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Alvis Birgis at the Second Life Future Salon has an interesting post on whether virtual worlds and related metaversal technologies will help catalyze broad change in the world. Hyperbole or considered foresight? You decide.

GovExec has an interesting story [via AllPointsBlog] about the political wrangling over a US Geological Survey mapping facility in Missouri. It seems the USGS wants to close an office there, but the state’s lawmakers want to hang onto the jobs it produces — even though it works on technology the USGS feels is outmoded. (more…)

SLBoutique is a Web site where residents of the virtual world of Second Life can sell the things they’ve created in the world. It accounts for a large portion of many SL vendors’ sales, and is quite popular (along with sites like SLExchange) among SL shoppers — mostly because it’s difficult to impossible to advertise products in an organized manner through the in-world interface. But even SLBoutique (which is owned by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog) has its limitations. That seems about to change slightly, however, with the news that vendors can now add tags to their products on SLBoutique, much as you’d tag a photo on Flickr. I don’t think shoppers can search on those tags yet, but that’s apparently forthcoming in a future version of the site. It’s nice to see services like this get more and more Web-friendly, and it seems Linden Lab is also getting the idea that SL will have to move toward a closer integration with the Web, something that’s happening already with the back-end move to a Web services architecture and indications that more such capabilties will be added in future.

Via a press release datelined “Framingham, Massachusetts and Uvvy Island, Second Life” comes news from VoIP company Vivox about a transhumanist seminar to be held in the virtual world of Second Life tomorrow, June 7, at 11am SL time. The seminar, sponsored by FutureTAG, will feature James Hughes, Giulio Prisco, and Philippe Van Nedervelde. Fascinating ideas about the future of humans are sure to be kicked around, but one thing that’s notable is that they’ll be kicked around in voice. Vivox has a nice application, which I’ve seen demoed, that runs behind SL (or another MMO) and does more than just connect people in chat rooms a la Skype or TeamSpeak. (more…)