• Julie Gomoll’s had it with twitter/facebook/social-media spam from people pitching their South by Southwest panel proposals.
• The best lessons on marketing from Second Life come from the people who are creating fashion, gadgets, and other things inworld. Learn from them.
• Your employees may be gender-switched in virtual worlds when representing the firm. I think, given IBM’s comfort with it, and Zha’s impeccable sense of fashion, that it should be a non-issue. But what do I know, as I’m a small brass robot while on company business.
• Budget cuts at the state-level in the US will force people with disabilities into nursing homes, where dehumanizing treatment, and risks to health and safety prevail.
• Here’s a couple of lighter chasers:
  • Each year at Worldcon, UK fan Steve Rogerson organizes a pre-convention pub crawl to visit places serving locally-made craft brewed beer. These are always a great evening out, even when you’re going on three hours of sleep. We didn’t make it to every place Rogerson listed on his Montreal outing, but I liked L’Amère à Boire.
  • Xach Beane has been making web toys in Common Lisp. His latest is a riff on a Super Mario Brothers cut scene.

The above is Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer constructing a ball and stick model of a lactose molecule in Second Life. It’s reading data from the HyperChem database converted into a notecard.

You can get one for free from the American Chemical Society’s sim*.

This is one of several examples of data visualization tools in Second Life mentioned in Rose and Tess Linden’s presentation at the She’s Geeky conference last weekend.

Daden Prime combines Google Maps with news feeds from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and CNN; earthquake data from the USGS; and 3D maps and panoramas of Birmingham.

* When you get Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer, select it to edit, then select “Recompile Scripts in Selection > Mono” from the Tools menu. The Rezzer will run much faster.

The group cites Lively’s ease of use, the ability to embed a room in a web page, and Google’s vigilance in policing content, as some of the things they’ll miss.

This quarter, I’ve stepped away from programming to manage the Open Grid Public Beta program: the first step towards breaking out of the walled garden of virtual worlds.

In this stage, identity is what’s portable. Participants sign in to what we’re calling an Agent Domain on Second Life’s preview grid (aditi.) Then they can log into regions supporting the Open Grid Protocol. Some of those regions are hosted by Linden Lab, the bulk of them are externally hosted, running a special version of the OpenSim virtual world toolkit.

You’ll show up as a default avatar, without a prim or pixel of clothing to your name, because managing inventory, permissions, and the copyright issues surrounding them are out of scope for this part of the program. But you can jump between virtual worlds.

My coworker Periapse Linden coined a wonderful term for the participants, they are gridnauts, a word evoking the romance of the space program.

If you’re interested in the project, read the Second Life wiki page to learn more. If you want to know more about what’s behind all this, Tish Shute has a background piece on the program at Ugotrade (thanks, Tish, by the way, for letting me have the last word, so to speak.)

In an email to the Lab, I paraphrased Alasdair Gray, and called this the early days of a better metaverse. There’s a lot of work to do. It will be fun and not so easy, and I believe that virtual worlds are the place to be right now if you’re looking for interesting technology and governance challenges.

Taken at Purgatorio, while wearing the Steam Sparrow Robot avatar by mochi Rokocoko.

It’s great for tooling around Steampunk sims like Babbage Square.

And as you see in the photo below, it’s small. Great for days you want to be a Steampunk version of a drone from Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.

Hey, wait, I was on a GSV with that guy.

But to do that, I had to sign up for yet another vendor, Snocap. Fortunately, they use PayPal, so I didn’t have have to give them a credit card.

However, I wish that MySpace would had struck a deal with eMusic for selling tracks since I already have an account there.

Some of Chouchou songs have that sing-song, treacly sound that can make J-Pop annoying.

Their track ‘Neverland,’ however, sports a bossa-nova piano, breathless vocals, and a dead-on hook. Recommended.

He wanted to release it under a Creative Commons license, but ran into complications.

Thanks to Aleks Linden for the heads up.