Tech -- Culture -- Humour
As reported on Massively and and New World Notes, Linden Lab’s CTO, Corey Linden (Cory Ondrejka) has ‘departed’.
There’ll be lots of speculation in coming days as to the specific reasons why, but the main issue is the impact on the evolution of Second Life. No-one is indispensable but it’d be fair to say there’s likely to be some significant changes in direction with such a departure.
The University of Plymouth have an excellent presence in Second Life devoted to sexual health. AIDS / HIV awareness, sexually transmitted diseases and other sexual health topics are the focus. Their blog lists a lot of their activity. One upcoming event that may interest you:
“Barbara Hastings-Asatourian, Managing Director of Contraception Education and Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing at the University of Salford, is our guest speaker for the second seminar in our bimonthly sexual health seminar series.
Her seminar will be about Contraception, and will take place on 13 December 2007 at 8:00 PM (UK/GMT time = 12:00 PM/noon SLT) at the University of Plymouth Sexual Health SIM.
We are writing to invite you to attend this event. Please also forward to colleagues and friends who might be interested in attending. We will also have Christmas celebrations, a huge Christmas tree and much more at our SIM on the seminar day!”
A post from Peter Abrahams on IT-Director.com makes the claim that business cannot afford to block access to Second Life for their employees. The argument runs that the gains to be made in training, meetings and their associated cost savings makes it a no-brainer.
Abrahams takes the argument further, stating “A blue chip company will never want to be pulled through the courts or exposed in the media for excluding anyone with a disability from a real life meeting”. With the more traditional options like teleconference, I think it’s drawing a long bow to claim that discrimination is occurring if Second Life isn’t made available. For me, the real argument is the cost savings – compare teleconference costs to installing Second Life and the value proposition is obvious – there’s no need to even have premium accounts for your employees (though it’s not hard to imagine the grumbling around that).
So is it likely to be open slather for Second Life in business? Somehow I doubt it – like most applications there’ll be varying levels of access with procedures around their use. The more innovative businesses will allow more widespread use and even encourage it. The more conservative group will either avoid the issue until they start to lag their competition or allow access to a couple of product development people.
What are your thoughts? Can you imagine Second Life widely available in your workplace?
Simon Kline has updated his excellent list of Australian presences in Second Life. I was surprised as to how many new areas have popped up and in coming weeks we’ll tour some of them for you.
Here’s the info Simon has supplied:
“This is a guide to Australian Locations in SL. If you have an Australian location in SL please IM Simon Kline to get it added to this list 😀
I sometimes get my IM’s capped so if i don’t respond keep pestering me till I do because i probably didn’t get your msg! Likewise if you gave me a LM and it’s not here it maybe because the list didn’t save properly when i added you, send me the LM again 🙂
If you didn’t get this from a notecard giver and want to be added to the handout list to receive updates automatically visit my store and touch the notecard giver. (currently 120 subscribers woot!)
If you own one of the places listed here pls check the information presented and let me know of any errors! Also let me know of any additions i can add!
Also i’m distributing these via notecard givers, if you wish to have a notecard giver at your place to help distribute this list and promote Australia in sl let me know. I now also have the bare scripts available so you may create your own notecard givers and just put the scripts in!
Please share this around with anyone you think may like it, even newbies find it handy to have a list of places to explore!
Thanks and Enjoy!,
Simon Kline 😀 ”
The Revd Mark Brown is a New Zealander leading an Anglican Ministry in Second Life and says its has grown to five church services per week with a congregation of over 300.
The group have their own blog and a range of service times including an Australian friendly one – 6pm Sunday evenings AEDT (11pm Saturday SL time).
ABC Island Sandbox is the venue for a Christmas shindig this Thursday night at 1am SL time (8pm AEDT).
Hope to see you there.
The Second Life Herald have started an overview of religion in Second Life, starting out with Christianity.
We covered Chebi Mosque earlier in the year and the thing that struck me was the attention to detail with the architecture and the desire to create a place of reflection. It’s something all religions have in common that is accentuated in the virtual world context.
A story last week in The Australian’s IT section mentions that both Deloitte and Westpac have made some initial forays into Second Life. Both appear to be adopting a model of using it for internal purposes like meetings, something that business is increasingly latching onto.
Both companies have enormous numbers of staff – Westpac has 27 thousand and Deloitte has 4 thousand in Australia (135 thousand worldwide). Those are the sort of numbers that make virtual worlds a very attractive proposition from a cost-saving viewpoint, let alone the innovation potential.
Thanks to Ross Dawson for the heads-up.
I haven’t heard a lot from the VastPark team recently but I did notice this video from them:
Pretty impressive stuff from a platform in beta. Have you applied for the closed beta? If so, we’d love to hear about your experiences.
Massively’s Tateru Nino has written about the legality of virtual stock exchanges, including Second Life’s World Stock Exchange run by Australian Luke Connell.
ASIC is Australia’s financial market watchdog and their view on virtual stock exchanges is that they don’t fall under their purview – but that Fair Trading entities may scrutinise any claims of such markets being touted as only a game. As Tateru states in her piece, “There’s no real difference, of course, in a bank or stock exchange that deals over the Web, over the telephone or in a virtual world”. It’s hard to see the logic in the opposing viewpoint, however it appears that some virtual exchanges have a vested interest in claiming it’s all a game. It’s increasingly appearing that such a claim isn’t even a defence from a legal viewpoint.
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