3pointD.com

Second Life resident Khamon Fate has an interesting post musing on the difference between owning property on Second Life’s main Grid, which is a contiguous land mass, and owning it on one of SL’s private island estates, which, while accessible to all, take marginally more work to locate, and provide the user with more tools. (One often stumbles across new locations on the Grid, while you rarely stumble across new locations on private islands because they’re not on any conceivable travel paths.)

Khamon compares the Grid to a LiveJournal community, and an island to a TypePad blog.

. . . migrating Fate Gardens from the mainland to an estate is similar to migrating a focused blog from randomish friends-based LiveJournal to a more independent location such as Typepad. Rather than relying on traffic from friends and their friends et al, a Typepader seriously blogs a subject and relies on links and shortcuts to garner traffic from people interested more in the subject than the blogger’s personal life. It’s similar to migrating away from a free hosting site to a paid facility where I have to do all the work, but can program the pages and scripts to organize and present material anyway I please without relying solely on provided tools and layouts.

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Sir Bruce Sterling Woodcock, who’s been studying subscriber numbers in massively multiplayer online games for years, has posted the latest update (the 21st!) to MMOGChart, where he graphs his data. New additions to the chart include Dungeons & Dragons Online and Auto Assault. EverQuest takes a tumble, and figures for Second Life, which Sir Bruce puts around 65,000, are sure to be as controversial as they have in the past.

Voice can be a contentious issue in virtual worlds. Many MMOs rely on it. It probably wouldn’t be possible to participate in the “end-game” in World of Warcraft and EVE Online without benefit of a VoIP app like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. Using voice in Second Life is becoming more common, especially for making presentations. But many residents of virtual worlds shy away from it because they perceive it to be anonymity-breaking. A number of apps let you mask or change your voice in order to avoid this problem, the latest of which is linked from Gamasutra and is available for free from a company called Screaming Bee. Personally, I don’t need this kind of thing, since I don’t mind people hearing my voice. But do we think it will be popular among those who do?