Interesting

Copyright – Fair Use

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Copyright is basically a way for authors of books, songs, music, pictures, and movies to protect their work and profit from it. In Second Life™ we have to deal with copyrights. A new court case just clarified the requirement for consideration of fair use prior to filing a take-down notice.

This is an example of the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjmbcLhtMYo

In the video above people are taking candied videos of their kids and those got compiled into a YouTube presentation. You probably noticed but didn’t think about the background music caught by the video camera. In a case known as The Dancing Baby Universal filed a DMCA take-down against a Ms Lenz because a song by Prince was playing in the background of her video. It wasn’t added later. It was what the baby was dancing to when the video was candidly captured. 

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YouTube Gaming and Second Life

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If you are wondering what YouTube Gaming is, click over to Ciaran Laval’s blog and see: YouTube Gaming Launches And Second Life Has Its Own Channel. The short explanation is this is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Twitch… and if you don’t know what Twitch is… well… you are hopelessly sheltered. To pop your bubble… Twitch is a site that allows gamers to stream their game play. People can watch a video stream of a person, in-game, playing in almost (?) real time.

The recent news is Jimmy Kimmel thought it was a funny idea and made fun of YouTube Gaming. As they point out, considering how poorly TV is doing these day he hasn’t much room to talk. But, I thought the video funny. 

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Making Better Use of Facebook

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Many of us in Second Life™ run businesses and some of us also run RL businesses… ummm… that means businesses  not in SL. I suppose whether a business is in SL or not, the business is real. Whatever, I came across this article on making better use of Facebook to promote your ideas, products, services, whatever…

See: How to Improve Your Facebook News Feed Visibility

Embryonic-3 : Mecha-Amonite II
Embryonic-3 : Mecha-Amonite II by Nebraska Oddfish, on Flickr

For bloggers in Second Life, or anywhere I guess, there is the problem of how Facebook is reacting to comments on linked-to sites. Having comments on in my blog drops my points with Facebook.  They are less likely to extend my reach, or in simple words… they will show my stuff to fewer people.

As the article points out, you can have comments on your site. But, if you can encourage visitors to comment on Facebook, your reach will increase. It isn’t so much that you have comments that is the problem for Facebook. It is that Facebook responds positively to people commenting on your links on Facebook.

So, whether you are selling something or just trying to increase your popularity, there are good and bad ways to do that with social media.

Star Wars Trailer

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I know a portion of Second Life™ users are into Star Wars®. We have tribute regions in SL. This Christmas a new Star Wars film is planned to come out. Today everyone is excited by the new trailer for the movie that just released. 🙂

Watch more than 30 hours of panels, interviews, and floor coverage, live from Star Wars Celebration Anaheim!

  • Today’s (4/16 ? 18) panel schedule includes:
    • 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PT: New Allies & New Villains: Star Wars Rebels Season Two
    • 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. PT: Smuggler’s Bounty – Original Star Wars Audio Drama by Kyle Newman
    • 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. PT: Star Wars Fan Film Awards presented by StarWars.com
    • 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. PT: Mark Hamill: The Return of the Jedi

Second Life & NGP: Voxels…

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At the recent VWBPE 2015 in Ebbe Linden’s (Altberg) speech he mentions voxels. This suggests, at the very least, the Lab is looking at voxels for possible use in NGP (Next Generation Platform – SL’s probable successor). But, what does that mean for us? And what is a voxel?

In the comments of one of my articles in the series Max Graf pointed me to the web site Procedural World. They are big on voxels and use then in ways that may be similar to what we could see in NGP. 

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Source of Creativity?

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I know some people are way creative and others way less so. A new study from Northwest University may give us clues to what makes one person more creative than another.

See: Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

Lobby Cam oil painting
Lobby Cam oil painting by Bryn Oh, on Flickr

The hypothesis suggested by the research is creative people have trouble filtering out distractions. I suppose a noisy and chaotic environment would be the most common distraction. But any irrelevant sensory information could provide the distraction.

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