3pointD.com

Jeremiah Owyang sends over a link to a podcast he’s just posted on his blog, in which he interviews two Second Life users from opposite ends of the SL spectrum. One is his friend Chris Salazar, a 20-year-old Santa Clara University student who’s just been introduced to the virtual world, and the other is Robert Scoble of Microsoft, who’s been evangelizing SL left and right lately. (more…)

Eric Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 blog ponders whether Google’s purchase of SketchUp means the company is thinking about turning Google Earth into “a virtual world where visitors can create their own buildings, vehicles, and other objects or just roam around.” [Via Croquet 2 Play.] This is something my metaversal friends and I have been thinking about for a while now, the prospect of some kind of shared, multi-user, avatarized layer or functionality for Google Earth. Google, I know, is interested in the space at least enough to entertain presentations and meetings with various emissaries from the metaverse, including from Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. If Google were to make some kind of move into the virtual world space, I imagine they’d do it very carefully. The challenge would be to keep such an app as open and versatile as the rest of their fare. I, for one, am very much looking forward to hearing about developments in this area.

YouTube has an interesting video of a pretty extensive hobo village that’s been built in Second Life. Click in the SLurlPane at the top of the right column here to visit, while the link lasts, or just click this SL link.

One of the best things about going to tech conferences is running into Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and an original author of the cluetrain manifesto. Doc is really smart and really nice, and he comes at technology solidly from the point of view of the people who use it, which I think is the most important angle. I just came across this podcast of a talk Doc gave last December, in which he talks about pending legislation, cable companies, and the importance of keeping the Internet and World Wide Web an open place for the creation of and access to content and information — or at least of deciding whether that’s what it’s actually going to be. Definitely recommended listening. (more…)

With the announcement the other day that Google was making SketchUp available for free also came news of 3D Warehouse, Google’s free repository for SketchUp models that can be imported into Google Earth. Now, Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth posts a very perceptive essay about some of the problems with Google’s not-quite-free and not-quite-open model. (more…)

200,747 registered members as of this morning. It actually passed the mark around 9pm Eastern last night. I got the text message from a friend, but I was out. Various people have a bet going as to whether Second Life will reach a million by the end of the year. I’ve been betting against, but at the rate things have been going, I wouldn’t be surprised — nor displeased — to see myself lose that bet.