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LEGO.com has a press release flagging a new MMO for kids it has in development with NetDevil (who worked on the mediocre Auto Assault, among other things). Due out in 2008, according to NetDevil, there aren’t any details available about what gameplay will be like, but you can bet it will involve some very cool snapping together of virtual plastic blocks. If this works well, it could be awesome. I’ve blogged before about how much I’d like to see a fully functional virtual LEGOlike in some place like Second Life (especially if it incorporated Mindstorms-like qualities, but I’d be more than happy to see it come to pass in LEGO’s own virtual world. It’s just the kind of thing that could make a world of world-builders out of the next generation, which is quite an amazing prospect, when you consider it. [Thanks, Micah!] (more…)

After the metaverse meetup we held recently, Jerry and I and several others have been pondering how to help some of the ideas that were kicking around there take shape. On Saturday, Jerry got together with several interested parties (I couldn’t make it), to discuss some approaches. I’d been talking about an “idea farm,” but what seems to have emerged from Saturday’s jawboning session was the idea of an idea factory, which is described very well by Bill Ward:

. . . An “Idea Factory” to leverage the newfound connectedness of society towards solving problems of all sizes. . . . [A] combination of social networks, semantic markups, peer review, incentives, and “knowledge visualization” could improve the effectiveness of ad-hoc collaborative teams. We’d like to harness the power of the community. . . . [We] covered ground related to facilitating open idea exchange, ranking those ideas, and mapping their relationships in a format which would facilitate the sort of ad-hoc collaboration that thrives in the open source community.

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I missed this on Friday, but it makes a nice fulfillment of something I was pondeirng a couple of weeks ago: what if a bank started offering real-world financial services through the virtual world of Second Life? Reuters’ Adam Pasick has the news that just such a thing is coming: “Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies,” he writes. It’s still in an early stage, but it sounds like Saxo will allow people to access their real-world trading accounts from within Second Life, and perhaps eventually give them the option to receive a portion of trading profits in Linden dollars. Saxo sounds interested in creating a forex market for Lindens as well, though it won’t do so at the moment because of serious doubts about how the L$ is managed. Having real-world financial institutions get into the services market, though, should help push the Linden-dollar economy forward. This will be an interesting one to watch.

Now that is the face of a lifelogger. One of the earliest lifeloggers, in fact. That’s Gordon Bell, lately of Microsoft but before that of DEC, with a couple of other mildly important stops along the way. A 3pointD reader reminded me of Bell the other day by linking to Microsoft’s MyLifeBits project, which I’d last thought about before lifelogging started taking up so much of my brainspace lately. A project of Microsoft’s research labs (not still known as BARC, I believe), MyLifeBits is essentially an experiment in logging Bell’s life in as much detail as possible, with Microsoft developing logging and storage tools along the way. For much more on this, read the long piece by Bell and colleague Jim Gemmell in the latest Scientific American. What I was particularly happy to be reminded of, though, was the fact that lifelogging — which we tend to think of as an outgrowth of MySpacing — in fact has its roots more than 60 years ago, at the dawn of the computing age, in or at least around the time of this July 1945 article in Atlantic Monthly by computing pioneer Vannevar Bush. Interestingly, the problems Bush was grappling with are not so different from those we ponder today: “The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.” (more…)

The acronyms are flying this month, and I am too. First to the South by Southwest Interactive festival, where I’ll be running a panel in the Screenburn track on microcontent and user creation in online games and how that’s beginning to change the face of gaming. This should be fun, especially as it features Raph Koster, who’ll be able to talk a bit about Areae, the lovely Betsy Book of There.com, Corey Bridges of Multiverse, and Reuben Steiger of metaverse services company Millions of Us, who has been creating cool opportunities for user-generated content as part of corporate marketing schemes in the virtual world of Second Life.

Later in the month I’ll also be on a panel on the future of virtual worlds at the new Virtual Worlds 2007 conference here in New York. This is looking like a great conference, with panels that go beyond the usual fare and actually look closely at what’s happening in virtual worlds and where they might be going. There are four interesting keynote speakers lined up as well, including Matt Bostwick and Jeff Yapp from MTV (both of whom were featured in my Wired article on Virtual Laguna Beach, Steve Youngwood from Nickelodeon, and Colin Parris, VP of Digital Convergence at IBM. What I love about this roster is that it doesn’t include any world-builders. Instead, it features voices from the sectors that are going to drive virtual world development in future: media, entertainment and business. We need more conferences like this. See you there.

• Virtual Earth with XBox 360 Controller
  with the introduction of Windows Vista it is now possible to link the Xbox 360 controller (wireless or wired) to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.
  (tags: games maps video vista microsoft earth)

• Sony blackballs Kotaku re: PS3 avatars - drama!
  Crecente posts rumor of upcoming avatar feature to Sony PS3, Sony responds by pulling access, Crecente tells them to F off, Sony apologizes and, imo, unwittingly admits feature is coming. everybody wins.
  (tags: blogs games news sony)

Sibley on the right

Electric Sheep Company CEO Sibley Verbeck was finally on NBC’s Today Show today this morning, after being delayed twice already. The appearance was quite brief, and preceded by an edited sequence that made it clear that NBC doesn’t think there are many SL users in its Today Show audience (which I’m sure is true), but I get excited about virtual worlds appearing on national television, I always think that’s huge. And pretty interesting, to think that millions of people are peering into their TV screen and then peering through that into a computer screen at a virtual world. Does the remove of two screens make it feel safer to an audience like Today’s than if they were simply shown it on a laptop? In any case, I don’t think SL has been featured before in a venue with broader reach than Today. That’s good for adoption, which in turn is good for the metaverse. Good.

Just took a nice stroll over to Park Slope from the 3pointCrib to have a chat with Nathan Freitas and Jon Oakes, two of the co-founders of Cruxy, the new(-ish) Web site for independent musicians, filmmakers and other artists to promote and sell their work. (The third co-founder is Web services wizard Will Meyer, who’s based elsewhere.) That’s Nathan on the left (aka Nat Mandelbrot in SL), with his pet AIBO, which, sadly, suffers from the classic symptoms of DHS. I got in touch with them after blogging up their music player for SL, and was happy to hear that they have more cool stuff on the way, and are in fact already working on some things that could make it a lot easier to do media-making not just in a virtual world but on the Web itself, as well as to cross over between the two. For musicians, filmmakers and artists in both the real and virtual worlds, it seems like Cruxy’s versatile player and format could provide a small boon. (more…)

Tringo, the engaging cross between Tetris and bingo that was originally developed in the virtual world of Second Life, has come full circle, and will celebrate its launch as a PC download today with a virtual launch event in SL. Created by SL resident Kermitt Quirk (aka Australia resident Nathan Kier) over his Christmas vacation in 2004, Tringo quickly spread like wildfire across the SL grid and became yet another thing that was going to “kill SL“. Instead, it was picked up by a real-world game developer and launched for the Game Boy Advance later that year. Now Australian casual games portal Two Way Ltd. is launching it as a US$20 PC download, and celebrating the same in SL with a launch event on »way2play island« at 1:00am SL Time tonight (late on March 1 / early on March 2) due to the Australian launch being scheduled for 7:00pm Sydney time. Another tidbit from the press release: Tringo 2.0 is apparently on the way.