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Take a listen to today’s edition of C.C. Chapman’s Managing the Gray podcast for news of a new “uncompany,” composed of podcasters C.C., Joseph Jaffe of Across the Sound, and Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson of For Immediate Release, that’s going to be doing “new marketing,” i.e., marketing primarily through new outlets like virtual worlds, rather than primarily through traditional avenues of print, radio and television. C.C., of course, is a big fan of Second Life and, in fact, part owner of the new Dirty sim, where myself, SecondCast producer John Swords, SLPodcast’s Jeremy Vaught, and SLStats.com’s Mark Barrett have taken up residence. The company will have an SL presence in a different sim, so look for projects coming in-world soon from these guys. The company is running half under the radar and half above: they’re not giving out word of what its name is yet, but everyone’s clearly excited. Good to see more competition coming into the field, but the question now is whether there’s enough business out there to keep everyone in $800 microphones and other podcasting equipment.

Second Life Insider flags a useful new tool for clothing designers in the virtual world of Second Life. Designed by SL resident Johan Durant, the app lets you preview a texture design outside the world on the default SL avatar. Besides making it more convenient to preview clothing designs, it should make the process cheaper as well, since it now entails many texture uploads, at L$10 each, to test designs. Download the app here. Feedback on the SL forums is so far largely positive.

For those that haven’t heard the news: Second Life is under attack! But it’s not W-Hats this time, it’s Martians! Take a listen on the latest episode of SecondCast for more details. Or maybe you want to wait for Halloween.

We’ve blogged before about the possibility that Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, might start letting users buy the rights to their own last names,effectively reserving a name for themselves and their friends. Now CNet’s Daniel Terdiman is reporting that there’s a plan in place to charge users $100 to set up their own last name, and a $50 annual maintenance fee. Corporate names will cost $1,000 to set up, with a $500 annual fee. While it seems that corporate customers can have unlimited accounts on the same last name, the story doesn’t make clear whether the $100 fee for personal last names covers only one instance of the name, or whether it covers exclusive use for any number of avatars. It seems to me this should get ugly fast, since it requires LL to make a great number of arbitrary decisions about what last names they will and won’t sell off. Who gets to own “Smith” and “Miller,” for instance? It’s also another case that could create a tiered service that works against metaverse neutrality. I’m not convinced that making naming conventions uniform across all users wouldn’t be a better way to go — but I’m open to argument.

One of the first stories from the new Reuters bureau in the virtual world of Second Life flags the fact that the U.S. Congress is in the preliminary stages of looking into virtual economies such as Second Life’s and World of Warcraft’s, and the public policy issues surrounding them. The story quotes Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, as saying, “Right now we’re at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise — taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth.” Many SL residents already pay taxes on their virtual earnings, of course, but a Congressional investigation could lead to legislation governing tax and intellectual property issues in virtual worlds. Whether lawmakers will treat such places any differently from other Internet-based commerce sites remains to be seen; it’s not clear that the issues are very different. VW economies, of course, do feature their own currencies, which could make things sticky for Congress and game companies alike. In any case, it will no doubt be a matter of years, not months, before legislation is even contemplated. But it’s heartening to see the issue being taken seriously in Washington. The challenge will be to educate lawmakers in such a way that early steps will not have a chilling effect on activities in the virtual world.

That said, some Congressmen are already educating themselves: “I can almost guarantee that there are some members of Congress spending time in Second Life or World of Warcraft,” Miller tells Reuters.

Venerable wire service Reuters (my alma mater in the news business) has opened a bureau in the virtual world of Second Life, built out by virtual world services firm The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). There’s a very nice tower on the Reuters sim, where correspondent Adam Reuters (aka Reuters’ Adam Pasick) will hold regular “office hours,” and you can pick up a free heads-up display or virtual wall-mounted unit that feeds running headlines from both SL and RL that can be clicked through to a Web page for the full stories. This is a very impressive effort on Reuters’ part, with Adam being named SL Bureau Chief. The news agency has also launched a Web page devoted to SL, where his stories can be read and subscribed to. (more…)