It is a strange concept that the users and providers of Second Life are having a party, a virtual one. Its been a focus for the past few weeks to gather together plans and venues for various celebrations for the third birthday.
It is an inidcation of the sense of ownership and community, combined with the type of platform this is that causes this sort of outburst of planning and activity. There are even sites in world that are advertising the various events. Something for everyone. Speeches, music, tutorials, races the whole shebang.
I hope I will be able to attend a few events, as happens with the real world, its good to be seen at these things.

It looks like the Supernova conference (which has IBM as a partner and Linda Sanford from IBM speaking) is going to be held with a virtual extension in Second Life. The electric sheep company have done the build and I believe there is a Yahoo branded HUD to go with it.
This link is the SLURL for it June 22nd 5:30 PDT
So hopefully a few of us will be able to attend the conference without having to fly to the US.

This article which I happened upon via the river run red, red papers has some very interesting briefing level material for marketing executives. Rivers Run Red are one of the top design and delivery agencies in the Second Life economy (and some others). They did the radio 1 gig, the xmen iii premier and a few other things.

The CMO article says watch these things as they will be changing the future. Some you may recognize from our previous blog posts about other work we do here.

1. Internet Data Mining
2. Virtual Worlds
3. Decision Markets(Attention Markets)
4. Neuromarketing – (admittedly not our specific bag, but medical imaging falls into this)
5. Automated Behavior Recognition – Which revolves around sensors actuators, motes and data mining

Yes just one article, but interesting how Second Life/Web3.0 etc is linked with the elements of emerging technology

Just so this does not get too serious though.
Here is me shooting myself in the head playing russian roulette in SL

In talking about Second Life to people, and in particular the late night building sessions with new people coming along to my Hursley item all the time to ask how things are going, I realized that in all the protestations of ‘this is not a game it just look like one’ I was starting to get asked why it was not used for games too.

Well those of you have have experienced the mainland in Second Life will know games exists. There are casinos and gambling games to get your precious dollars from you virtual pockets. There are racing leagues and race tracks. Large scale quake style combat arenas.

My personal favourite though is “Les White” and his Sim invaders. A cabinet that looks like the real thing and rezzes the space invaders in 3d above the cabinet. There is something very circular about all that as back in my youth seeing space invaders got me into computers. I hope thats a virtuos circle not a vicious one!

Its a nice example of function in a box. Homebrew coding mixed with old school design, re-rendered for web3.0.
Game3.0 anyone?

Also check out Wagner James Au’s review of Russian Roulette sweeping SL

This is a little sneak preview of some things that I have had some success with in Second life

Primarily it is around getting data on an http request to explore some of the possibilities for future sports events. With the french open on at the moment and our collegues from Atlanta working over there, with a certain UK event in the next few weeks powered by IBM, well I had to have a go didn’t I?

In this article Wagner James Au writes about some of the pressures and expectations that everyone is expected to be American in Second Life. I personally have not found it to be a barrier, though I have been happy to express the fact I am a brit. Indeed there are many groups such as Brits in SL who are clearly not just US based. Our eightbar group in SL by its very nature crosses many cultures as the interest in Second Life spans further than us in Hursley and across IBM.

I have also found that in general people are quite chilled out and polite about things. SL is more of a leveller in terms of culture. Though given it is a ‘english’ focussed language based medium I am sure its NLS support will grow. Who knows we may even be able to learn a bit more about one another’s cultures through this medium more than any other?

You may have noticed that a few of us are very supportive of Second Life as a medium to explore the technology and to see the future of the web. Web 3.0 even.
This link takes you to something that is currently on the IBM main homepage. Which makes it (for us) very significant.

It is focusing on the fact that many of us know that some of what would be considered game technology actually has many more uses. I say this as a gamer for over 20 years. In some ways gaming changed the course of my career in that it is what interested me about computers in the first place back in the 1980’s.

Part of the IBM article mentions the embedded reporting of Wagner James Au who has been able to document the rise of web 3.0 from within web3.0 itself.

In reading his blog I have found out a fair few things, but I had not come across his other articles here that document Web3.0 and Blog2.0 from his point of view.

It is very insightful and well written. It also strikes a chord with many of the things I have been saying so maybe I am a little biased. See what you think though.

I finally got to try the llhttprequest, it was in a 10 minute gap in the day, when my daughter who is 3 today decided she only wanted to play with Grandad.

Anyway, I did not intend to do things ‘properly’ but I did want to see if the new outbound http would let me add function to what I had already. Extend rather than port the XML-RPC inbound code I already had.

The existing “legacy” or “chesished” second life objects were 4 different instances of objects with my weatherrss script in them. Just to explain the objects in second life can and could open a channel making them available to be talked to from outside of second life. The outbound mechanism was only email.

Anyway this led me to create these objects, and cut and paste their unique ids into a piece of externally hosted PH. This PHP did a call to a well known weather service and then sent it into SL to the set of unique ids I had added to it. One click 4 objects get updated

The problem was triggering this, getting second life to send an email as a way to ask for a refresh was not great. I had a webpage with various URLs that were precanned calls to my PHP with various country location parameters.

Anyway the new 1.10 Second Life let me put a call in an object in an llhttprequest. So I simply got an object to use the same URLs as in the original webpage.

I now have an object in SL that can take user input and as my PHP to update all the various weather instances I have.

Obviously there are better 2 way mechanisms, like why bother using the XML-RPC at all, but this one liner let me exploit what I had and gain massive extra function.

It would now be very easy to create a map or globe with hotspots. Trigger external events by avatar presence and sensor events etc. All very useful.