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Second Life resident Mark Barrett, who’s been providing community tools and collecting interesting information about the Grid at SLStats.com, SLBuzz.com and SLTags.com, recently cobbled together a nice graph showing the growth of SL’s land area, which I’m happy to present above. While Second Life’s economic statistics page gives some data on how many “private islands” are out there (i.e., regions not part of the mainland), it doesn’t give a total figure for the land masses present in Second Life. Mark’s figures, while not 100 percent accurate, should be close, and give a very good picture of one aspect of Second Life’s growth since he started collecting the data about six weeks ago — in which time the SL land area has grown almost 15 percent, from under 3,600 16-acre sims to over 4,000. (Almost half of these are private islands, according to LL’s economics page.) According to Mark, Linden Lab is adding some 10 to 20 regions every day. It will be interesting to see how this growth curve changes, if at all, given the recent increae in prices for islands not on the mainland. (more…)

Two new episodes of SecondCast, Johnny Ming’s weekly podcast about the virtual world of Second Life, on which I’m a regular co-host, just hit the pipes. Episode 40 is one of our regular newscasts — though a particularly cogent and informative one, for a change. Episode 39, on the other hand, is a horse of an entirely different color, being our first full-length machinima podcast, in anticipation of the upcoming Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences annual machinima festival, being held this weekend. Johnny, Torrid, Lordfly, Cris, moo Money and I spend some time checking out recent Second Life machinima entries — in a style that may remind you of a certain television show that featured silhouetted avatars viewing other people’s movies. NOTE: Don’t forget to check out the machinima festival in Second Life this Thursday, when a preview of some SL work will be running. Read more at Rik Riel’s blog.

Like any good work of religious architecture, perhaps, the First Second Life Church of Elvis creates a paradoxical container that is at once about being woven together with others in a community yet completely naked before a higher power. In this case, that higher power wears a pompadour.

But then again, so did I. They were handing them out at the door.

The build sits on a mere 512 square meters of First Land in the sim of Nampo (slurl link). Its 117 prims, while representative of one of the humble gable-roofed churches found in rural areas across North America, also happen to be hovering in the air, fused with bling and iconography of the The King. Fittingly, a yellow porcelain toilet sits at the apse end from which the clergy (including the Right Reverend Elvis Faust and his associate SpaceProphet Jay (who kinda looked like a young Darth Vegas)) deliver their services. The pews are emblazoned with the visage of the man originally known as The Hilbilly Cat, allowing attendees to take part in a ceremonious sitting on of his face.

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