3pointD.com

Henrik Linden at the Second Life Creativity blog has an interesting call out for former residents of Second Life, for his project studying creativity in Linden Lab’s virtual world.

To help me see a fuller picture I would really like to get in contact with former residents. It is no big secret that a substantial number of people come to Second Life and after spending relatively time there; they leave and often never return. If this sounds like you or you know someone that did this then I would love to hear from you. See About for some contact info or leave a comment.

(more…)

The Second Life Insider, a new blog from AOL’s Weblogs Inc., reports on the recent auction of a Second Life automobile that fetched US$2,000 for charity. (Also on Chris Carella’s Electric Sheep blog.) The auction was part of the fund-raising effort that’s on at the moment for the American Cancer Society’s second annual Second Life Relay for Life. Over at SecondCast, we interviewed the event’s organizers last week, and podcaster extraordinaire John Swords just posted the episode last night (which you can also listen to in the sidebar here). But $2,000 for a virtual car? Evidence of nothing more than that virtual worlds can be quite effective places to do charity work. The Relay event is this weekend, July 22-23, so log into SL now and get your virtual running shoes on. (more…)

Thank god I opened my feedreader this morning, or I’d never have known about the Battleship: Google Earth mashup that’s being created by Julian Bleecker at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. (Actually, thank Ogle Earth.) Bleecker is hacking together a system whereby one player plunks down a huge battleship in Google Earth (just like in the old Milton Bradley game), and the other tries to bomb it — only to do this you have to visit a real location with your GPS-enabled phone, dial in to the game engine, and say “drop.” The game puts a big red peg at your location — which is hopefully close enough to sink your opponent’s battleship. (more…)