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October 2009
The Archives
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10.23.09Linden Lab to Unveil Nebraska at Enterprise ConferenceLinden Lab's long-awaited behind-the-firewall virtual world solution will be unveiled at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco on November 4th, according to the conference Web site: The Virtual Enterprise: The Future of Work #e2conf-49 - Sponsored by Linden Lab/Second Life We all feel it. Today's economic, environmental, and business climate is putting tremendous pressure on enterprises to cut costs, innovate faster, and work in a more eco-friendly way. And, these business imperatives are driving forward-thinking organizations to explore emerging technologies that enable teams distributed around the globe to communicate, collaborate, learn, and create more effectively. Second Life, developed and launched by ...
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10.23.09Philip Rosedale’s Brave New World: Burritos and Love MachinesPhilip Rosedale, who recently left his full-time position at Linden Lab to start a new venture, has a call out for burritos and voltometers as part of his new project, which may or may not provide hints on where he's headed. According to the task list posted at P-Squared Island in Second Life, the virtual home of his new business, Rosedale is looking for burritos, playing cards, lightning fast iPhone apps, and a great bar. Oh - and an office manager for his virtual island (so get down there you Philip groupies and turn your adoration into a job!). Now, the list is ...
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10.23.09Second Life and Unity: Time for a Developer’s Conference?Maybe it's time for Second Life to get a touch of Unity. Sure it's a community and I wouldn't miss the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) about which Hiro Pendragon wrote a post suggesting changes: "This year's SLCC had great content for attendees, though the convention was somewhat disorganized. I've heard from a lot of folks interested in helping SLCC. Really, it comes down to getting an early start and getting people into appropriate roles. Everything else should flow from that. The organizers already have been taking feedback about this year, planning, reorganizing, trying to continue the momentum from this year's ...
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10.15.09The Green Light: Philip Rosedale’s Second Life"(He) believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther." 'Flower Tower' and Spider Sack Meeting Space by Eshi Otawara I didn't arrive at these shores expecting a world but that's what I found. I didn't arrive expecting that the lack of rules or goals or direction would be the source of dreams. I remember asking someone: "so what do you DO here" and the response was - "well, what do you WANT to do" as if ...
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10.14.09Should Second Life Get Socks?OK, this is a call out really to all you coders and assorted geeks who can help explain this to me. Here's the issue: companies often don't allow access to Second Life, or aren't convinced that it's a good idea, because of the number of ports that need to be opened in order to access the virtual environment. Contrary perhaps to popular belief, it's not usually Second Life content that's the issue but rather the security fears raised from opening up internal systems to the outside world. But Linden Labs seems to be trying to tackle this issue by 'renting a coder' ...
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10.14.09Creative Destruction: Deleting Avatar Accounts in Virtual WorldsAre virtual worlds like company towns you cannot leave? What's the price of just deleting your account and starting over? Have we become so interconnected that we can't just pull the plug and start over? There's nothing wrong with being part of a culture, or even a support group, which is often what it feels like Second Life actually is: a bunch of people with this sense that all of this MEANS something and is GOING somewhere but we're all king of wavering between absolute faith and certainty and dark despair and a suspicion that maybe we're living some kind of ...
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10.11.09Child Avatars in Virtual Worlds: Freedom and Progress?I hadn't quite expected to find Adam Thierer's appearance on Metanomics to be so, well, stimulating. I'm immediately suspicious, I suppose, of organizations with names like the "Progress and Freedom Foundation", as if the name itself is a sleight-of-hand for anything but. But Thierer made a compelling case for a light (or non-existent) regulatory hand on-line, although I found the outer reaches of his argument a little frustrating - there's a kind of iron-clad logic that brooks little argument which bothers me. But Thierer DID come up against the limits of his viewpoint when it came to digital representations of children ...
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10.11.09The General Theory of the Second BestOnly the second best will do for virtual environments like Second Life - or that according to Robert Bloomfield who closed last week's Metanomics with a resounding call for complexity: The bottom line is that we live in an imperfect world, and we will never eliminate all government regulation and other imperfections. The general theory of the second best tells us that we need to look at each regulation in all its messiness, in the context of the other regulations and imperfections we have to suffer. So I’m not against freedom. I’m just skeptical of simple arguments. So those of you who ...
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10.08.09Second Life and the Superbowl: Is Linden Lab Ready for Prime Time?Has the pendulum swung too far in the direction of enterprise clients at Linden Lab? Or are they prepping Second Life for a marketing push that will bump up the numbers of casual users? You know, the folks like you and me who arrived in the virtual world looking to waste some time maybe and suddenly found ourselves rezzing prims and dreaming that we could actually bring some of that sense of exploration to the office...someday, maybe, if we could be sure we didn't sound like we were nuts. My last post about Mark Kingdon's recent trip to Europe spurred Kwame ...
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10.07.09Only in Paris: Linden Lab and the Road AheadM in Paris by way of Chez Serge. Seems like every time M hits Paris he spills out a little bit more stuff about where Linden Lab is headed with Second Life. Must be the wine or something, because he always ends up sounding a little more loose lipped than he tends to get this side of the Atlantic. So it was recently when the Lab went hunting for offices in Amsterdam and then popped in for lunch or whatever in Paris. M (or Mark Kingdon as he's know in the atomic world) re-emphasized a few points he brought up at the ...
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