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Call me Mad Dog Winters. (I’ll explain in a sec.) The Mini Cooper, everyone’s favorite cute little British car, is teaming up with Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us to bring a cool-sounding promotion for the new Cooper S to the virtual world of Second Life. The thing I especially like about this project is that it offers a contest/game that’s played not just in SL, but on a handful of Web 2.0 sites as well, which, as regular readers know, is one of my favorite kinds of mashups. (more…)

Dutch bankers ING, in partnership with metaverse services company Rivers Run Red, are getting ready to set up a virtual Holland within the virtual world of Second Life. While the OurVirtualHolland project’s Web site doesn’t say how many sims it will cover, it sounds a substantial project, featuring Dutch architecture, landscapes, windmills, tulip fields, and even deltaworks, as well as what sounds like a virtual Formula 1 racetrack. (ING is the title sponsor of the ING Renault Formula 1 team.) Residents will be able to own land and run businesses there (i.e., it’s a place designed to attract residents, not just visitors), and the virtual Holland will come complete with its own third-party registation site and orientation experience. The project will be built and opened in stages, but ING notes, “We expect a first release to be ready in weeks not months.” (more…)

Rik Riel has a nice video on his blog showing off the »Roma sim« in the virtual world of Second Life. The Grid is down at the moment or I’d go check it out, but it looks like a nice build. A no-fly zone, the sim comes complete with a market, religious buildings, and what look like working chariot races and a gladiator’s arena, as well as several interactive educational displays. It’s nice work, and Rik’s video tour is nice work as well. Worth checking out.

A fun new episode of everyone’s favorite Second Life podcast, SecondCast, is now on the air (or on the site, rather). It’s our one-year anniversary, and incredibly, we’ve actually managed to average an episode a week, making this one #52. Johnny, Torrid, Lordfly, Cristiano and myself take a walk down memory lane, reminiscing about fruit griefing, field trips and SecondCast’s own war of the worlds. We also cover some news of the day. Happy Birthday, us!

Quick follow-up to my post about using Google Earth to help survive in Iraq: podcaster Johnny Ming sends along a link to this story from last month about Iraqi insurgents using Google Earth to pinpoint coalition targets. “Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google,” the story says. “The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.” Just a reminder that technology makes no value judgments; it can as easily be used for destructive purposes as for benevolent ones.

Architecture Island, from SL resident Keystone Bouchard’s Flickr stream

Regular readers are aware that I often pine for a 3D wiki for the virtual world of Second Life, something akin to the one Hiro Pendragon made some time ago. I’d love to see an object that many people could modify in some way, which could be rolled back to earlier versions or have individual modifications ratified somehow by the group. Turns out I’m not the only one. I recently noticed an interesting discussion on The ARCH, an excellent blog on virtual architecture, about the possibilities for collaborative design mechanisms in Second Life (complete with transcript). Keystone Bouchard, who runs The ARCH, puts the problem nicely: “Is true Wikitecture and collaborative asynchronous design possible in Second Life? If so, what kinds of tools, scripts and rules might be necessary? Some exciting ideas are already beginning to surface.”

The transcript is a bit too long for me to read all the way through at the moment, but some interesting ideas appear there. A couple of my favorite come from a resident named Theory Shaw: (more…)

From the Metaverse in Real-World Governance department: the BBC ran an interesting story recently about the possibility that Iraqis might be able to use Google Earth to plan escape routes and make themselves safer from terrorist and milita attacks. [Spotted via Clipmarks.] “As the communal bloodshed has worsened, some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads. One tip — on the Iraq League site, one of the best known — is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth’s detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block,” writes the Beeb. (more…)