soothsaying is a tough business. you have to have a decent crystal ball and some pretty edgy clothes. and a scarf on your head – always with the scarf on the head. then you need a great name. Ener Hax just won’t cut it – hmm . . . maybe Zelda Hax? the tarot cards [...]

happy New Year everyone! =) 2011 is here and will be as many institutional projects in Second Life as in the past years? i would tend to not think so, what with the cessation of the teen grid, the stop on the ed/not-for-profit discount, the earlier stop of Enterprise, and the possible “gaming” direction of [...]

universities live and die by their intellectual property. grants are awarded based on it and it is the life blood of all universities. i’m not talking about lectures but about research. something all true universities do i doubt many university legal departments read Second Life’s terms of service or its updates. FERPA is one thing [...]

wanna be a smartie pants? or maybe need some virtual world research info you won’t find in Google? try Google Scholar! it searches published articles like you would see coming from universities and also legal opinions. some stuff is free, some you pay to access, but there are tons of things on Second Life and [...]

With Second Life’s Teen Grid closing in December, where does that leave the educational use of virtual worlds? Adult education can carry on but K-12 may need to change. Certainly those working with students under 16 will need an alternative. Those working with students 16 and older may also want an alternative rather than be [...]

i heart Maria from Hypergrid Business. why? because when subQuark tossed out the idea of doing OpenSim i was bikkuri collar deep in Second Life estate woes. i’m not sure why my leather collar is called bikkuri (it was made by a Japanese lady in Second Life), i can’t find that on the web, but [...]

reinventing yourself or your goals or projects often means being ready to shelve your current goals for new ones, this can be very hard because you have put energy, effort, and time into your goals. and if your goals come from a team effort – it can be even tougher with Linden Lab announcing the [...]

when i was in Second Life i counted myself as pretty lucky in the drama department. there was very little drama on the iliveisl estate even at its peak with 101 parcel owners. that’s a lot of personalities to deal with! i was pretty hands off and had a very open covenant. some height restrictions [...]

version 0.7.1 of OpenSim is out and it sees security improvements to hypergridding plus web-on-a-prim a big concern of content creators from second life is security of their creations. up until the last version of OpenSim (0.7.0 saw HG 1.5 introduced) clever people could copy your inventory if you visited their sims. i have no [...]

as you know, our shift is now on creating virtual world science field trips with OpenSim. it’s a big shift from doing land sales but a good fit for my education and subQuark’s real world experience i was putzing around today with “l’ascenseur” (see the post immediately prior to this one) and noticed that someone left the sim i [...]

Mark Kingdon was a well respected CEO with an good corporate background before coming to Linden Lab. i say good because he has an MBA, which is nothing remarkable anymore (it was the “hot” degree to get in the 1980s), and he was CEO at Organic. there does not seem to be much of any [...]

becoming mainstream is something any company or commercial artist would love. whether you are Stefani Germanotta or a Pagan Goddess branded company, success is partly tied to how mainstream you are. btw, those two are Lady Gaga and Nike  =) what will it take for Second Life or another virtual world to become mainstream and [...]

Or is it… “Virtual Dreams and Lucid Worlds” ? Do you find that being in a Open Sim world like Reaction Grid, or Second Life, to be like a waking dream? Have you ever dreamed about your avatar?  Have you ever had a lucid dream? Or has a virtual world at least influenced your dream? [...]

okay, so i jumped the gun a few months back by saying we were hypergridded.  oops, my bad. now we truly are! so what does that mean? well, opensim is made so that you can move from one grid to another with a hypergrid teleporting protocol. you can setup an opensim on your own machine [...]

after last night’s post on Edmonton going virtual i had a great back and forth with the CIO of Edmonton on twitter. first off, how cool would it be to be the CIO of a city? must be a different dynamic than at a company. they variety of applications must be challenging but also exciting. [...]