1. The Industry Standard (USA) – Real world laws intrude on virtual world behavior. “Navigating the laws of cyberspace is getting ever more complex as virtual worlds themselves become mirrors of the real world. That’s one clear message from a Stanford University event on legal frontiers for digital media that I attended today. Protecting children from predators is at the top of the list. But there are thorny issues about who owns the property created in the worlds, what rights to privacy should users expect, how operators should work with real-world law enforcement, whether gambling with virtual money should be regulated, and in general whether or not real world laws should govern behavior in virtual worlds.”

2. The Boston Globe (USA) – The learning game. “Call me a dinosaur if you like (you won’t be the first), but I believe the best way for kids to learn is simply to read a book and the best place for them to spend their childhood is outdoors. Brace yourselves for one more heresy: I also think that, for all of the Internet’s wonders, it does a lot more to distract young children than to inform them.”

3. Fast Company (USA) – OpenShaspa: Energy Management in a Virtual World. “Want to manage your energy consumption by playing a video game? The OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit aims to do just that, by letting you oversee energy management in a virtual world. Shaspa’s kit, which is constructed from open-source components, contains a system of wireless sensors that control home energy output. The sensors can send data to cell phones and Internet applications like Google’s upcoming PowerMeter. Additional sensors for utility resources like gas and water can also be tacked on. Wireless sensor networks are becoming increasingly common, but OpenShaspa’s virtual world adds a new element to smart grid energy monitoring. OpenShaspa can be linked to an open-source spin-off of Second Life called OpenSimulator.”

4. Wired (USA) – Simulate Star Clusters with Second Life Mod. “Ever wanted to control the stars with your outstretched arm? An open-source virtual reality platform just made it possible. What in 1991 was a novel physics solution now comes packaged in a virtual world for you to intuitively explore. A new simulation in OpenSim, an open-source version of the popular virtual world Second Life, shows how a handful of objects floating in space react to each others’ gravity. In physics, this is known as the N-body problem. It’s simple if you have only two objects: they orbit their common center of mass in a circle or an ellipse. But three or more objects send the system into chaos. Physicists and mathematicians banged their head against it for centuries, with a general solution emerging less than 20 years ago.”

5. Huffington Post (USA) – Living in Sim. “Is somebody with a joy stick guiding my hands as I type this? Are they making me want to go across the street to Starbucks right now? Are we all living in a computer simulation? With Sims 3 coming out next month, it seems worth pondering. Sims, to help the uninitiated, is a sophisticated and addictive life simulation game. Millions of people are immersed in it, as well as in Second Life and World of Warcraft. Me and my kids were once avid players of Sims. Then one day a Sims character got into her hot tub, became drained of life force and never got out. ”

6. Singapore Entrepreneurs (Singapore) – Interview With Simon Newstead, Founder Of Frenzoo. “Based in Hong Kong, Frenzoo brings fashion online and in the form of 3D avatars. They will be here in Singapore to present at unConference 2009 and we had a chat with Simon Newstead, founder of Frenzoo.”

7. Government of Jamaica Information Service (Jamaica) – Protecting Children in Cyberspace. “The Internet, cyberspace, represents one of the greatest technological advancements of the 20th century and plays an important role in all aspects of life but most importantly communication, education, commerce and entertainment. It has radically changed global social interactions. Many of you have witnessed children sitting beside each other but communicating via texting, instant messaging or by e-mail. The larger the group, the more the children seem to have fun. Their fascination with the social networking websites such as Hi5, Facebook and MySpace is unabated.”

8. How Do (UK) – Salford students clean up kitchens… in Second Life. “Here on How-Do we’ve seen pop stars, award ceremonies and even academic qualifications delivered through the virtual reality of Second Life… but students cleaning up dirty kitchens? Surely some mistake. Apparently not. In what is being hailed as a first of its kind kind of thing in the UK, Salford University environmental health students have been thrown into dirty and dangerous kitchens in the virtual world and told to clean them up.”

9. AsiaOne (SIngapore) – Philippines’ tourism campaign engages audience of new media. “Forget mere traditional advertisements and colourful brochures; the Philippines is getting edgier with new media to posture itself as a destination for the adventurous and music lovers. The “Awesome Philippines” tourism campaign, in partnership with MTV Networks, has harnessed interactive websites and virtual realities in reaching out to its target market of 18- to 35-year-olds, the age group deemed to be the most adventurous and thrill-seeking. The campaign’s most recent outreach tool is the creation of a simulated microcosm of the Philippines that Department of Tourism (DoT) Secretary, Mr “Ace” Joseph Durano has monikered the country’s “7,108th” island in the online virtual reality Second Life (SL).”

10. Web Worker Daily (USA) – Second Life Is Social Media. “Despite all of the hype about Second Life, followed by the Second Life bashing, followed by some more hype, and now the latest “Second Life is dead” pronouncements, the 3-D virtual world owned by Linden Lab is still breathing. I feel strongly — as do many others — that Second Life is an important, and often overlooked, aspect of social media marketing. To be clear, Second Life is social media. If you break down the key features of social media, you will see that Second Life stacks up very well against other popular tools. Here are some of the reasons why you’d be remiss to leave Second Life off a well-rounded, integrated social media marketing plan.”

1. Information Week (USA) – U.S. Armed Forces Look To Second Life For Training. “The Second Life role-playing and gaming communities are home to dozens of make-believe armies and navies. But you can find the real thing in virtual worlds too. The Air Force, National Guard, and Navy are using Second Life and other virtual world technology for collaboration and training. The armed forces are looking to virtual worlds to reduce the time and costs associated with travel, and create more realistic experiences for users than those provided by flat-Internet applications.”

2. VentureBeat (USA) – Facebook platform developers could see $500M in revenue this year. “A growing number of game makers on Facebook are making money from virtual goods — from poker chips to virtual clothes that users can buy or earn while playing gaming applications with their friends on Facebook. The combined ecosystem of these game developers and other companies supplying services to them could generate half a billion dollars in revenue in 2009. That’s significant, considering third-party applications on Facebook have been viewed as gimmicks making no significant revenue. Facebook itself appears headed toward the $500 million revenue mark this year, mostly through advertising.”

3. The Economist (UK) – Of dragons and dungeons. “HAVING once lost badly at three-card brag—poker’s brutal ancestor played in the pubs and clubs of Britain—your correspondent worked double-shifts to pay off his gambling debt, and vowed never again to play games of chance. The only exceptions he has allowed himself over the years have been the odd video game or two, where the stakes are measured more in terms of satisfaction than hard cash. But even his early forays into the grinding world of monsters and loot favoured by “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” have dwindled since parenthood. Such virtual worlds are far too immersive and addictive—and keep getting more so with every increase in the number-crunching power and graphics of personal computers and game consoles. Better to stay clear of online communities like “EverQuest” or “World of Warcraft” if you are perpetually running out of time in the real world.”

4. Business Week (USA) – Studying Epidemics in Virtual Worlds. “A day after news reports about an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, health officials in Allegheny County, Pa., huddled to discuss contingency plans. How should they respond if the virus came to their part of the world? By closing schools? With widespread vaccinations? To test different courses of action, they turned to computer scientists who had built a working model of the county. “It helps come up with recommendations of when and how to intervene,” says Dr. Ron Voorhees, chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Allegheny County Health Dept.”

5. ICT Results (European Union) – When virtual reality feels real. “Despite advances in computer graphics, few people would think virtual characters or objects are real. Yet placed in a virtual reality environment most people will interact with them as if they are really there. European researchers are finding out why. In trying to understand presence – the propensity of humans to respond to fake stimuli as if they are real – the researchers are not just gaining insights into how the human brain functions. They are also learning how to create more intense and realistic virtual experiences, opening the door to myriad applications for healthcare, training, social research and entertainment. “Virtual environments could be used by psychiatrists to help people overcome anxiety disorders and phobias… by researchers to study social behaviour not practically or ethically reproduced in the real world, or to create more immersive virtual reality for entertainment,” explains Mel Slater, a computer scientist at ICREA in Barcelona and University College, London, who led the team behind the research.”

6. The Gazette (UK) – Godfather of online gaming: Inventor of Mud Dr Richard Bartle. “Virtual worlds are a global industry worth tens of millions of pounds a year. Eleven million people pay an annual fee of $15 – a bit less in poorer countries – to play the adventure game World of Warcraft. Twenty five million players have at some point entered the kids’ on-line universe Habbo, and players spend an astonishing average of 38 Euros a month buying imaginary possessions for their on-screen characters.”

7. MediaPost (USA) – Are Media Companies Missing The Virtual World Mark? “Many traditional entertainment media companies are missing out on huge opportunities to market and monetize their content libraries in Casual Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) worlds. Some forward-thinking companies have dipped their toes into the interactive entertainment pool, but there are many obstacles to successfully extending your brand into an engaging interactive experience. As innovative brands explore developing Casual MMOs, a number of important lessons can help lead them to success.”

8. Business Week (USA) – Virtual Currencies Gain in Popularity. “Make way, Zambian kwacha. There’s a hot new exotic currency on the market, only it’s not from any country on earth—at least not one in the material world. This currency is called the Project Entropia Dollar (PED) and it’s used to buy and sell goods on the planet Calypso, in an online gaming world called Entropia Universe. The PED is among a growing number of alternative currencies changing hands in virtual worlds, social networks, and other Web sites eager to make it easier for users to spend money and carry out other transactions while online.”

9. Information Week (USA) – Rumors Of Second Life’s Failure Are Just Lousy Journalism. “As a journalist and Second Life enthusiast, I’m annoyed by irresponsible articles that take it for granted that the virtual world is dying, or already dead, or a failure. In fact, Second Life is healthy and growing — I say this based on personal experience, and statements made by officials of Linden Lab, the company that created, develops and operates Second Life. Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon described a couple of the signs of Second Life’s health in an interview Wednesday conducted inworld at Metanomics, an interview program hosted by Cornell University, conducted inside Second Life. The number of active users now stands at about 600,000, Kingdon said; that’s up from about a half-million last year, and it follows a period of roughly a year when Second Life’s user base had plateaued. Blogger Wagner James Au analyzed the growth last month at GigaOM. Monthly repeat logins — people who logged in more than once per month — were 731,000 in March, climbing upward since August. Active users — people who’d spent more than an hour in Second Life — were 650,000.”

10. Times Online (UK) – Free Realms is latest children’s craze. “Forget the youth club — record numbers of children are spending their leisure time exploring online worlds that combine the fantasy element of traditional games with social networking. The games mark a shift in the industry away from adult-oriented virtual reality adventures and towards less gritty and more fun titles aimed at pre-teens. The popularity of these games has surged in recent months as word of mouth spreads. Two sites stand out: the Disney-owned Club Penguin attracts an estimated 4m primary-school-age children every month, and Habbo Hotel has signed up 120m teenagers worldwide. These are figures that dwarf much-hyped adult worlds such as Second Life, which has never drawn more than 2m users in a month.”