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Category
Art and Exploration
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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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09.30.09The Power of -In: Second Life’s Dynamic Web InterfaceWhen it comes to whether business will adopt Second Life instead of, say, Protosphere or Forterra's OLIVE, we can talk feature sets and look at nice shiny corporate builds all day, but as I proposed yesterday, the advantage that Linden Lab has over all of the competition isn't what THEY can do, but rather what content creators can accomplish. The challenge, I proposed, is whether the Lab can engage, support and build an ecosystem of developers who collectively will be able to build a marketplace of ideas, applications, content, and services. Whether the Lab can pull this off is partly ...
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09.30.09The Story Box: Second Life Breaking BordersSecond Life is a Story Box: But when I look at Second Life I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, and I don’t see an e-commerce engine (although to some degree it is all of these) – I see the possibilities for stories. And in these possibilities I am attracted to how Second Life may be a new camp fire around which we weary hunters gather, scratching pictures in the sand with our primitive tools and telling each other of the days we’ve had, and the adventures ahead. Stories without Borders has extended this beyond our personal ...
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09.25.09Orange Ends: Winding Down a Success Story in Second LifeA success story is coming to a close. It was made official today that Orange is winding down its Second Life project. Words fail me a little. Yeah, I know...I hardly have a shortage of words. But for me, the Orange Island project was one of the great success stories of Second Life. Places like Svarga or the Greenies made me realize how beautiful, fun and engaging Second Life could be. Orange Island convinced me that there was business value as well. I remember my first time visiting Orange. I don't remember how I landed there. I just remember I arrived one ...
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08.12.09Can Second Life Become a Great Brand?You hit the west coast and all of a sudden you're surrounded by Starbucks. Not Starbucks at the major intersections, but Starbucks on every corner, between the corners, above the corners. And even though I've been trying to avoid it because I've never really LIKED Starbucks, (does anyone actually like Starbucks coffee? Or do they just like knowing the secret code for ordering a no-whip-double-dip-triple-hit-machiato-grande-al-fresco?), but the reality is I've become a little over-caffeinated, I'm struggling a little with jet lag, and it's the only thing open at 5 in the morning. Besides, I came here and swore I wouldn't drink ...
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07.26.09Bryn Oh’s Immersiva: An IntroductionI'm really thrilled to sponsor Bryn Oh's Immersiva. Her work is stunning, and her most recent show at IBM brings her even closer to the goal of creating a completely immersive experience with story and 3D content. The following video gives a nice summary of the sim we sponsored, covered by the folks at the Virtual Build Archive which is becoming a "must read", or "must see" I guess, for keeping up with the latest and greatest on the grid (you might want to visit their site to see the video in a larger format): Immersiva - Artistic World of ...
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07.11.09Quick Link: Books, Writers and Readers in SLFrom the Writers In The Virtual Sky blog comes praise for one of the author's favorite places for the more literary-minded in Second Life, Bookstacks, a sim that has a companion Web site. Alas Zerbino - aka Joan Kremer - is effusive in her praise of Bookstacks, noting that it is a wonderful place for a number of things: meeting other book lovers (the island is, after all, created by two of these, Simeon Beresford and Kghia Gherardi; author cheerleading; literary performances, from one of the many performance spaces at Bookstacks; reading promotion; the first Internet radio show to discuss ...
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06.22.09Brooklyn Is Watching Best of Contest: Virtual World ArtQuick Link: Bettina Tizzy has a report on Brooklyn Is Watching, the in-world/out-world art project that occurs simultaneously in SL and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. BIW, which has just passed its first-year milestone, has announced the Best of BIW 1, a two-month long festival spanning part of three sims and the space at the Jack The Pelican Presents gallery, as well as artist talks, panel discussions, and some art shows. Continue Reading...
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06.18.09Blue Mars, Social Media, Open Government, and Virtual WorldsBlue Mars is anticipating a launch later this summer - or at the very least, is anticipating opening its doors to a wider pool of content developers, and with its approach there's active interest in how it works, how the business model is set up, and how the heck to access it if you're on a Mac. Jim Sink, Vice President of Avatar Reality, the company behind Blue Mars, appeared on Metanomics yesterday. (The video is now posted). Unfortunately, the audience had me as the host - which meant that I was incapable of following all of the audience discussion and ...
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06.11.09If Only They Were AvatarsFrom the theater of the bizarre, what I'm not sure about is why I received an e-mail saying: "Thought you might be interested in some fun stuff for your blog readers. Please take a look how fire thrills...... and kills. Watch a fire-breather's head blow up in a freak accident." Now, either the person who sent me this actually reads my blog, which has me rethinking my target audience, or they don't, in which case I can't figure out how I got on this particular mailing list. In any case, they're right - this is kind of fun, but really, they should be ...
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