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In case you haven’t already noticed, Mia Garlick, General Counsel of Creative Commons, will give a live talk in Second Life tonight on copyright issues and “Some Rights Reserved” licensing. Head to Kula Island, the Kula 4 sim, coordinates (75, 75), at 6:00pm Pacific time for the one-hour talk, hosted by SL resident Genevieve Julot

Just spent a brief minute signing up over at ziki (here’s mine), the new social-software site that lets you aggregate your own content in one place and also tag yourself. The content aggregation could be a powerful way to move your media, but I’m also a big fan of the tagging idea, especially as it relates to virtual worlds. What I’d really like to see is a piece of social software that allows you to link your identity in one virtual world to your identity in another. I’ve written about this idea on Walkerings once or twice before, as well as in The Escapist. I’d really like to see some kind of world-straddling communications network emerge from this kind of thing. Xfire is something like it, but it’s not as open or powerful as what I have in mind. We’re due for some kind of VW-2.0 mashup very soon, I think. It will be interesting to see who does it and how.

Steve Rubel flags what could be an alarming trend: Google is apparently going to start charging for access to its AdWords API. “If charging for API data becomes more widespread among the big players, it will slow innovation,” Rubel says. The difference here is that AdWords is specifically a revenue-producing app, so it may be more understandable that Google charge for it. If other open APIs come in for the same treatment, though, it could certainly have a chilling effect on innovation.

When more than 2,000 real estate agents and executives gather in San Francisco this July for a big real estate and technology conference, one of the people they’ll hear from is David Fleck, Vice President of Marketing at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. Fleck will present on “Virtual Real Estate: What must we learn from gamers, immersive online communities and their addictive, artificial worlds of ‘real’ estate?”, according to this press release. (more…)

The Holman family, together in Guild Wars

Nice to see that the Washington Post today has an unabashedly positive spin on massively multiplayer online games and their power give far-flung family and friends a different way to connect.

Although computer games have often been thought of as a pastime for the antisocial, communal online worlds such as the one in Guild Wars are the hottest things in games these days. . . . Game companies don’t track how many families play online games together, but they say the trend helps drive their popularity. Some families play games to maintain contact from far-flung towns; some parents play online games with their kids in the next room as a way of bonding with them. Game designer Jack Emmert, at Guild Wars publisher NCsoft Corp., played his own game, City of Heroes, to stay in touch when his brother was serving in the Army and based in Korea.

I think I can count a dozen instances of this kind of thing that I know of. Nice to see it get some wider readership.

The Games for Change conference is taking sessions proposals until April 25th. The conference will be held June 27th and 28th at Parsons, the New School for Design, in New York City, and will feature a keynote by author Steven Johnson of Everything Bad is Good for You. More details below: (more…)

Sir Bruce Sterling Woodock has new population figures up on his excellent MMOGChart site, which tracks the population of massively multiplayer online games as well as a few virtual worlds like Second Life. Sir Bruce’s new data only covers up to about January of this year, but it’s worth slappping an eye on his charts, as his site is about the only one tracking numbers like these (plus it’s pretty). That said, there’s not much that’s terribly notable to report this time around (a new release is coming soon, according to the site). Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online continue to bleed customers, RuneScape continues to climb and, interestingly, A Tale in the Desert and World War II Online, though both small, seem to have leveled off without dropping customers for some time. Sir Bruce still has World of Warcraft at 4.5 million, though it’s since passed 6 million, I believe. Then there’s the issue of Second Life. (more…)

[Via Glitchy:] The Prefix magazine blog has an entry about the band Arctic Monkeys and the fact that their MySpace profile reportedly fetched more than $2,000 on eBay. The eBay auction had apparently been invalidated and removed from the site by the time I clicked through from Prefix. The sale (or attempted sale) is part of what’s been a recent surge in sales of MySpace profiles that have a large number of friends, which are apparently being farmed by marketers looking for new ways to reach potential customers. What’s especially amusing in this case is that (a) the Arctic Monkeys themselves seems to have little idea of who or what MySpace is, and (b) MySpace is said to have been partly responsible for the band’s rise to the top of the UK charts. More interesting from a 3pointD perspective, though, is the financial value of a broad friends network, and the privacy implications of such a sale. If I link to you, are you free to sell my link to someone? How much am I worth as a link, anyway? The Arctic Monkeys’ friends — all 49,450 of them — were valued at about 4 cents apiece. Surely I’m worth more than that?