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October 30, 2007

Twinity: Europe's play for virtual world dominance?
by: Alain Thys

I just requested to participate for the beta of Twinity, a new virtual world going online in about 3 months promising to be "just not so virtual".  Not the traditional exercise in digital escapism, the idea is that the world will act as a virtual extension of your own life in which "even your avatar will look pretty familiar".

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July 25, 2007

Wired, Too, Bearish on Second Life
Last fall, Wired published a huge "travel guide" on Second Life. "[...] This exotic realm can seem bewildering and strange to first-time visitors," the magazine wrote then.

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July 17, 2007

Media Pendulum Swings On Second Life
Yeah, the media's honeymoon with Second Life is clearly over. Time mag has listed it among five worst sites to avoid: "We're sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life, but why? You interact in the space through an avatar, but creating and personalizing this animated representation of yourself is tedious. Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag."

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Serious Games: Second Chance Trees Reforestation Project

Via: Second Chance Trees and and The Click Heard Round the World

Second Chance Trees, conceived, designed and developed by Converseon in support of its project partner Plant-It 2020, utilizes the power of social media to support proper planting, maintaining and protecting as many indigenous trees as possible.  

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July 14, 2007

Top 10 Features of China's Second Life

by: Dominic Basulto

Hipihi If you've ever experimented with virtual worlds such as Second Life, you may have heard the rumors that the Chinese were working on a souped-up version of Second Life for Chinese-speaking avatars. Jason Stoddard, CEO of new media agency Centric, has done some heavy beta-testing of HiPiHi and put together a list of the Top 10 features of China's Second Life - everything from water effects, in-world weather, swimming capabilities for each avatar; and cool new flight engines that mimic the look and feel of helicopters. Plus, there are neat things that only hard-core tech developers will appreciate, like new distance algorithms and on-the-fly ground retexturing. But here's the #1 reason why HiPiHi rocks:

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July 13, 2007

The Niche of Mass
Joel Greenberg has a blog entry (Link) worth reading regarding Suzanne Vega’s upcoming concert inside Second Life. Some of what he’s getting at has come up here before (reLink). And of course scarcity is something I’m often thinking about, given my particular interests.

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July 9, 2007

Gibson To Ghost Second Life
Via Media Bistro comes word (Link) that cyberpunk author William Gibson intends to rez inside Second Life as part of a marketing effort to promote his latest book, Spook Country. From the Media Bistro post:

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Art Institute Goes Virtual
Via The Online Universities website comes word (Link) that The Art Institute Online has established a presence inside Second Life. No surprise here. But also no surprise is that so many other art schools have failed to establish a presence. This is especially odd considering the recruiting possibilities in a virtual space where there is so much emphasis on content creation.

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June 10, 2007

XBox Island a Future Gateway?
Via Tateru Nino on the Second Life Insider comes word (Link) that a “Microsoft XBox” island has broken the virtual surface in Second Life. As Tateru says, Microsoft’s presence isn’t news, but their intentions will certainly fuel speculation, especially with Sony’s Playstation 3 “Home” (reLink) in beta and full release on the horizon.

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June 7, 2007

Opportunity Fading: Why The New Second Life Offers Less for Business
Those following virtual worlds have probably heard about recent “changes” to Linden Lab’s position in regards to how they - or supposedly their residents - will police Second Life to make it “safe, together” (Link). While I’ve been involved in the debates, there is a separate opinion I’ve formed regarding what’s occurred that I consider worth mentioning here: the less like the Internet Second Life becomes, the less reason there is for a company to stake a claim inside it.

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May 24, 2007

Starwood Shutters SL ALoft Effort {*Update*}
The first time I blogged about Starwood’s CEO, Steven J. Heyer, it wasn’t because of their use of virtual world Second Life, it was because of a video interview where Heyer talked extensively about consumer Experience. I titled that entry using a key quote from the interview, “We Deliver Memories” (reLink).

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May 14, 2007

Playboy Soon in Second Life



Playboy Island in Second Life is opening soon. Look for Playboy in group search, join, and you too can be a playmate (that's the title group members get automatically). I bumped today into someone who said the island was actually open, but when I tried, the teleport failed. Don't you love the island's shape, though? It's one of the few businesses for whom Second Life is a natural fit, given how many of the residents spend most of their time.

Original post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/05/playboy-soon-in-second-life.html 

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May 7, 2007

Brand Traffic in Second Life

by: Alain Thys

sldwelldata_400_01Not so long ago, Ilya featured an awareness study on brands in Second Life.  But as the last time I checked Second Life was still supposed to be about conversations and communities, the real proof for brands lies in "how long do people actually hang out in your wonderful virtual building". 

 

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May 4, 2007

Coke virtual thirst - update
After some mixed reactions to the announcement of the Coke Virtual Thirst contest (see also my previous article), Coke has responded by tweaking the contest a bit, and adding a 'cash' prize of 500.000 Linden Dollars. More importantly however, they have released a video on Youtube, responding to the critics. All I can say is - WELL DONE! A very informal yet concrete reply, showing they listened and understood what they were hearing. See below for the video. Also UPDATED.

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April 28, 2007

Behavioral Targeting in Second Life


Sebastian from the German Inworld Advertising Network sends in a tip about Future Ad Park (SL URL) they have set up "to demonstrate behavioral targeting capabilities". Their blog post explains: "Depending on the interest-profile of an avatar, ads are replaced immediately on billboards to deliver a personalized and relevant advertisement. The interest-profile is not only determined on the basis of where an avatar sojourns, but also combined with inquiries-data to make a prediction what he is really interested in."

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April 24, 2007

Contextual Advertising in Second Life
Billboards that listen to the conversations of people in their vicinity and displaying all the ads that fit to show, now in Second Life:

"A ContextAds board listens to the conversations of those avatars around it, displaying advertisements when certain keywords are mentioned. Advertisers can bid on keywords, with their account only being charged when their ads are actually shown. Avatars can click on advertisements of interest to them, and can be offered a website, or a teleport to an in-world location."

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March 29, 2007

List of Brands in Second Life
nspired by KZero's map of brand presence in Second Life, I thought about compiling a more usable list with SL URLs and everything, but then I found a fairly complete one over at SL Business Communicators wiki. Instead, I flew around the world and took a few snapshots of islands I hadn't seen before.

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March 28, 2007

Ad Pubs Bearish on Second Life
Two sister VNU publications Brandweek and Adweek are running the same article today under two similar headlines: Are Marketers Dying on Second Life? (the former) and Second Life Loses Luster. It's mostly a follow-up with the author of the Komjuniti study about second lifers not being all happy with how RL brands present themselves.

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Second Life Shorts, Set 3


I just watched Second Life hit five million residents (happened between 3.47 and 4.04 pm EST). It was three million last time I did the Second Life Shorts edition in end-January.

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March 25, 2007

Study: Second Lifers Unhappy with Brands
Press release: "In a survey of 200 participants conducted by the agency Komjuniti, Second Life users (“avatars”) were questioned about their perceptions, their satisfaction with the products on offer and the brand content in the online community.

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February 13, 2007

Snippet: SL data

A few days ago, Linden Lab released a workbook containing comprehensive SL metrics. Almost 13% of the residents are French? Well that certainly expla-..never mind, here's the link.

 

 

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January 30, 2007

Søme SL News Here
And I'm back, if only fleetingly, due to some first life issues (I knew I shouldn't have gotten a First Life). At any rate, here's a bit of news straight off the Beeb: Sweden will open an embassy in Second Life (link).

Also, We The Sheeple has an article on AOL beta-testing their SL island.

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January 29, 2007

Second Life Shorts, Set 2

image: moomoney via Giff Constable

A number of interesting Second Life developments happening all at once:

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January 16, 2007

In The News: Buy More Lizards!
First off, as you know, The Burning Crusade was released today. As one who managed to shrug free of the damn virus a while ago, all I can say for now is "great, now I'll never see my friends again". Bloody addicts, the lot of them!
Now then, it looks like IBM is once again pushing tennis into Second Life. Here's a video:

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January 15, 2007

SL Screens: Sears, Circuit City


As announced earlier, Sears got itself some Second Life presence on IBM's island. Right next to it is a Circuit City building (press release). Unlike many other corporate builds, these ones offer a degree of interactivity. Both solicit visitor feedback that can by simply typed into the chat line. Like Dell, Sears allows to place orders for certain items through its website, which opens in a separate browser window.

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January 11, 2007

Sears Carries Cheap Fabricator, Enters Second Life
Two seemingly unrelated pieces of news that showed up next to each other on my clogged RSS reader and made me jump:

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January 10, 2007

Snippet: Brands In Second Life
Following are a few screenshots of places where real life brands decided to set camp in Second Life. Couldn't decide if to present each shot or just slap them on the page,  "no comments" style. I would have went with the latter but the image quality isn't as good as I had hoped for some reason so confusion might ensue.

Note: images may take a while to load if you're on a slow connection.

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January 8, 2007

Second Life Goes Open Source
Yep. Details right here. Also a FAQ there from which I quote:

Wait, doesn't that mean anyone will be able to change anything in the code? How are you going to keep people from inserting malicious code and exploits into SL?

Anyone will be able to create a new viewer for their own personal use, or share that modified viewer with others. Anyone will be able to submit code to Linden Lab, which we will consider including in the Second Life viewer that most people download from secondlife.com. However, we will carefully review any submission, and ensure that it is safe and stable code that will be of broad benefit to all before we accept it into the mainstream version of the Second Life viewer.


It's the "carefully review" part that makes me wonder. However, I'll hold out from making any predictions or comments yet and see how this works. More on this later.

 


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January 5, 2007

SL predictions...
...and other assorted articles you could read and pretend not to notice I haven't updated this in a while now. Yes, I'm talking to you. Anyway...

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December 30, 2006

Warren Ellis writing about Second Life
I have to admit, I've always been a little uneasy when posting material or links to material about Second Life. For one, it's not my domain. Ilya Vedrashko is at home there, I am not. Not yet. Still, given the possibilities this growing virtual world lays before us, I have and do write about it.

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December 27, 2006

In The News..
Well, we're back, after a somewhat tumultuous Christmas. Starting tomorrow, we'll be going back to regular articles as I trim my feeds, something I wasn't able to do in the last few days' uproar. Until then though, here are a few things for you to read over a cup of mulled wine (if you're so inclined).

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December 17, 2006

Market research in Second Life
More from 3pointD - on a December 12th article, there's news of a "first life" market research institute moving into SL. Reperes Second Life is a French agency. The front page of their SL branch makes the following claims:

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3pointD: IBM in Second Life
This month, Mark Wallace has two new articles on IBM moving into Second Life, on the 13th, respectively the 14th. Following an October article, 3pointD announces that IBM is setting up a business group to focus on virtual worlds and will make some of its SL private islands available to the grand public.

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December 4, 2006

SL: Official Guide Now Shipping
Business Communicators of Second Life announces  Second Life: The Official Guide. The announcement specifies that the guide "promises to provide some of the practical aspects of operating in Second Life" and   "includes the