3pointD.com

World of Warcraft guild We Know has garnered some repute for being run by venture capitalist Joi Ito, who says he listens to the guild’s TeamSpeak channel even while cooking dinner or driving his car. We Know’s latest innovation is to use the virtual world of Second Life to plan their end-game raids on World of Warcraft instances, the tough dungeons that can only be conquered by intense planning and lockstep cooperation. In Ito’s Kula sim, the guild has set up maps of several WoW instances (taken from WoW screenshots), and annotates them using SL objects. [Via Metroblogging Azeroth.] Ito spoke at SD Forum about the fact that his guild uses SL as a place to review in-game video footage of their raids, much as a football team would review game videos. Now SL is being used as a place to prepare specific strategies, in what amounts to a nice virtual world mashup. How much cooler would this be, though, if We Know was putting the instance maps into something like angrybeth Shortbread’s communal writeboard or one of the other collaborative annotation tools that are available in Second Life? And even cooler than that if the maps were made interactive. Just watch out for Overlord Wyrmthalak.

This is only a test. But it’s a test of the very cool blogHUD, a heads-up display attachment devised by Second Life resident Koz Farina, that allows SL residents to post to various blogs from within the world. Its basic functionality allows users t . . .

[. . . and that’s where the trouble began. I’m a huge fan of the blogHUD, but the test was only a qualified success. Still, I’d recommend you pick one up. More after the jump.] (more…)

Jerry and Vanessa and I went to a party last night for Four Eyed Monsters, the cool film we saw last week. Susan and Arin were very nice, delighted to be feted, and we got them pumped up to bring the film to Second Life. Susan has a friend who just joined SL, and Arin is down with the idea, also having immediately grokked the concept of lifelogging as described in this post (see the comments thread). It was very cool to see their eyes light up as we described some of the things they’d be able to do in Second Life. But we need your help! Go to this Web page to request the film be screened in Second Life, if you haven’t already. Plug in a random zip code and select “2nd Life” from the drop-down country menu. We’re leaning on Susan and Arin’s friend Brian to include SL on the request map so you can see how many requests there have been, but trust us, you need to go request the film now so that the first feature film to be screened in SL is this very cool production and not the latest X-Men sequel. Plus there’s one more Thursday in September on which you can go see the film in an actual theater. Enjoy.

There’s a new SecondCast on the air: in Episode #33 we talk to Mike Prevost of Muse Isle, a Second Life venue for live music performance, and Cylindrian Rutabaga, who often plays there. An interesting look at what it’s like to gig in the virtual world. Plus, listen along as the SecondCasters pimp their MySpace pages in order to try and get a record deal. Exciting!