area of ‘protecting the innocent’ . A social object appears to be that people can and do hide behind their avatars. Consequently they may mis represent and not be nice people. I apprecaite the problem people have, but something occured to me on an internal discussion.
This is by no means water tight but its something to bear in mind. Second Life et al are generally public spaces. People tend to start to meet in public areas. Even if you are not in a meeting you can see others in one, and that is a benefit. In normal chat rooms people pose as other people to try and attract people away. Very often the rest of the chat room is not that bothered. In SL if we see someone approaching someone in an unsual way, or are aware of a certain reputation we are able to intervene. Now the counterpoint is that its much easier to pretend to be someone else, but there is an element, just as with the co-location of land generating traffic to your site based on where it is not what its called, that must play into the ability to protect the innocent.
Obvioulsy if someone is very devious and nasty they will get aronud any of this, but getting to know people by their actions as well as their words may highlight the nasties more? Either way its social responsibilty and education that lets us ‘protect the innocent’
As it was late I decided to repay a visit to the space centre, and very good it is looking too.
I had somehow missed the planetarium last visit. Also Davee Commerce’s NPL stand looks to be showing a lot more now too. My visit cheered me up and restored my faith in our digital personas.

As an ageing resident of Second Life I am happy to see this stat “The median age is about 33. The older you are, the more likely you are to continue using SL.” written by Giff of Electric Sheep via Corey at Linden
“In any 7-day period, about 15% of residents write code. The monthly total is equivalent to the amount of code in MS Office.”

This CBS article is crisp and captures some of the main points. It also features Philip Rosedale getting to say “Yes we just call the FBI” when asked about the hackers and griefers in Second Life.
I now have a little sarcastic saying everytime we see some mainstream media refering to all things metaverse. “Yeah but there’s probably nothing in it”. The SL part with the anchor man was created by the electric sheep company.

Linden Labs have combined their official Second Life blogs to this one
The most recent post is one about the new feature to let residents report exploits, or hacking opportunites directly through the Second Life client. Hence removing the pressure and problems of people sometimes posting the exploit on a public forum in order to get it sorted out.
This is an interesting extension of the principle of the residents policing the behaviour and looks of individuals, as an exploit may have been discovered but not actually used by anyone.
Anyway, one for all interested parties to add to their RSS reader lists.

Wagner James Au has a very full article around the thoughts that came out during an event with Julien Dubill author of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot.
Its it money or art of the builder that drives Second Life?
It is fascinating to hear from someone who made a mint doing this. Whilst I have been vocal about not falling into the dot.com trap a fledgling economy does have its advantages to those who spot the early opportunities.
Some of this article though is more about the industry that is emerging. Its well worth a read. It is not often you get to see things like this form, but we can all experience it and form our own thoughts.

Hugo Dalgleish, a fellow eightbar member, invited me over to his working area last night. This was spurred on from some of the conversations we had with Jeffronius Batra at his presentation facility over how to use the parcel media, and suitable split thereof, to get more live information from places like amazon such as pictures of books.

Hugo has an object that you ask for a book title, and it finds the first hit on Amazon and displays the book cover, along with the other related books.

Here I asked for both the now popular in business long tail and the popular in my house Gruffalo, both suitably different to illustrate the principle.