Close the forums NOW!

For a long time there have been various general Second Life forums like “General” or “Sandbox” etc. With the recent announcement by Linden Lab to close these forums the main topic in there is of course just this fact. It even turns out that many people feel that it’s now time for personal attacks e.g. against Torley Linden. While many of these people seem to pretend to fight for a better “second” life it seems also apparent that respect for other people is not among the values they are fighting for.

The question to me here is how people can assume that doing personal attacks instead of well-written criticism should raise the value of the forums in any such way to make Linden Lab rethink their decision? And after all the forums have been more a means of self-display than of any useful discussion anyway (of course there have been some but you rarely see one). But for this purpose a personal blog should be a better tool.
And why now saying it’s all LL’s fault? It’s the fault of the flaming and insulting people which led to closing them. It’s maybe time to rethink that everything going wrong is only somebody’s else fault. It’s maybe also time to rething how criticism is voiced. Doing it in a civilized manner instead of an insulting one makes it even more probable to be heard.

But it seems people do not want to follow that line and thus I call for closing the forums immediately. Save us from another month of fruitless discussions and flamewars.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, forums, lindenlab, civilization, hate, discussion

Art!

Many of you might have not noticed and many of you might not even be interested in the fact that an art exhibition is going on right now at the Brilliant sim. But you should! Because it’s great stuff out there and even some stuff which plays with the possibilities you have in Second Life.

It is the virtual representationof the 13th International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA 2006) held by the San Jose Museum of Art. The exhibition is called New West and can be found (as mentioned) in Brilliant.

The exhibition will be on until tomorrow (Sunday) and while there unfortunately isn’t a list of events going on there (nor that much PR for it) there should be something going on at around noon SLT today and at 2PM there is a Skydancing performance by Dancoyote Antonelli. Make sure you don’t miss it!

More information can be found at the Second Life Art News Blog and at the SL Explorer News Blog. I still hope for a list of events happening there to be created and posted somewhere 🙂

Additionally here are some photos from the place.

“Immersive Art” by Bruno Echegaray	“ManorMeta” by In Kenzo
“Gregory Ain – Mar Vista Residence (1948)” by Octal Khan	“Light Path” by Giovanni Tweak
“Modernist Marvel – Museum of Hyperformalism” by Dancoyote Antonelli	“Primolution” by Stella Costello

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, art, exhibition, new west, isea2006, isea, san jose, museum

The Infinite Mind and Howard Rheingold

I thought I just post it here as I see that it’s available now. The interview with Howard Rheingold can be watch here at blip.tv. So go and watch it! 🙂

You can find all the media files at the Second Life page of The Infinite Mind. What strikes me a bit here, though, is that everything is just RealAudio. I would expect to have that as MP3 so I can listen to it on my favourite mp3 player while being on the road.

Moreover I think The Infinite Mind should be distributed in form of a podcast anyway, so we in the non-US can easily listen to it, too. I understand though that they want to sell their episodes but for the free SL related stuff an mp3 would have been nice nevertheless.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, media, radio, howard rheingold, machinima, video, infinitemind

Recap of the “Second Lives” event

Today I was attending the “Second Lives” event at Avalon, which is a screening of 4 short documentary films about 4 people living in Second Life. It’s about what they do in there and why they are doing it.

So we are just about to watch the movies again (each one is some minutes long) and they are great movies. They really capture the atmosphere of Second Life and these people behind the avatars very well. Lots of people showed up (including those shown in the movies).

We heard from Zafu Diamond (found of the Support For Healing Island) about his use of Second Life for supporting people, from Errol Mysterio about why people are drawn towards virtual worlds, Fallingwater Cellardoor talks about her business and how she found her husband via Second Life and finally Arahan Claveau talks about photographing in Second Life as well as his ideas about uploading his mind into a computer when he dies.

Make sure to watch it if you have missed the event, they will still be available for some weeks on Avalon. Also check out the cinema which gives a nice widescreen cinema feeling 🙂

Here some photos:

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, riversrunred, second lives, screening, documentary, tv, channel 4, channel4, taotakashi, media

Bits and Pieces

Another installation of Bits and Pieces is here 🙂

Not that much though as last time, so here’s the list

• Today at 12pm SLT (which is 9pm my time or 8pm UK time) a screening of a short documentary film series called Second Lives will be held on the Avalon Island (I think) in Second Life. It was produced by UK’s channel 4 in cooperation with Rivers Run Red.

• I just discovered that Israel Hyman also made a little piece about machinima in Second Life. He’s not showing any SL related techniques though but of course the techniques he shows normally in his DV Tutorials mostly apply to SL, too.

• I added some sites to worldofsl.com, e.g. Scarlet Singer, Catherine Omega, Siobhan Taylor, Metaverse Architecture and some more (which Torley suggested). Check them all out at the sidebar on the left.

• From a post by Babbage Linden on the Second Life Blog he talks about his side of the meeting with John Lam about whom I talked in my previous post. Apparently he now is looking into doing the next RubyConf as mixed media event in Second Life (I should propose that to the EuroPython or Plone Conference guys, too).

As an unrelated note: If you dig DJs scratching Vinyl you might wanna checkout my latest video over at my RL video blog.

Technorati Tags: 3d, blogs, event, lindenlab, Machinima, Mixed Reality, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world

To get or not to get it

Lots of discussion was going on recently about people getting or not getting it. Speaking of course of Second Life. So here’s another one who first thought he’s too old to eventually “get it”. (actually I don’t care that much about whether people get it or not.. Some do not get chatting or blogging and in Germany only few get it anyway 😉
I am speaking of John Lam and his blog post which I just discovered. He was hanging around with Miguel de Icaza (of Gnome and Mono fame) and Jim Purbrick. Now Jim Purbrick is better known to Second Lifers as Babbage Linden and thus he tried to explain the idea behind SL. John also listened to a talk by Cory Ondreyka/Linden which eventually made him get it. The key points in this talk quoted from the post are:

• It is not a ‘game’, because games have objectives, winners and losers, ‘leveling’ etc.
• A virtual world where computing resources are represented by a land ‘proxy’. More land equals more CPU resources in Second Life.
• More land equals more money that you pay per month. This lets people pay for more power.
• Vibrant and growing internal economy – $1.3M USD exchanged hands in July.
• 140,000 residents in July sold 380,000 items
• You have intellectual property rights to things you create in Second Life. Case of Tringo which has been licensed for distribution in the ‘real world’.
• Whereas only 3% of web users have ever created any content, 65% of Second Life have created content. That translates into 36,000 hours of content creation per day. Currently that’s 23TB worth of user-created data.
• 15% of their users have written code in Linden Scripting Language.
• 350,000 residents in Second Life, growing at a rate of 15% per month.
• Median age of 32 years (there goes my ‘too old to get it’ argument).
• Gender neutral by hours of use.

He also mentioned the Beyond Broadcast Conference at the Berkman Center at Harvard (I just did some video shooting for them btw 🙂 ) and the by now famous photo by Steve Garfield. It also seems that good keeps happening as results of that conference, the last one being “The Infinite Mind” being inspired to do stuff in Second Life.

So he’s hooked and I hope he will tell us how his SL explorations work out.

Technorati Tags: blogs, lindenlab, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world

The Infinite Mind (Updated)

Yesterday night (for me) the second show of the SL version of The Infinite Mind has been taped and held live inside Second Life. Guest this time was John Maeda. As the stage at the Vega event was a bit empty (and unfortunately the stools have been moved after I did setup my camera angles and thus I had to improvise a bit) I thought about improving it a bit and thus Shukran Fahid came up with this:

So I used my TT Lounge Chairs and adjusted them a bit, Shukran added some carpet and finally I did some simple backdrops (low-lag ones ;-). I’ve also put my head movement animations into the chairs so that the head at least moves a bit as if they were talking although lips aren’t of course. So here is how it looked during the event:

The interview itself was again interesting but apparently it was Maeda, too, hasn’t really visited SL before that much. I hope though he does more after that event as it might be of use for both sides.

The most interesting part about this whole “The Infinite Mind” thing is though that they themselves plan a lot in Second Life. John Hockenberry (who actually also has a video blog). First of all who don’t know the Infinite Mind: It’s a national weekly 1 hour Radio program (national means US of course) being on the air for 9 years. It covers the human mind, brain and behaviour.

According to him the sim will be used for the community to listen, discuss and get in contact with the producers of The Infinite Mind. So they want discussion and residents might even be part in the planning of shows. So I am looking forward to what they gonna do there.

Ok, enough talk. The video of Suzanne Vega is finished and here it is:

Watch the Video

Update Aug 7, 2006: Robbie Dingo released his video of “The Queen and The Soldier” which can be found here.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, infinitemind, suzanne vega, stage, set, taotakashi, radio, hockenberry, maeda

Multi Gadgets – to lag or not to lag?

When you own a Multi Gadget then it might have happened to you, too, that you got asked to take it off because of lag. It definitely happened to me which usually results in some discussion whether this really is a lag inducer or not.

Now the same happened to Orlie Omegamu and he went out to do some more scientific testing on it which might bring some light into the dark of MG sim lagging. You can read the whole story here and although no final results is there we hopefully see better results with a bigger number of people.

Looking forward to these!

Technorati Tags: seconflife, virtualworld, taotakashi, multigadget, gadgets, lag, performance, research

Busy Day with Community Meetings, Parties and Suzanne Vega

Yesterday has been quite some busy day for me as such a lot of stuff was going on. Let me wrap it up a little bit. I will go into more detail in later posts.

Community Roundtable Meeting

This was the first to happen at 9am. Not that much people seem want to attend at that time and so it was sort of a cozy little round although more people were coming in later. The process was (despite my hope they reversed it) again a closed group thing, so first come, first serve, which I somehow dislike.. Does not fit SL IMHO and the internet in general.
Topics discussed were

• How can we improve Quality Assurance (QA) and esp. Preview. Nice ideas did come up like having a beta grid where people can really live and e.g. can buy land for reduced tier fees.

• How can communication get better between LL and residents. Apparently there are many channels used right now but it is some sort of scattered around them and none have all the information. It is expected that the Linden Lab Blog will play that role in the future. Other ideas were some newsticker in the client where LL can post news bits and such. Additionally one idea was to enhance Linden Radio by having some news bits put in the stream.

• I was coming up with the topic of the Cristiano suspension resulting in some discussion about the abuse report system. I am not really happy with the system as it’s highly intransparent but that’s stuff for another post. Additional suggestions have been to enhance the Police Blotter page so people can check better what has happened to their reports (like search for a certain sim).

• The report discussion led also to some discussion about privacy. And here it’s a bit twofold as on the one side Linden Lab has access to all chat logs but otoh they don’t want to reveal any information about certain abuse reports because of privacy issues involved.. But again this is another post.

All in all it was a cool meeting although it left me with a strange feeling about “Linden justice” and Privacy issues.

SL Insider Launch Party

After that meeting I did some building and coding and then went to the SLInsider launch party. It was quite a nice crowd there and Trinity Serpentine was DJing.. A fun event and we should do more of these (like a party for each new post 😉 ).

Suzanne Vega and The Infinite Mind

Then late in the night (for me) I was attending the interview and concert with Suzanne Vega on The Infinite Mind. I was invited by Boliver Oddfellow of Infinite Vision Media to do the filming of the event and thus I had a reason to stay up til 4am 😉
The event itself was quite nice and it is really nice to see that the Infinite Mind want to do stuff regularly in Second Life. Of course lots of Vega fans have been around (actually everybody had that title as they all needed to be in that group 😉 ) and were having lots of fun. And while this is of course more of an marketing event of some sort for her and The Infinite Mind (I actually didn’t know it before, so it worked) and thus it’s not really SL related (at least for her as I doubt that she will explore SL on her own from now but I might be wrong) it is still very cool that the audience can get that close to her and also ask questions. This is something which probably wouldn’t be possible otherwise but SL makes it reality 🙂
But it is great to see a media company entering the realms for virtual worlds and doing stuff in here. John Hockenberry, the host of the show, seemed quite excited by that 🙂

And this was only the first event of some in a row. Upcoming is tonight at 5pm John Maeda of MIT Media Lab and on Monday and Tuesday you can meet Howard Rheingold and Kurt Vonnegut. Get all the information here. Filming will then be done by moo Money and Ill Bixby of the ILL Clan (who do Tra5hTa1k).

BTW, 30 mins after the show Philip Linden appeared 😉 Apparently he was stuck in traffic and was then asking me and moo about how it was and whether Suzanne Vega liked it and so on.. Besides that he appeared to be quite stressed (take a vacation! 🙂 ).

Well, that was my day. Besides SL I actually also did some RL work, believe it or not 🙂

Photos will be added to this post later, for now I need to do the editing of the video.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, community, justice, privacy, qa, party, blog, suzanne vega, the infinite mind, mixed media, radio, interview, video

bits and pieces (on Hamlet, Eggy, Spin, Movie Trailers, Updates, SLCC and SLBusiness Magazine)

Just what comes to mind:

• James Wagner Au, also known as Hamlet Au within Second Life who’s writing on Second Life over at New World Notes has been hired by GigaOm (a broadband weblog by Om Malik). He’s supposed to write about Gaming there (and probably mostly about Second Life. and btw, he’s also known for having about 6-7 posts about Julian Dibbell signing his book in Second Life. While this is nice that this has happened I also think that he’s overdoing it a little bit here (and apparently for a reason)).
• Spin Martin, Eggy Lippmann and I have been skypeing up yesterday to plan and test things for another episode of Late Night with Eggy Lippmann. Spin will do the audio tech and I will again be doing the video production. Additonally I will create some tools (like HUDs) for avoiding the Zombie-look of people doing audio in Second Life.
• While being on the phone with each other and having a beta user with us (Eggy) we assumed that back then in beta the main activity was to chop off forests and produce plywood cubes out of these trees which are nowadays the building blocks of our world (until they run out of course). Additionally we were trying to stack people without success until Eggy revealed the secret ingredient.
• The Movie Trailer contest is still going on and the deadline is approaching on August, 10 (and will be shown at the SLCC). So if you planned to participate but forgot about it here’s the reminder! By winning the contest you will receive L$100,000 and for winning one of the categories it will be L$50,000. More information over here.
• Tomorrow is update day. Version 1.11.2 (I think, no announcement yet) will be deployed. It’s available for testing on the preview grid and everybody should go there now instead of complaining about bugs afterwards (and knowing now already that this update will suck). Release notes to be found here.
• The Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) will be held from August 18-20 in San Francisco and if you want to join you should register at that site probably very soon.
• The first issue of SLBusiness is out. First impression without looking inside: It is PDF based (uuhh 😦 ) and getting that PDF from the front page involves several clicks. Good might be that there are two versions of the PDF out which are different formatted. So you might choose according your taste. Hadn’t had a chance yet to look inside but I will do on my train ride back and will give you some little report on that. But so far handling at least could be somewhat improved (make it a blog so I can aggregate it to worldofsl.com !).

Technorati Tags: 3d, lindenlab, Machinima, media, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world