3pointD.com

Rezzible is a Web site building and hosting service that lets you associate a Web site with your identity in the virtual world of Second Life. This is interesting for reasons described below, but more immediately interesting to me is an associated product that lets you put text on a Second Life message board via a Web interface. (It’s the orange sign in the image at left. Both were built by SL resident Barry Walcher.) Dynamic text in Second Life is still a crude affair, and must be accomplished using objects with letter textures already on them instead of any kind of actual text parser. But I like the idea of a message board with a Web-based input channel, so that you can update public, in-world information on the fly. I don’t think there are many other (any other?) apps that do this. (more…)

What a week to be away. While I was busy chatting to fans of the best MMO going, the virtual world of Second Life was getting its knickers in a twist over something called CopyBot, an application that intercepts data flowing between the Second Life servers and client and can be used to re-create objects that would otherwise not be copyable. For a variety of reasons, perhaps chief among them the fact that many people earn not insubstantial incomes selling their creations in Second Life, the episode has roiled the community in some pretty ugly ways. (For reference, here is the del.icio.us page and the Digg page on the topic.) I’m unavoidably late to the blogging game on this, so rather than recap the controversy in depth, I’ll look at something I think the CopyBot episode helps illustrate on a broader scale: the fact that Second Life has now grown to the point at which it’s no longer possible to speak of the “community” I just mentioned in a meaningful way. Second Life is no longer the walled garden that it was perhaps originally intended to be, but now belongs to the billion-plus users of the World Wide Web. Interestingly, though, that kind of community is still possible in SL, it just takes a bit more work. (more…)