3pointD.com

Graphic novelist (now there’s a double entendre) Warren Ellis launched his column for Reuters’ Second Life bureau today. Ellis’s take on the recent griefing of Second Life land baron Anshe Chung is refreshingly honest. Ellis writes of Anshe’s “desperation to drop the incident down an Orwellian memory hole” with the DMCA-like notices Anshe’s typists have been sending around. This is exactly correct; there’s no rights violation in a media outlet publishing a shot of an incident that took place in public, even if copyrighted material is contained in the image. Of course, most of the media outlets that did publish those shots (of Anshe being assaulted by a flock of flying penises during an interview with CNet) are hardly concerned. (more…)

The screenshot at left is lifted from a BlogHUD post by Second Life user CDB Barkley, which flags a shared markerboard created by user Cubist Scarborough, which you can see in the Cottonwood sim. It’s a pretty nice piece of work. You sit on one of a handful of chairs and click through to a Web page, where you can draw in various colors, as well as erase. Everyone’s contributions show up on the same board, which refreshes itself in SL every five seconds or so. (more…)

The MobVend vendor for the virtual world of Second Life has been around for about six weeks or so, but it’s interesting enough that I wanted to flag it here. A product of SL user Shep Korvin, the vendor sets prices on its items according to how many people are standing around it at a given moment. The bigger the crowd, the lower the price. You can buy at any time, but once the item hits its lowest price, the vendor sends a chat message to the crowd: you have only one minute to buy at that price before the price pops up to the top again and the process starts all over. (more…)