3pointD.com

• BLDGBLOG: The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations: An Interview with Simon Sellars
  BLDGBLOG interview w/ the author of Lonely Planet’s Guide to Micronastions. “…basically a guidebook to teeny-tiny nations with self-declared sovereignty, oftentimes established in someone’s backyard.”
  (tags: architecture books design interviews reality)
• Vigilance 1.0
  “Prevented from using his critical sense by the lure of success, the player faces a double bind : while he still plays the part of the unrelenting lover of justice, he becomes conscious that to play the game is in a way to play against the discourse of th
  (tags: art camera culture design game government security software surveillance)

Linda Zimmer over at Business Communicators of SL flags what sounds like a very cool application: a downloadable 3D browser called 3B that allows you take existing 2D Web content and make an avatarized 3D space out of it that others can visit. From the site: “3B allows you take any web sites or photos and place them in a personalized 3D space, your 3B village. You can use MySpace, Hi5 or Bebo pages or photos you’ve loaded onto Flickr, Photobucket or any other web service.” Cool. I’m really looking forward to checking this out, as a MySpace-to-Second Life importer is one of the things on my personal technology wish list. 3B sounds like not much more than a way to paste flat Web pages onto the walls of a 3D environment, but it raises some interesting possibilities. It also remains to be seen whether this kind of thing has the community-building and self-expressive power of a place like Second Life. But what interests me about it is that it could be an easier way to get Web users into 3D online spaces. And as we know, getting a critical mass of people into such environments often leads to truly fascinating things that the developers hadn’t envisioned. More reports to come.

Adam Pasick (aka Adam Reuters in SL), the Reuters correspondent covering Second Life, sends word that he’ll be conducting two in-world interviews this week with business heavyweights who might be of interest to many SL residents: Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime and Warner Music chief executive Edgar Bronfman. Both will have their own avatars and take questions from residents as well. (more…)