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The latest entrant to the raft of virtual worlds conferences planned for this year is the Virtual Worlds Forum that will take place in London on October 24-25. I’m going to try to make this, even though I’ll have been in California two weeks earlier for the autumn edition of Virtual Worlds 2007 (which we reported earlier), which takes place October 10-11. The London forum is already featuring an impressive list of confirmed speakers, including Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Mike Wilson of There.com, Raph Koster of Areae, Richard Bartle of MUD1 (the first virtual world), and many more. Registration should open later this week; we’ll try to give you a heads up. Text of a recent press release after the jump. (Pay no attention to the first word of the headline.) (more…)

What do you do when a group of troublemakers is disrupting the operation of your virtual world? If you’re Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, you ignore the griefers themselves and simply go after the owners of the land they happen to be operating from. Big props to our managing editor over at the Second Life Herald, Pixeleen Mistral, for catching the story of southern California’s Woodbury University, which had its private region in SL deleted a couple of days ago. Why would the Lab wipe Woodbury’s investment? Because a group of SL residents who were not part of the university and who have long been accused of causing trouble have apparently been using the Woodbury land to build and test their disruptive devices. There’s definitely culpability on the part of both the griefers and the university, but LL has shown some really poor judgment in the way they’ve handled the situation thus far. (more…)