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AOL’s sticky wall at AOL Pointe

The AOL Pointe project, AOL’s presence in the virtual world of Second Life (which we published a sneak peek at on Friday), has its official opening today, and the early notices are very favorable. Hiro Pendragon weighs in on the variety of activities available there, while the Second Life Insider has a great pictorial tour. I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing their shot (see above) of AOL’s “sticky wall,” which seems to be everyone’s favorite feature. Credit here goes to the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), who seem to have done quite a job of dreaming up diversions for Second Life residents new and old. There are also quite a few events listed on this months AOL Pointe calendar. (more…)

This isn’t specifically Second Life-related, but it’s a project that a Second Life resident is helping to run and it’s very cool, so I thought I’d mention it here. SL resident Jeremy Neumann helped bring excerpts from the seminal metaversal novel Snow Crash to Second Life last August. Now, in the guise of his real-world avatar Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Pengiun Books UK, he’s created and launched a very interesting collaborative novel that’s being written by many people at once on a wiki. Anyone can contribute, and anyone can edit anyone else’s writing. The novel has been seeded with contributions from a team of MA students, but over the next six weeks anyone will be able to contribute, after which, it sounds like, pages will be locked and the novel “published,” at least in Web-based digital form. The progress will be chronicled on the Penguin blog. Already the wiki site has proved so popular that high volumes of traffic are forcing Penguin to switch in some heavier-hitting servers. No one at Penguin is making any claims for the quality of the finished product — they just want to see what will happen, and explore the results of crowdsourcing an artisitic work like a novel. I’m all for it. I’d love to see this kind of thing in Second Life, as well, whether it’s something made from words or prims. How can we make that happen?

Speaking of conventions, I’ve just got the news from Second Life resident ZATZAi Asturias that a Second Convention will be held in Second Life, March 1-3. It looks like a well thought-out couple of days providing mostly entertainment and some showcasing of interesting stuff from the virtual world. The forum posting announcing the convention doesn’t say whether you have to register before you show up or how the organizers will handle an embarrassment of avatars, should they show, but hopefully things will work out. [UPDATE: The convention will be held in the »Artificial Isle« region of SL.] A couple of people have mentioned to me that they’d like to hold larger conventions in Second Life to mirror the kinds of conventions you find in the real world, but this is the first one I’ve heard about. Sounds like fun.

It’s conference season, and 3pointD is hitting the road to flap our gums (or mine, anyway, if I could get out of the third person) at a handful of cool upcoming events. First up is the ScreenBurn festival at South by Southwest Interactive. I did a presentation at ScreenBurn last year, along with Peter Ludlow, on our brilliant work over at the Second Life Herald. At that point, ScreenBurn, which covers the gaming industry, was crammed into one corner of a huge empty hall with a few dozen chairs set around a makeshift podium. This year it graduates to the big leagues, taking place upstairs alongside SXSWi. On March 12 I’ll be running a panel on Gamer’s Games: Microcontent and User Creation, which should hopefully cover everything from making skirts in There.com and Second Life on up to building worlds in Multiverse and Areae. Chatting with me will be There’s Betsy Book, Reuben Steiger of virtual world services firm Millions of Us, Multiverse’s Corey Bridges, and Raph Koster, who by then will be able to give more details on just what his new shop, Areae, is working on. This should be a really fun panel, as pretty much all of us know each other already, so I’m hoping for something more chatty and interactive than the usual fare. (more…)

An experimental three-way conversation about the future of virtual worlds is taking place among Clay Shirky, Henry Jenkins and Beth Coleman, the first round of which is now complete with Beth’s recent post. I find myself reluctant to even blog about this, as most of the conversation leading up to this point (kicked off by some tendentious posts by Shirky over at ValleyWag) has been counter-productive for those who actually want to make some kind of even-handed inquiry into what’s happening with 3D online technologies. But the present round of blog posts from Shirky, Jenkins and Coleman seems more balanced, including Shirky’s. Unfortunately, the result is that not all that much is being said that’s really new, at least, not to my eye. Shirky is right to question Second Life’s adoption numbers (when he can put aside the vitriol he’s directed against the press; that’s a separate issue), but they’ve been questioned many times before. Jenkins’s post is interesting for putting virtual worlds in the broader context of participatory culture. I think Beth Coleman’s, though, does the most to push the conversation forward. Instead of arguing over which part of the elephant is the right one to examine, she pushes some ideas out to us for adoption and/or consideration, including the need for a standard measurement of usage, whether such world will be created in our image, and the need for interoperability and stronger communications between virtual worlds and the other technologies through which we communicate and manipulate information. This last section even includes a line that sums up my own view about virtual worlds and about what I’m doing here on 3pointD: “What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication.” Win.