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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.

Metaverse development company Rivers Run Red will open a California studio this Friday, January 5, according to Rivers CEO Justin Bovington. With a staff of seven and headed by a fellow names Ben James, Rivers’ west-coast operation will be located in San Francisco and will cater to the company’s existing clients, including Adidas , and also work on “a number of projects which have called for a global team presence.” (The company is based in London.) This is another indicator that the flow of virtual projects is not slowing yet and in fact is only growing. Whether that’s sustainable or just a temporary trend is a matter of hot debate elsewhere in the metaversal blogosphere at the moment, but for now it seems that the people who earn their livings bringing new corporate entrants into virtual worlds are doing just fine.

Second Life’s Adam Reuters (aka Real Life’s Adam Pasick) was kind enough to drop me an early version of the new Reuters NewsHUD that will soon be released in Second Life. The new HUD not only displays Reuters SL and RL headlines, but can also display several feeds of the user’s choice (you can see recent 3pointD headlines showing in the HUD in the image above), and pulls in headlines from Koz Farina’s BlogHUD.com. One interesting feature is that the BlogHUD feed is customizable to show either all BlogHUD headlines, or headlines from the region the user is in. The HUD also has a tab showing SL financial statistics. All very nice and useful, and a good example of a nice way to pull information into SL from the outside world, something which has been difficult in the past (though SL feedreaders do exist). While the new Reuters NewsHUD isn’t out yet, it should be available in a matter of days at the »Reuters bureau« in Second Life.

I’m not sure how long this has been around, but I just came across it in a BlogHUD post by Jaishree Bengal, and it’s a great idea: a kind of floating tour bus for use in the virtual world of Second Life. Controlled through a heads-up attachment, the Pied Piper unit lets you create a 1-, 3-, 8- or 14-seat floating platform — which then follows you around as you walk or fly around a sim or from sim to sim (though not when teleporting, of course). Created by SL resident Deep Semaphore, the Pied Piper seems ideal for giving tours of a private island or a large build of whatever type. Seasoned SL users know how to use the mini-map to follow their friend’s green dot around a sim (if it isn’t too crowded), but if you haven’t mastered that trick yet, following someone around can be quite challenging. The Pied Piper looks like a good way to solve that problem. You can get one at the »CryoGen Cloning Facility« — though they may be slightly expensive, at L$875. Fortunately, there’s a free trial version there (which disappears after a minute or two), which you can also pick up at »3pointD Labs«. Let the tours commence!

Episode 48 of SecondCast, our weekly podcast about Second Life, is now on the air. We cover Christmas presents and game consoles and get into some of the more interesting corporate initiatives in the virtual world of Second Life, including the Grid Review, and Pontiac’s Motorati Life, both of which are great examples of promotional undertakings which mesh with and add to native SL culture. We wring our hands a bit over the hand-wringing about Second Life’s population, and Cristiano and I get into a good old-fashioned, chair-throwing smackdown over the issue of Prokofy Neva’s having been harassed over the real-world telephone by what seems to be a virtual-world nemesis. All good stuff. Happy new year.

Over at the Second Life Herald we have a long tradition (well, a tradition as old as the paper itself: three years and change) of giving out three “avatar of the year” awards every January for the virtual personae who had the greatest impact on the news over the preceding 12 months. This year’s first-place winner is CopyBot, the Second Life avatar- and object-copying program, whom we’ve immortalized with Uri’s Ballad of CopyBot over at the Herald. Two of the three awards this year went to abstractions (Time stole the idea from us, naming “You” as its Person of the Year). Second Place was taken by the unverified masses of Second Life, i.e., free accounts with no payment information on file, which caused quite a stir earlier this year, as well as helping to swell SL’s ranks. Third Place went to Mark Barrett, creator of SLStats, which had many residents up in arms because of perceived privacy infringement. (more…)