Second Life in the Media

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Inara Pey has written a good rebuttal to a rather retarded article appearing on MoviePlot.com by Marlon McDonald. You’ll find that article here: These Strange Stories Prove Second Life Isn’t The Dreamworld You Believed…

Blood Letters #19
Blood Letters #19

Inara’s rebuttal appears on her blog and to MoviePlot.com’s credit they have posted a version of the article. See: A rebuttal to one-dimensional writing and The Strange Stories about Second Life that Totally Miss The Mark!

Main stream writers are producing less and less information that is accurate or connected to reality. Much of what is written and published is to serve one agenda or another. We are seeing more and more non-journalists correcting matters. I am not saying that Inara isn’t a journalist or reporter. I am saying that the majority of journalist/reporters are not doing the job we expect from them.

I congratulate Inara on an awesome rebuttal with supporting references. Please visit the her article on MoviePlot.com and leave a comment. This is a good page to save a link to for future reference and to hand out when some other lame article appears.

Rosedale Interview

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Philip Rosedale the current CEO of High Fidelity and former CEO and founder of Linden Lab/Second Life was interviewed. Ciaran Laval has an article up on the interview. See it here: Philip Rosedale At Gigaom Roadmap – Sci-Fi, Virtual Worlds And Beards. The original Gigaom interview video and article are here: The gap between virtual reality and sci-fi is shortening. This is mostly video, 30 minutes. At the beginning it comes across more as a setup promo than an interview, IMO. But, becomes apparent they are explaining HiFi to an audience that likely doesn’t understand virtual worlds or Second Life(TM).

Blood Letters #19
Blood Letters #19

Ciaran has done a good summary of the interview video. So, I’m not going to redo it here.

An interesting point to me is Philips take on people being able to self govern. In today’s world people are taught it takes a strong central authority to govern. About 240 years ago the American founding fathers thought people could self govern and built a structure to limit the power of government. Seeing similar thinking in this day and age is surprising.

Another interesting concept is the idea of creating a system that is open as possible. This means open source, open content format, and very much a free market.

Second Life: Group Chat Failures

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No one is sure what is going on in any detail. But, we have seen the group chat for the Mad Pea Blood Letters’ hints (Madpeas) go down a couple of times and the Firestorm Support group. Both groups have been able to send notices to their group’s users advising them of the problem.

The restarts for hardware updates may have been contributing to the problem. No changes are being rolled to the chat servers this week because of the hardware update restarts. Whatever changes are being made to day ARE affecting group chat.

The Madpeas group chat was down late yesterday (11/18). It is still down now (11/19) 3± PM SLT.The Firestorm group is back up now.

Grid Status has made note of the issue:

[Posted 12:10 PM PDT, 18 November 2014] We will be performing additional scheduled maintenance on 19 November at approximately 1:00 AM PST. During this time, some residents may experience login issues and residents in-world may be logged off or experience degraded performance. Additionally, during this time Group Chat may fail. Please refrain from rezzing no-copy objects and making L$ transactions during this maintenance. Please check back here for updates. (Reference)

Second Life: DMCA Abuse – Fight Back

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA is pretty well known and abused in Second Life™. In RL it is also commonly known and abused. The law should be over turned and I expect it would be if it ever made it to the Supreme Court. The law makes people prove their innocence, which is upside down in America and most free market economies. The the reason the law continues to stand is the it favors politicians, big business, and the wealthy. Individuals and small business can’t afford to fight at the Supreme Court level.

Image by: Michael Mandiberg @ Flickr
Image by: Michael Mandiberg @ Flickr

The WordPress organization is fighting the censorship that can be imposed by abuse of DMCA. They wrote about it here: Striking Back Against Censorship. Others are in the fight too. One of those is a company named Automattic. They gained fame when fighting  Janet Jackson’s take down demand. (Reference) 

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Photo Shoot

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Every so often someone surprises me. Mr. S. did when he asked to photograph me. I agreed and it was painless… The results are interesting. I like them.

Mr S. - My Attempt
Mr S. – My Attempt

 

He got his poses from just the AO I was wearing. I think he did well with the images. You can find them here: Ink and Moon and Information Warrior. His entire stream is here: Mr S./ Bell or Balcony @ Flickr. It is an interesting collection. Check it out.

Second Life: Ebbe Altberg Interview

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I’ve seen several people blogging about this week old interview. I finally got around to reading the interview. There isn’t much new in it. I did not expect there would be. If you’ve been following Ebbe and Second Life, you know most of what he said. But, there are a few new things that are interesting and probably new details that I’ll touch on. Mostly interesting is the insight into what Ebbe is thinking.

The interview is here: Linden Lab explores VR for its next-generation virtual world (interview)

 

Blood Letters Murder Scene
Blood Letters Murder Scene

We know the Lab has been hiring software engineers for SL2. But, did you know they plan to hire 30 or 40 more? They currently have 190 employees. Ebbe says the number of employees has remained flat as they hired and dropped employees from projects they dropped. They plan to grow to 220±.

I think it safe to say some of the staff from released projects probably transferred  over to SL2. He makes it clear they have taken people from the Lab’s various projects and focused them on SL2. 

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