Some more people have joined eightbar in Second Life and a diverse set of skills has emerged.
Judge Hocho showed me his design skills in the clothing department yesterday. He has made some great Eightbar tshirts and hats.

Meanwhile a newer resident has dived into building some clever things too.
Turner Boehm has a fantastic Tardis that appears and dissapears with sound effects. Now I know Turner is a boffin, and some of the recent conversations indicate he has some exciting things on the horizon.

As per usual all the shots can be seen on snapzillaI just need to get around to tagging them !

Idz Ni of eightbar pinged me to say he had found something interesting and amusing in Second Life today. So I popped over to have a look for 5 minutes.
He had found a cannon, with cannon balls that lets you climb in and be shot out of the cannon, and you go further if you are carrying a heavy cannon ball! This cannon is by Abramelin Wolfe
No this may seem frivolous, and in a way it is. However Idz and I then collaborated in order to get a good picture of the device in operation. It is very difficult to take the picture as you are being fired out yourself so it was a two avatar job.
It involved timing, and patience but it acted as both a demonstration of collaboration and is a great energizer to any brainstorm session.

Ok, if you know what I am talking about you will smirk. Snowcrash, albeit a mini version has made its way to Second Life.

We have a lot of meetings. It’s what companies do. They are required and there are always ways to make them more productive. However I noticed something in a Second Life meeting a few days ago that really made for an engaging reason to use avatars and presence in a multi user environment as part of a meeting.
How many conference calls, phone, video, chat varieties have you had the meeting, the call ends, then directly on to the next one. Sometimes someone running a call may ask someone else to hang on to chat about another topic. If you are not that person it feels rude to hang around, and equally you may feel excluded. In real life you tend to have to leave the meeting room with people, even if you are going to a new meeting. During those last few minutes human bonding interactions happen. People take off their meeting face and tend to be themselves, even if only their work persona. Idle chit chat, or off topic conversations spring up.
Hanging up a phone does not let you experience this bonding. So it could be we are losing something productive and effective when it comes to organizations and people?
In a recent eightbar and ‘friends of eightbar’ meeting in Second Life you can clearly see from the positions of everyone in the pictures below who is presenting and who is listening. We did this as both a telephone and Second Life chat meeting to mix things up a little.

When the meeting finsihed we quite naturally stood up and assembled into familar groups to chat. Not to waste time, but to exchange hello’s with people we knew, or wanted to know. Those few moments talking, openly in a room but ‘near’ our friends avatars meant the meeting completed properly. I could see the social groups around me, old collegues meeting again, people from Wimbledon past and present etc. There was a little buzz of chat and then we all went our seperate ways.

This seems an obvious thing? However like all good obvious things its not until its staring you in the face that you really know its right.

So many people at that meeting have commented on how it ‘felt’ better. That must make it more effective?

You can find a very good article here from Jeff on Hugo’s Second Life Amazon shop and his plans for a toolkit.

It never ceases to amaze the whirls and loops that things like Second Life seem to do around me and the rest of Eightbar. I was only today talking to someone from text 100 as PR agency who are lining up some interviews about Second Life and what we have been up to as IBMers when I come across this on the as usual, and very prompt 3dpoint.com.
Text 100, rated 9 in the top 50 PR firms has opened a presence, or an office in Second Life. I look forward to my next call as, as well as evangelizing, I can point them to their own island.
Yes I do have PR representation, albeit not my own personal one (yet).

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: