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Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has cooked up some nice graphs of the L$ currency used in the virtual world of Second Life, based on a new release of data from Linden Lab. The graphs clearly show things like the dip in value in May of last year, around the time Anshe hit the cover of Business Week, which kicked off a flood of press and new users. Around the same time, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale was also speaking about SL’s economy, and the lab was hit by a lawsuit that got a lot of press. The Lab also went live with SL economic data on May 9. I think there were also a few Grid attacks and perhaps a change to stipends around the same time. What’s more interesting about the graphs, though, is that they clearly show the exchange rate having been more or less stable through heavily rising trading volumes and the increase in sign-ups over the last year. Interesting stuff. Next up: someone start the SL Bureau of Economic Statistics I’ve wanted to see since I got to SL more than two years ago.

It still hasn’t snowed here in Brooklyn (Capital of the Metaverse), but you can now make it snow in the virtual world of Second Life — or at least, you can make it snow somewhere near your intended target, by using Ordinal Malaprop’s new snowball launchers, which I blogged a few days ago but which are now available for sale. There’s a free snowball rifle and two premium products available at Ordinal’s Steampunk shop »in the Caledon sim«, as well as a video on Ordinal’s blog. Happy new year!

As readers may recall, Mia Farrow’s appearance in the virtual world of Second Life to discuss the crisis in Darfur, originally slated for last month, had to be rescheduled due to a fire in the office building that houses Lichtenstein Creative Media, which is helping produce the event. The new date is Tuesday, 9 January, at 11am SL time (2pm Eastern). The event will also feature John Heffernan, who serves as Director of the Genocide Prevention Initiative for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, the sponsor of the program; award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv; and Ronan Farrow, who has served as a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth in Sudan, as a representative of the Genocide Intervention Network, and has written extensively about the situation in Darfur. One interesting aspect of the event is that while it take place in The Infinite Mind sim in Second Life, streaming audio will also be available at Camp Darfur, and at Global Kids, on the Second Life Teen Grid. (Is this the first time an event has been audio simulcast into the Teen Grid?) Visit the Lichtenstein site for more information.