3pointD.com

Second Life resident aDen Ennui has built a faithful and impressive recreation of some of the artifacts from Robyn Miller’s ground-breaking video game, Myst. [Via Torley.] aDen posts from screens of his (her?) creations on a bit of a browser-choking Web page, but they’re worth checking out. (more…)

Click the image above to go to Torley Linden’s Snapzilla page

Second Life resident Cristiano Midnight’s Snapzilla — which has firmly established itself as the Flickr of SL, with 200,000 visitors and half a million snapshots viewed in April — has added a new feature, called the Snapzilla Live Panel, which works more or less like a Flickr badge (which is the thing that displays the 3pointD images in the middle column here). The Live Panel seems to be iframe only and not java, but I imagine this will catch on quick. Though the slightly clunky site only has 1,600 users and under 73,000 screenshots in its archives, it has become a great place to get a quick read on some of the things going on in Second Life, and is also a rich resource of the Grid’s visual history. (Interestingly, the site didn’t have a way to delete screenshots until recently.) It’s well worth checking out for a good visual take on SL, and if you’re already a user, go get a Live Panel and slap it up on your site. As I’m going to do now.

Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick took an interesting tack recently to introducing his audience to a few metaversal concepts. In a slightly odd post on the CNNMoney.com site, he relates a conversation with three hip, young (and anonymous) metaversal friends about what’s going on now in virtual worlds and online social spaces. Most of the random quotes cover salient phenomena that many CNNMoney.com readers are probably not familiar with. Pretty good food for thought, especially in its presentation.

Wikimapia [via Glitchy] seeks to “describe the whole planet Earth” using the open-editing principles of Wikipedia, but in a map-based format. It’s a nice-idea, but it seems to be a bit buggy still, and not all that different from Platial or Community Walk. Ogle Earth also flags a new mapping app that sounds slightly more interesting: Pin in the Map lets you quickly add a marker to Google Maps that you can then send to a friend, complete with a link to the Google Earth location, if you like. And you don’t need to create an account to use it. It’s the TinyURL of place, as Stefan says.