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Seems NBC so enjoyed its virtual Christmas tree lighting in Second Life that they’re back for more. Next Wednesday, December 20, the network will bring reggae rockers O.A.R. and funky gospel dude Robert Randolph to the virtual Peacock Room at the top of their Rockefeller Center replica, starting at 6:25pm SL time (9:25pm Eastern). Once again, the event will be produced by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) and replicated across multiple sims (this time NBC1 through NBC10). Nice to see a major media company coming back for a second helping of Second Life. Look for more such initiatives from more such companies in more such worlds in future.

EVE Online gives rise to some of the most interesting economic gameplay in any MMO. EVE fans and those who pay attention to these kinds of things may remember the EVE alliance known as Interstellar Starbase Syndicate Operations, which started selling shares in its in-game outposts (huge, player-built and player-run space stations) to the public almost 18 months ago. Now, ISS is going one step further, and is selling shares in the alliance itself. It’s non-voting stock, but it turns the alliance into something different, something that’s rarely if ever been seen in EVE before: a mega-corporation that’s beholden to its shareholders, a company that will publish financial statements, and whose first order of business will be the maximisation of shareholder value. With its IPO, which is still under way, ISS is seeking to take emergent economic gameplay to another level in EVE, and is making a pretty fascinating step toward a new kind of player-generated content in the game. I just had a chat with ISS principals Count TaSessine and Serenity Steele, who had interesting things to say about both their in-game goals, and about the kinds of gameplay they want to help generate in EVE. Their plan is so ambitious that it almost constitutes a kind of user-generated patch to gameplay. (more…)

IBM, which just launched a business group to pursue opportunities in virtual worlds, will make some of its private islands in the virtual world of Second Life open to the public starting next week (from around 18 December), to showcase some of the company’s early work and experimentation. There aren’t a lot of details on this yet (since the islands aren’t yet public), but some of the things IBM will be showcasing on the islands, according to the company, include the following:

Virtual business, or v-business – exploring how to extend business opportunities into virtual worlds, but also how to apply virtual worlds to business problems and opportunities.

Collaboration and education – focusing on how to extend virtual worlds to help business collaborate both internally and externally in ways that more closely resemble real life, and where we are using these immersive, 3D environments to simplify complex concepts by “showing” them in a visual fashion.

Innovation and experimentation – working with a broad community to push the limits of what is possible with virtual worlds and to build a community to help build out the next generation Web, one that is immersive, interactive and 3D.

It sounds like IBM is shooting high with their virtual worlds ambition. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve come up with so far, and hearing more about what they’re planning.

We knew that IBM had two researchers officially poking around in the virtual world of Second Life, but now comes news from CNet that the company is setting up a business group specifically to address opportunities in Second Life and other virtual worlds. It seems the effort is being led by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president of technical strategy and innovation. This could be a seriously interesting development, as it will bring IBM’s weight to bear on the challenge of making Second Life and other virtual worlds and similar platforms into more useful and functional places. (IBM has also mentioned it will be working with the Multiverse world-building platform in some form.) If you ask me, that’s one of the most important things that virtual worlds still need to bring to the table; they need to demonstrate ways they can be easily useful to broad numbers of people. So far, we haven’t really seen it happen, except as entertainment. Here’s hoping IBM’s move helps make these places a useful part of more people’s lives.

The Electric Sheep Company is hiring. The Sheep are apparently looking for everyone from entry-level builders and texturers on up to project managers and the like. Only the excellent need apply, of course: no wind-up sheep or steam-powered sheep will likely get in the door. If you think you’ve got what it takes to become an eSheep, help build the metaverse and work with Sheep clients like NBC, Edelman, Major League Baseball, the Sundance Channel and all the rest, drop a line to contact@electricsheepcompany expressing your interest. Good luck!

Check out the Grid Review, the new project from the Electric Sheep Company (3pointD sponsor, etc.) and PR agency Edelman. Launched to bring news of the grid via short machinima pieces, the service premieres with, among other things, a hilarious interview with the “avatar” everyone loves to hate, CopyBot. Talented machinimists Nylon Pinkney and moo Money will be the anchor anchors, but the Sheep are also soliciting submissions from residents — and I believe there may be some facility in the works to help you produce those pieces, though I’m not entirely sure. At any rate, it should be a good source for entertaining video news of Second Life. Another first?

The Sundance Channel is coming to the virtual world of Second Life in January, with a virtual premiere of 3pointD’s favorite movie of recent weeks, Four Eyed Monsters, according to a press release. “Sundance Channel’s SL screening room will be used to showcase films, documentaries, shorts and original series and to host unique interactive events with filmmakers and other independent thinkers,” according to the release. The Electric Sheep Company (who sponsor this blog) will be building out the Sundance presence in SL. Like their Aloft project, the Sundance build will also be accompanied by a blog, which will document the construction, provide information on SL itself, and give updates on upcoming events being held at the virtual screening room. All of which sounds very cool to me, especially the opportunity to see new films like Four Eyed Monsters in SL before they’re widely available elsewhere. And how long will it be before we start to see machinima at the Sundance Festival? See you in Park City.

Second Life resident Hiro Pendragon sends word of a new company claiming to be “the 1st market research institute on Second life.” Known as Reperes Second Life, it sounds like the firm will, among other things, keep a close eye on SL trends; offer consultative services, including some form of focus grouping; and provide a space for test launches. The company is the virtual arm of the French market research company of the same name, who seem to be doing interesting work in the real world. I’m not entirely sure if they’re actually the first such firm in SL, or if they’ve just caught a case of the recent first-itis that’s going around, but I’m not too concerned. I imagine there will be a lot of call for such services if SL continues to grow and companies start to find new, better and less intrusive ways of offering their goods and services there. The SL platform also offers unprecedented opportunities for market researchers, since there are many more metrics of interaction than can be tracked in the physical world. In the real world, for instance, it’s impossible to know how many people picked up your product without buying it, unless you do some elaborate work with either surveillance cameras, or clipboards and ergonomic shoes. In SL, it’s a much easier matter to figure out who’s clicking and buying, and who’s clicking and leaving. And there are many more such measurements that can be had. This space will get especially interesting if firms like Reperes start releasing public reports on the SL market. Any other companies like this out there?

Trinity Unviersity professor and Terra Nova author Aaron Delwiche sends word that he and SL resident Adri Saarinen have started up a new metaverse services firm, known as Metaversatility. The company has already recruited a number of SL residents and others to help out, and has a small but growing portfolio of projects — including an »in-world location« for ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is a cool client to have. “Our client list continues to grow, and there are more and more projects on the horizon,” Delwiche says. That’s what’s most remarkable to me: There still seems to be a lot more demand for such services than there is supply. Start-ups are immediately busy, notable builders and scripters are still being hired off the Grid, and projects continue to roll out in a steady (increasing?) stream. The market, at least for the moment, remains bullish on SL. (Though one recent report questions whether usage statistics are growing as quickly as registration figures would make it seem.)

Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth reports that Google Earth has added two new layers to its default set, and created a new directory for “Geographic Web.” Now included in Google Earth’s default placemark sets are georeferenced articles from Wikipedia and georeferenced photos from photo-sharing site Panoramio. Adding these as default layers is a nice way to promote what Google’s calling the geographic Web. It moves flat Web pages closer to 3D functionality. All that’s needed to complete the circle is for people to add links in Wikipedia’s georeferenced pages that launch Google Earth at the appropriate placemarks.

Second Life resident Tateru Nino has a very perceptive post on Second Life Insider yesterday. The post points out a new phenomenon in “camping chairs.” These are usually located at nightclubs, and allow users to earn a trickle of Linden dollars (usually something less than L$50 an hour, that last time I looked) simply for parking one’s avatar’s butt in a chair and remaining there for a period of time. (Most people simply walk away from their computers once they’ve sat down.) The users gets “free” money, and the club owners get high traffic ratings, which push their location up in the charts, making it easier to find, thus attracting more traffic and, hopefully, more revenue. But as Tateru writes, some club owners have recently started installing camping objects that put users’ avatars through the paces of erotic dance. “Is there a qualitative difference here between these and the regular dance-pad/camping chair vulturing?” Tateru asks. “Does this cross the line, or should we consider this more-of-the-same?” Interesting questions. Related: If you saw an avatar doing the erotic zombie dance, would that taint that avatar’s reputation for you? Consider the fact that there’s no one at the controls. It’s like the tree falling in the forest. If an avatar strokes its breasts in public while there’s no one behind the keyboard, does that make them naughty?

Or at least, we’re talking to one of the Big Brother Second Life contestants on SecondCast #46. In this case, it’s TheDivaRockin, who’s a podcaster herself, as well as being a hoot of a guest — and having made it through to the second round! One thing I liked about having TheDiva on the show was that she was one of the few guests we’ve had who seemed to treat Second Life as just another corner of the Internet, rather than as some mystical place that’s an escape from anything “real.” And she has some energy, and is not afraid to dish. A fun show.

As noted, I did a panel last night on lifelogging with Jerry Paffendorf and Susan and Arin of the film Four Eyed Monsters, which is playing for another week at Cinema Village in New York. I don’t know if anyone had a good idea of what they were going to talk about ahead of time, but the panel turned out to be a lot of fun for us, and seemed to be an interesting experience for the audience, who were happy to share their thoughts with us in turn.

One of the things we touched on was how one expresses identity online, through means like MySpace, YouTube, blogs or your behavior in an online world. One of the things that’s most interesting to me about the film is how Susan and Arin expressed their identities to each other in an offline context. Before they even met, they decided that they’d communicate simply through written notes rather than speaking. Though they speak freely to each other now, the film chronicles some interesting moments in their relationship: not just the moments when one or the other of them found the notes too much to bear, but just the way they unfolded themselves to each other through writing, a much slower process than through speaking, as we normally would. The written word, of course, carries a lot less information than the voice. Not only are there vocal inflections and mannerisms to read, but there’s an element of spontaneity that writing can’t capture. Susan and Arin forgo that channel, though, in favor of getting to know each other through the much narrower band of text. As Jerry pointed out, it’s almost as if their relationship took place in text chat. (more…)

Fans of the short-lived series Firefly will be interested to learn that the show’s ‘verse will be turned into a massively multiplayer online game on the Multiverse platform, at least a beta version of which should be available by sometime in 2008. I’ve just done a story on it for Wired.com, where you can read more details, but note that they haven’t chosen a development team yet, so it’s anyone’s guess what the final game will look and feel like. Here’s hoping it’s as cool as the series. Which rocked.

iVillage, an online community for women established in 1995, is coming to the virtual world of Second Life in the form of a bi-weekly Girls Night Out that will seek to showcase existing content rather than draw people to a branded location, according to Marc Schiller, CEO of digital brand strategy firm Electric Artists, which is launching the initiative in partnership with the Electric Sheep Company (who are, of course, sponsors of this blog). Every two weeks, according to Schiller, a different curator will lead a group of iVillage members on a short tour of interesting locations around Second Life. Tours will take in things like tutorials, music, interesting builds and many other subjects, and will also seek to “highlight the great women who are doing amazing things in Second Life,” he said. The first tour, led by Electric Sheep Cory Edo, will kick off on Thursday, December 14th. (more…)

Reader Richard Hensler just drew my attention to UniveRSS, a 3D RSS feed reader for Windows Vista. My first reaction was, “So what?” But my second reaction was, “Perfect! I need this right away.” Why? Because the size and position of the icons representing each feed in the UniveRSS window is determined by the number of unread items each contains. I don’t know about you, but I have so many feeds in my reader that they’re almost impossible to navigate. A 3D representation of them, sorted in this way, would make them much more useful. My third reaction was, “Why not let us arrange them by relevance, or in some other manner?” But we can do that ourselves, since not only can you download the application, but you can even download the source code itself. Now all I need is Vista, heh.

If you’re free Thursday night and in New York, drop by the Four Eyed Monsters screenings at Cinema Village, where I’ll be on a panel about lifelogging, along with Susan and Arin, who made the movie, and Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company (who are, of course, kind sponsors of this blog). If you’re not in New York, you should be able to see it in Second Life soon enough, which is very cool. The film is ace, all about a young couple (Susan and Arin) who meet on MySpace and document their budding relationship in great detail. Read more about Four Eyed Monsters and lifelogging in this post of mine from back in September. Should be an interesting evening. The panel goes off between the 7:25pm and 9:35pm screenings.

As previously noted, I spent much of Friday and Saturday at the joint State of Play / Terra Nova symposium at the New York Law School. I’m always happy to spend a couple of days talking virtual worlds with a lot of smart people, and the symposium was no disappointment in that regard. Great panels were held on governance, methodologies of study, diversity, taxation and learning, but what was hardly touched on were the putative topics of the meeting: “How did we get here?” and “Where now?” As revealed below, however, there was much to be learned about both those topics at the symposium. (more…)

Bill Lichtenstein of Lichtenstein Creative Media sends news that his firm is bringing actress Mia Farrow to the virtual world of Second Life this Friday at 9am SL time (noon Eastern), to discuss the worsening situation in Darfur and Chad. The event is being put on in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and produced by in collaboration with Infinite Vision Media. It will also replicate in SL a photography exhibition which projected images of the Darfur crisis onto the walls of the holocaust museum (as pictured above), which is great if you live someplace in which visiting the museum is inconvenient or impossible. If you have a Second Life account, you can teleport directly.

We all need our rest. Some of us, though, catch our catnaps at more vulnerable times than others. For that reason, I’ve coined the term geeksleep, which hasn’t exactly caught on since I started using it in March, but still has enough breath left in its lungs to keep knocking at the door of global Internet meme-hood. What exactly is geeksleep? Well, as defined in Geeksleep #1, it’s the following:

Geeksleep: (noun) 1. the act of sleeping during a technology conference or while involved in any geek-like activity. 2. sleep performed by anyone who could be described as a geek. (verb) 1. to capture a geeksleeper on camera and post his/her picture to Flickr with the “geeksleep” tag.

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I had the honor yesterday of chatting with Reuben Steiger, CEO of virtual-world services company Millions of Us, for the first in a series of podcasts he plans to do from his car during his 15-minute drive to work each morning. (I’m calling this technique “roadcasting.”) We mostly covered the State of Play / Terra Nova symposium I’d been at, but Reuben also started a betting pool going as to how many registered users Second Life would garner by the end of the year. Free to enter, prize is US$500 in cold, hard, taxable cash. Give us a listen.

Rivers Run Red sends word of the second annual Avalon Film Festival they’re holding this week in the virtual world of Second Life, in association with 4 Talent and The Guardian. Through December 11th, you can watch 80 different short films — including dramas, documentaries, animated films and machinima — in what sounds like a very cool »venue«, an enormous Zeppelin airship, floating high above Avalon Island. There’s even a cute little festival guide, in PDF format, that you can download. A number of Second Life films will be on display (check the guide for scheduling), as well as short documentaries with cool-sounding names like Subverting the City (shown here). If it gives us a peek into something called the Office of Subversive Architecture, I’m all for it.

Well, it’s official. Actually, it’s the official guide to Second Life, out now (or rather, as of this Wednesday) from Wiley. I’ve paged through most of it already and it looks like a pretty good guide for finding your feet in the virtual world. Why do I have a copy already? The same reason it’s kind of hard for me to give it a terribly unbiased review: I wrote two chapters of the thing. So go buy it now! To be honest, though, I’ve already learned a couple of things about inventory management and stuff like that from it. The thing is, Second Life changes so quickly and so much, even the software behind the world, that it remains to be seen how useful the book will be over time. All part of a nefarious plan to sell multiple editions, I imagine. One thing valuable about grabbing this edition: There’s a lot of good history in there, and a record of current builds and communities that are archived on no other pages (except here and there around the Web). In any case, I recommend a purchase, not least because some very small portion of it will go to support 3pointD.

The Great Games Experiment is “a social networking community for gamers, developers and publishers to play, show off, promote and ultimately enjoy games.” Sounds good to me. Raph Koster blogged this recently, along with two other sites that fall under what he’s calling “YouTube for games.” I think the Experiment sounds most cool to me. (The others seem more narrowly focused.) I haven’t got a beta invite yet, but it seems to be a kind of Friendster or LinkedIn for those interested in games. Will this be any more useful than any other games-related forum? Who knows. But the ability to form connections to other people in the community suggests it might. More information if I can actually get in.

Rivers Run Red’s latest project is to bring Philips Design to the virtual world of Second Life, where they will seek to “gain feedback on innovation concepts, engage residents in cocreation and gain a deeper understanding of potential opportunities in this virtual environment.” Sounds like a nice way to enter the virtual world. (more…)

The device sounds cooler than the headline, trust me. It’s the TrackClip PRO from a company called NaturalPoint, and it turns your headset into a mouselook controller. Clip it onto your headset, and the motion of your head controls the direction of your view on screen, freeing up your mouse hand for more important matters, presumably. Check out this Flash animation to see how it works (though be sure to mute the annoing music). I can’t tell from the site whether you need to mod your games to use it, but there’s a longish list of TrackIR enhanced games that apparently already support the peripheral — including Flight Simulator X, GTR and GTR2, and even EVE Online. In any case, modding it in shouldn’t be all that hard, considering how easy it was to convert Half-Life 2 for the cool 3D haptic mouse from Novint. And the price? Only $39.95 Around $200. Of course, I can’t tell you whether it actually works or not, since I haven’t actually tried it out (and actually, there’s the potential for it to be highly annoying), but I like the idea.

I spent Friday and Saturday at the joint State of Play / Terra Nova symposium at the New York Law School. There was a lot of interesting talk, but probably none more so than the panel on taxation and virtual worlds that was held Saturday morning. Dan Terdiman has an excellent wrap on CNet, though I feel like his take is slightly alarmist. To the tax lawyers at the symposium, taxation of virtual assets seemed only a matter of time. But to the emissary from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, a gamer himself, the picture looked more grey. Either way, it was clear that the debate was slowly reaching higher levels of policymaking circles, and that it’s only a matter of time (and maybe not that much) before Congress or the IRS starts making rulings that directly affect players of online games and the residents of virtual worlds like Second Life. (more…)

Trevor Smith of the Ogoglio project (”exploring shared 3D spaces in the context of Web-enabled work”), will discuss the synthetic world he’s developing for businesses, on Tuesday, December 5, at 10pm Eastern time, in Second Life. [UPDATE: The event has been moved to Sheep Tower, at »Sheep Island (134, 134, 113)«. A former Xerox PARC researcher, Smith will talk about using 3D Web spaces to “meet with remote coworkers, collaborate using new tools, integrate existing business applications, and enjoy the benefits of being in the same office with people in different time zones.” Trevor’s a smart guy, so this should prove to be a very interesting talk. There’s a brief announcement of the talk, which will be held »in the Mill Pond sim«, on the Synthetic World News blog of Indiana University.

• PRESS RELEASE Whyville Launches Virtual World Influenza Vaccination Campaign in Partnership With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  “The citizens of Whyville will have the opportunity to receive a flu shot which will result in immunity to the “Why-Flu,” a simulated virtual version of common influenza. Similar to a real flu, the Why-Flu will is transmitted between by “contact” in the v
  (tags: advertising mmo virtual influenza virus)