1. Kotaku (Australia) – Worlds.com Targets World of Warcraft, Second Life For Patent Suit. “Virtual world patent holder Worlds.com filed suit against NCSoft in December, claiming its games, including City of Heroes and Guild Wars, were violating its patent for multiplayer virtual environments. And it won’t stop there. Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin says that the company “absolutely” has intentions of going after other big virtual world creators, including Blizzard for World of Warcraft and Linden Labs for Second Life”.

2. CBC (Canada) – Virtual dealings in Second Life pose real-life privacy risks: study. “You can shop, date and commit crimes virtually in online fantasy worlds like Second Life, but you may jeopardize your privacy in the real world, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says. What sets such worlds apart from mere games is the fact that they involve real money and real personal information, said Janet Lo, the author of the study released late last week by the Privacy Commissioner. The rules and agreements concerning privacy, however, were sometimes “missing, or just a bit unclear or vague,” Lo added.”

3. Business Insider (USA) – Linden Lab Finally Cracks Down On Second Life Porn. “Second Life is about to get a lot less sexy. Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, announced today a range of new measures meant to finally confine Second Life’s sprawling adult community to a virtual “red light district.”

4. Information Week (USA) – Second Life Putting A Leash On Sex, Violence. “Linden Lab will build a fence around adult content in Second Life, creating dedicated adults-only areas in the virtual world and banning adult content from appearing anywhere else on the public grid, the company said Thursday. Users — known as “residents” in Second Life jargon — who want to visit the new red-light districts will need to verify their age, according to a statement on the Second Life Blog. Residents hosting adult content on their areas of Second Life will be required to flag that content. Search results will be filtered so that people who don’t want to see adult results won’t have to see it.”

5. RedOrbit (USA) – Virtual World Second Life Continues To Thrive. “Some media reports have suggested the potential demise of the former Internet virtual world of Second Life, but Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon claims the former Internet darling is doing better than ever, the American Free Press reported. “The reality is that Second Life continues to grow; every second someone joins. Second Life is hopping,” said Kingdon, who last year took over for founder Philip Rosedale as chief executive of San Francisco-based Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life.”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Qube, RedBedlam Partner For ‘Messiah’ MMO Tech. “iddleware company Qube Software and virtual worlds company RedBedlam, both of them UK companies, are partnering on new MMO development tech they call Messiah. Qube’s Q Engine middleware will provide the genre and platform-agnostic client base, while RedBedlam’s ZoneBubble System will provide the server technology for a single, persistent virtual world. RedBedlam says ZBS allows for the creation of large contiguous worlds without loading zones or artificial barriers, for the benefit of developers aiming for large communities that share the same environment. ”

7. Wall Street Journal (USA) – How Do Morals Translate Offline to Online? “How does a 12-year-old’s sense of right and wrong play out when he or she is online? A recent Michigan State University study, published in the academic journal Sex Roles, isn’t answering the question but attempting to get the conversation going. The study, titled “Gender, Race and Morality in the Virtual World and Its Relationship to Morality in the Real World,” looks at responses from 515 seventh-graders to questions about the acceptability of “virtual” actions. Those actions included spreading computer viruses, emailing test answers to friends, viewing pornography and sending sexually explicit messages to strangers. It compares those results to the same students’ responses to questions about real-world behavior like cheating on tests, bullying or teasing, lying to parents or teachers and using racial slurs.”

8. MSNBC (USA) – Nortel Teams Up With Virtual Heroes to Deliver 3D Virtual Training Application. “Nortel(1) (TSX: NT)(OTCBB: NRTLQ) today announced that it is working with Virtual Heroes Inc.(2), a leader in simulations for learning, serious games and virtual worlds, to further enhance the simulation and training functionality of its web.alive communications application. Virtual Heroes Inc. (VHI), the “Advanced Learning Technology Company”, creates collaborative interactive learning solutions for the healthcare, federal systems and corporate training markets. The company is best known for its work with the America’s Army Game training platform architecture, and HumanSim(TM)(2) for medical training and education.”

9. Mediaweek (USA) – Sony a Hit With PlayStation Home. “Sony’s gamer-targeted virtual world PlayStation Home has reached a new audience milestone, having been downloaded by 5 million users since going live back in December, said officials—2.2 million of which reside in the U.S. and Canada. But don’t expect the avatar playground to become flooded with ads anytime soon, according to Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home, Sony Computer Entertainment America.”

10. The Associated Press – Deaths of gamers leave their online lives in limbo. “When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them. It wasn’t easy, because she didn’t have her father’s “World of Warcraft” password and the game’s publisher couldn’t help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father’s friends by asking around online for the “guild” he belonged to.”

1. Associated Content (USA) – Islands for Sale Follow Cave Home onto Real Estate Oddities Market. “First it was a cave house that was auctioned off on eBay; now there are private islands for sale. Would you buy an island right now? What is more, would you buy a private island on Second Life? Private islands for sale aside, there currently is a unique cave home listed on eBay while a balloon note threatens a cave foreclosure. The eBay cave home auction is scheduled to go until 03-11-09 and for only $300,000 the cave could be yours; unfortunately, even though the story generated much interest, there are no bidders thus far. Will those holding private islands for sale have better luck?”

2. New York Times (USA) – Portrait of an Artist as an Avatar. “Certainly, Filthy Fluno is not the first artist to realize that in order to sell his paintings, he needs to sell himself. He does, however, work at it with impressive zeal. Every day he makes new friends and cultivates new contacts, edging himself and his work — a collection of expressionistic oil paintings and vibrant, graffiti-laced pastels — just a little bit farther into a universe that to others might appear huge and indifferent, but as Filthy sees it is stuffed with possibility and also potential customers. To this end, you will often find him wandering around art openings and dance parties, dressed in a spiffy suit and pair of sneakers, trying earnestly to chat up every person in the room.”

3. NPR (USA) – Scott Simon Looks for Coffee in Second Life. “When you think of school, you may think of students sitting in rows of desks in a classroom while a teacher lectures up front. But, what if you could go to class in your pajamas while lying on your couch? Dr. Michael DeMers is a geography professor at New Mexico State University. While he does teach in a traditional classroom, he also invites his students to join him in an online virtual world called Second Life. At least once a week, their avatars (digital versions of people) head to an island in this virtual terrain to review class notes. Host Scott Simon’s avatar paid a visit to this online virtual island to meet with Dr. DeMers, our Second Life guide. While there, Scott asked for a cup of coffee, but what he opened was a can of worms instead”.

4. Slippery Brick (USA) – VR headset mimics all five senses. “What you are looking at in the pic above is a virtual reality helmet that recreates sights, smells, sounds and even tastes from far-flung destinations. Created by British scientists, the device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya’s Masai Mara while never leaving home. You could greet friends and family on the other side of the world as though they were present in the same room. Previously, scientists have only had success with virtual reality technology recreating sound and vision. This helmet named the Virtual Cocoon could change all that.”

5. Money (UK) – Real Money Trading in a Virtual Environment – Virtual Items Can Lead To Immense Wealth (And Occasionally Death). “A virtual economy is generally taken as being the exchanging of virtual goods in a virtual world, just as it reflects how a real economy works in the Real World. However, there are times when the line between Real and Virtual economies can bleed together, when players exploit “virtual” goods in order to profit from their deeds in the “real” world. Here is an amalgamated list of some well-known (and perhaps some not so well-known) instances of where the line between “real” and “virtual” becomes a little too blurred for some.”

6. Campus Technology (USA) – Second Life: Engaging Virtual Campuses. “n the previous article in this series, Real-Life Teaching in a Virtual World, we looked at the state of Second Life as it pertains to higher education. There are so many schools represented that one could spend days exploring the college and university campuses. The ways they are used in the 3D online virtual world vary drastically, and how much and how well they are used appear to vary as well. First, the bad: ghost towns abound. Just as many corporations have created presences in Second Life with the approach of “if you build it, they will come,” some colleges and universities have done the same.”

7. Science Daily (USA) – Virtual And Real Worlds: Two Worlds Of Kids’ Morals. “Children’s moral behavior and attitudes in the real world largely carry over to the virtual world of computers, the Internet, video games and cell phones. Interestingly, there are marked gender and race differences in the way children rate morally questionable virtual behaviors, according to Professor Linda Jackson and her team from Michigan State University in the US. Their research is the first systematic investigation of the effects of gender and race on children’s beliefs about moral behavior, both in the virtual world and the real world, and the relationship between the two.”

8. The Guardian (UK) – Friendship studies reveal the power of pals. “A recent study from the University of Leipzig found that college freshmen were more likely to be friends with people they met in their first week at university if they had been randomly assigned a seat next to them in an introductory lecture. The happiness of our friends is infectious, according to researchers at Harvard and the University of California. In a study that measured the happiness of nearly 5,000 individuals over a period of 20 years, reports showed that when an individual was happy it spread through their network of friends, and their friends’ friends, and the measurable effect could last for up to a year.”

9. Accountingweb.com (USA) – Financial literacy moves to Second Life. “Ohio University and credit union industry leaders have launched a new educational video game that uses the virtual world Second Life to teach financial skills to young people. The game, Credit Union Island, is designed for high school students. Based in the teen grid of Second Life, a simulated world with millions of users, the game enables players to guide their avatars through real-life financial decisions such as taking out a college loan, making car payments and buying a home.”

10. Computerworld (USA) – No security reprieve from Blizzard’s Warden – Two good reasons to pass on MMORPGs in the office. “World of Warcraft (WoW) and other massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) are the source of recent rumbling in the industry. The online gaming numbers are staggering, but the notion that a significant percentage of people is logging in from work is truly the stuff of executive nightmares. The impact from lost work hours and the legality of alternate-currency businesses or “gold pharming” are worthy of discussion, but the alarm is a bit misplaced. Games have been a staple of computer workers’ existence since J. Martin Graetz, Alan Kotok and others cooked up Spacewar! on a PDP-1 in 1961, and people have been exchanging virtual identities and goods for real money since the first multiuser dungeons (MUD) in the ’80’s. Such games will always be with us, and the further up the knowledge-worker ladder one goes, the seemingly more essential their importance for blowing off steam. Modern role-playing games aren’t my thing, but I’d much rather see a senior security officer ganking Blood Elves in a cathartic frenzy for 30 minutes on company time than losing her cool when cornered by a tightly wound executive in some postincident blamestorming session.”