3pointD.com

After running as a bit of a stealth operation, Playboy is finally ready to reveal all. The magazine and attendant flesh lifestyle empire opens its »island in the virtual world of Second Life« today, with a party at 4pm SL Time (7pm Eastern). Playboy island will house a virtual Playboy retail store, and host a variety of events and “social opportunities,” according to a press release. Playboy’s Second Life retail location will feature merchandise from its e-commerce sites, PlayboyStore.com and ShoptheBunny.com Residents will be able to purchase Playboy-branded apparel either for the real world or for their Second Life avatars. “The virtual store will be staffed by female avatar employees wearing Playboy-branded apparel and the famous Playboy Bunny costume,” according to the release. That leaves tons of space on the island to serve as a “social space” for residents to interact. It’s not entirely clear how Playboy will fill that space and time, but you can hear more about the project on C.C. Chapman’s Managing the Gray. (Note that Playboy is an advertiser in the Second Life Herald, a 3pointD sister site.)

Book your tickets to Denmark. There’s yet another virtual worlds meetup in the works, this one being held by Copenhagen’s Innovation Lab, home of past metaverse meetup attendee and Terra Nova guest poster Peder Burgaard. The Lab will hold the LifeLike conference on September 26 [UPDATE: The conference is just on the 26th, not 26-27, as previously reported]: “Looking at the prevailing trends and technologies, the virtual worlds seem to be a natural effect of a series of causes: the game industry is perpetually redrawing the boundaries for graphic prowess; and their turnover has long since passed that of Hollywood. Social networks are forging virtual bonds between several hundred millions of people. Today, the sharing of digital properties, such as e.g. sound and images, constitutes the majority of all Internet traffic. Web 2.0 and open source are labels conveying a much more interactive exploitation of the Internet as a tool. Concepts such as CustomerMade and Crowdsourcing express a net-based and extremely active user involvement, where products or -– in case of virtual worlds, entire worlds -– are created by the users themselves. All this leads to an unavoidable and natural consequence: our lives are becoming virtual. LifeLike is an international stocktaking of the aspects and perspectives of the virtual worlds.”

Games designer and researcher Ian Bogost is liveblogging the Games For Change conference going on at the moment in New York, and has a good post up about the panel titled Virtual Activism: Exploring Nonprofits in Second Life, as well as a couple of the other presentations that were made yesterday. Worth noting.

One of the great things about lifelogging is that it takes a bunch of data that formerly had been in the hands only of companies and the government, if anyone, and puts it back in the hands of the individual. At the moment, Amazon.com knows enough about me to recommend Infotopia, but unless I care to do some clumsy screen-scraping, what I buy on Amazon stays on Amazon; there’s no way for me to combine that Amazon data with a Netflix history and my Zappos purchases to build a more detailed profile of myself. That’s a shame, but we’re now approaching the point when something like that should soon be possible. Already, there are services and applications out there that can record my browsing history in more or less detail, including stuff like Google History, Justin Hall’s Passively Multiplayer Online Game, Slife, Me.dium and several others. Me.dium, in fact, has been able to leverage the attention data flowing through its Firefox plugin into a $15 million Series B round of funding. This very perceptive blog post (which is excellently titled — and from which I’ve stolen the image above) starts to get at why lifelogging services like Me.dium could become very valuable as the broader metaverse takes shape: “Me.dium’s technology, by tracking people’s behavior, could become valuable to advertisers looking for more ways to target ads.” (more…)