Finally: flickr is getting rid of NIPSA!

Ok, I am a little late to this party as this happened actually exactly on my birthday already but nevertheless I want to report on it as I was one of the opponents of the whole NIPSA thing (see here and for the rest here, Wired article with a statement from myself and Spin/Eric here).

What was promised after the Wired article on it (thanks Kathleen 🙂 has now happened. flickr not actually removed the NIPSA mechanism from accounts but instead introduced a filtering system where you can mark your photos as screenshots yourself (for me SL photos are still photos but ok..) and then you can request that the NIPSA tag is removed.

What is NIPSA?

For those late to the party here a little explanation: Formerly only real RL photos (very blurry definition actually regarding Photoshop etc.) were supposed to be on flickr. Screenshots and other things (like of course nudity) were not allowed or at least blocked from public searches. And this is what NIPSA stands for: Not in Public Search Area. As Second Life photos were seen as screenshots your whole account would be then marked as being NIPSA and thus won’t show up in e.g. public RSS feeds such as the Second Life Group photo pool (that’s why on the Second Life blog where there is a flickr plugin showing the contents of that pool never showed all photos).

With this mechanism of course also tagging your photos made not that much sense as they were not searchable anyway.

What should you do?

But with the new system this is no problem anymore. Everybody now can decide what sort of results they want to get back from a flickr search. They just need to define it here. On the account page they also show the status now. So if it says NIPSA there you might want to make sure that all your photos are flagged accordingly (you can set the safety level and the content type either on each photo or in the Organizr for a batch) and request a review of your account here.

Now this is great news, so thank you flickr and it might finally be time for me to get a pro account for Tao Takashi, too.

BTW, you can find the flickr blog post here for the full scoop.

Technorati Tags: flickr, NIPSA, secondlife, screenshots, fliters, taotakashi

Video Blogging Week 2007

Maybe unrelated to Second Life but nevertheless it’s Video Blogging Week 2007 and here is my video of day 1 of this. If you don’t know what it is: It’s happening from April 1-7 and you should do a little video on each day, edit and upload it the same day. Theme is quite open (which it is for my episode) but there is a suggested one:

       One vlogosphere, crossing borders, making new friends

But here’s finally my video from today (hope to be able to keep it up ;-):

Find more of this later at mrtopf.tv!

PS: I now also have a german blog, find it at mrtopf.de!

Technorati Tags: videobloggignweek2007, day1, mrtopf.tv, kenshiro, san francisco, nerdcore

Voice Beta now open to all

In case you haven’t heard it yet: The voice beta testing program is now open to the public as Linden Lab writes on their blog. There’s also a new version out now which has a new speech indicator which also indicated if you are just listening and thus making it easier to distinguish between people with voice activated and those without. So download it here and keep talking 🙂

PS: Apparently they added also some new options for the key used for enabling push-to-talk and one if them is the ‘ (the key above the tab key). Of course with a german keyboard it’s not above the tab key, it’s the ^ instead. So international issues are still issues unfortunately (and the ^ is of course quite underused here, too, so it would make sense to have this as an option, too).

Technorati Tags: secondlife, voice, beta, talk, virtualworlds, taotakashi, lindenlab, blog

BTW, I am twittering, too ;-)

So, just make me a friend at http://twitter.com/mrtopf 🙂

For now I am just a little sick though, so not much might show up there…

Technorati Tags: twitter, taotakashi, mrtopf

Adam Reuters nterviews Raph Koster and Jerry Paffendorf at SXSW, live at Reuters in SL.

Adam Reuters informed me that today there will be two Second Life interviews with Raph Koster and Jerry Paffendorf. Raph is right now working on a eventually-to-be Second Life Killer called Areae. He will be interviewed today at 2 pm CST (3 pm EST, noon Pacific) at the Reuters Auditorium.

Jerry, well known to Second Lifers, is part of the Electric Sheep Company and will be interviewed at 12 pm CST (1 pm EST, 10 am Pacific) about Sony’s newly announced PS3 virtual world and where Second Life is heading. It will also take place at the Reuters Auditorium.

Definitely interesting interviews so make sure you are there!

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, reuters, sxsw, interviews, media, areae, esc, taotakashi

The AvaStar has launched!

A new magazine is on the block: The AvaStar. It is a product if Bild.T-Online.de which is the online edition of BILD, a large tabloid newspaper published by Axel Springer.

You can download the first issue now from it’s website as a PDF file. People who know this blog know that I am no fan of PDF files as they are cumbersome to read on a monitor. I’d prefer an in-world version or a blog style approach as this is easier (even the in-world version as zooming is more natural there). Moreover a blog-like format will have the ability to start a conversation which PDFs do not have and even linking to some article is impossible or cumbersome at least. Some magazines (such as SL Business Mag) seem to be on a good route to a more reader-friendly format and we will see what The AvaStar will do.

As for the content you can judge yourself. It is co-written by long-term Second Life residents and thus it shouldn’t be too far away from what really happens in Second Life (which was my fear at first when I heard about it). I still have to fully read it but so far it looks good and definitely like a real newspaper. I am just wondering about the drama level involved as I personally I am no big fan of BILD (more the contrary).

But judge for yourself, the first issue is out and you can get it at various locations (or the web as described above). Also open is now their island which was built by Aimee Weber and her team. Definitely a nice build but we have to wait and see how and if they will be used.

So I wish them good luck and I will check back later and see how it worked out. I also hope that more newspapers will follow suit and maybe cover some other areas.

Update: I forgot to mention that in the future it will cost L$150,- per single issue. With similar content as the Metaverse Messenger we will have to see if this works out or not. The fee at least might limit the possibilities of going with a more open format than PDF because a blog needs to be readable by everybody for a conversation to get started.

Update 2: I also forgot to mention the agency who realized it for Bild.T-Online. It is Pixelpark, a big german media agency who just entered Second Life but have big plans as it seems. So we can expect some more german companies now entering this virtual world.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, newspaper, media, avastar, taotakashi, launch

And the winners are…

Yesterday the winners of the The Second Life Business Magazine machinima contest have been announced. The goal was to produce a commercial within Second Life for whatever product, company or service that exists within Second Life (and I was part of the panel for judging the entries).

So here are winners:

1st place: Trent Hedges and his Griffin Ad
2nd place: Trent Hedges and his Tugboat Ad
3nd place: Francis Chung for the Dominus Shadow Ad

Congratulations to the winners and esp. Trent Hedges (who I accidently met yesterday evening and who is a nice guy :-).

BTW, one video I also like, is the promo by Metaversatility which has a nice RL/SL blend and great editing.

All in all I think machinima in SL is getting better, which I was also noticing during the last machinima festival. Sometimes compression and camera technique could be better but some people seem to have an eye for good camera angles and editing.

And speaking of machinima, I also did a new piece, this time for Crayon and you can watch it here.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, taotakashi, machinima, contest, slbusinessmag, media

Your favourite employer

In the Financial Times Germany there was a supplement this morning called “Karriere & Zukunft” (career and future) and it had a listing of the top 5 favourite employers of germans by sector and by what you’ve studied. It was created by The Universum Graduate Survey.

Here are the results for the IT sector:

1. IBM
2. Siemens
3. Microsoft
4. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
5. SAP

Based on what you studied it’s:

1. IBM
2. Siemens
3. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
4. Microsoft
5. BMW Group

So that’s for Germany.

So I wonder: What would be your favourite employer in Second Life?

Technorati Tags: 3d, discussion, media, taotakashi, virtual world

Adam Reuters interviewed Edgar Bronfman (updated)

It was taking place on the Reuters sim and was actually a bit short (15 minutes or so). The topics dicussed have been YouTube, File Sharing, DRM and so on.

Of course not much new was told in that interview but here are quickly some bullet points (if I did not get something right please correct me):

• there was a question about mashups and he replied that they are looking to enabling that more but with a license attached
• Adam asked him if his kids have ever used a file sharing service. He said yes and he discussed it with them as wrong is wrong and right is right and they need to understand that.
• Asked about DRM in relationship to the Zune and the recent decision by Microsoft not to support their old DRM standard anymore he replied that DRM is an important thing to fight theft but then again walled gardens is probably not what customers want. As DRM is important he’d like to see more standards in that area so that devices are more interoperable.
• Prokofy asked about CopyBot and what he thinks of it. His reply was that it’s of course intellectual property which might get stolen with it but one also needs to find a good balance in how big the restrictions are.
• He also said that they will open up their music video library more in the future when asked about their YouTube deal

So all in all nothing new. And unfortunately it does not sound really like they are going to open up much. The fact that he thinks DRM is important is very much in the way of any openess. In fact it only does make the use of music harder for honest customers, not for people downloading from filesharing sites. It is also in the way of doing mashups. But then again you’d need a license to do a mashup anyway and this means lots of legal work. I guess Creative Commons won’t be an option here.

Anyway, I just don’t buy DRMed music esp. not with the situation of those walled gardens. There are enough music options out there, be it in podcasts, CC licensed music and so on. They should just trust their customers more and try to find better business models which work in the 21st century.

The transcript can now be found here.

UPDATE: I forgot to add one link which is in this context and was quoted during the discussion after the event. So read here about the RIAA.

UPDATE II: Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing blogs about that interview here.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, reuters, warner brothers, interview, media, taotakashi

Media Media

Slow posting those times due to general business, but here are some media bits and pieces.

Financial Times Germany

The FTD was having today some report about Second Life. On the frontpage they report about the first million made in an online game, which is of course the story of Anshe Chung. They give a little overview about the economic capabilities of Second Life and talk about the companies already in there (although I don’t think Intel and Coca-Cola are really in SL, haven’t these been more one-time events for now?).

On page 5 they continue to talk in general about Second Life. They talk a bit about Linden Lab and how they started in a small office in “Linden Alley” (in the middle of homeless people) and how it went from there in 3 years to have an economy worth of 1,6 million people. They then go on talking about IBM and it’s boss, Sam Palmisano, who plans to give support to customers and clients via Second Life. Well, following are some more examples and enumerations of companies in here. And they end with CopyBot, which seems to be no real danger to SL but is nevertheless worth of mentioning. They even claim that because of that there’s still room in SL for a entrepeneur with a clever concept of a security service. Well…

Not enough, another topic mentioned in this issue is Creative Commons, which seems to be a topic quite rare in the mainstream media. On page 32 they talk about discussions about a new copyright law and how even artists are not really happy with it. There are some reasons:

• As artist you sell your rights for not even existing distribution formats to your record company. If you don’t want this, you might get replaced. Prior they need to discuss another contract with you if they go e.g. from Vinyl to CD.
• As privat person there is no right of a private copy included anymore. To be precise, you are allowed to copy as long as you don’t break any copy protection. But nowadays nearly every CD has this.
• Artists do want to control how their work is being distributed. E.g. filmmakers do not like the cutting down of movies into little chunks for consumption via UMTS. With the new law they wouldn’t have any way to protect their work against that.

So all in all mostly the record labels etc. are profiting from these changes. Artists and consumers do not seem to be that important. A reason more for artists to move to a Creative Commons license (they give Beastie Boys as example).

Of course it won’t be that easy for most of them as they rely more or less on their record labels. But who know, someday it might change 🙂

Reuters

Reuters is bringing Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime and Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman into Second Life this week for interviews. It is part of the Reuters Media Summit taking place this week in New York and according to Reuters more such events are planned.

Fils-Aime will be interviewed at 0730 PST on Nov. 29, and Bronfman will be interviewed at 1200 PST on Dec. 1.

For more information check out this link! Depending on my time constraints I will be there as this might be cool 🙂

Machinima

Leaving mainstream media we enter the field of Machinima. For quite some time I wanted to post a longer wrapup about it but as I am quite busy I did not get to it. But at least Hiro Pendragon did a bit on the Machinima Festival and as there’s even a contest attached, you should head over, read it and submit some cool film and win US$ 250,-  🙂

Something which is definitely clear is that we need more machinima artists and I hope that every contest will bring some more people into that field.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, media, ftd, reuters, machinima