1. The Financial Times (UK) – Sony aims for a new virtual world order. “The age of the avatar has arrived for games consoles, with the launch of Sony’s Home yesterday completing the response of the big three makers to the growth in popularity of social networking and virtual worlds. The internet connectivity of the current generation of consoles is allowing Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony to build worldwide communities among owners of the more than 75m machines now sold. The addition of avatars and virtual environments is expected to open up new revenue streams, but the impact on existing virtual worlds such as Second Life , Gaia , There and Habbo is still unclear.”

2. CNN (USA) – Virtual world, real emotions: Relationships in Second Life. “Nina Allam was nervous. She was about to meet someone she had been chatting with online since February. Nina Allam and Sean Barbary were married on the virtual world of Second Life before meeting for the first time. “I was terrified on the train. Very, very nervous. I remember sending him a text saying ‘Last chance to back out,’ when I was at the station ready to get on the train.” Though meeting Sean Barbary in person for the first time, Allam was already married to him in the online virtual world of Second Life.”

3. BBC News (UK) – Virtual world for Muslims debuts. “A trial version of the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has been launched. Called Muxlim Pal, it allows Muslims to look after a cartoon avatar that inhabits the virtual world. Based loosely on other virtual worlds such as The Sims, Muxlim Pal lets members customise the look of their avatar and its private room.
Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal’s creators hope it will also foster understanding among non-Muslims.”

4. Ars Technica (USA) – Griefers attack Muslim virtual world already awash in users. “The idea for a virtual world focused on the Islamic lifestyle began five years ago, when CEO Mohamed El-Fatatry moved from Dubai to Finland in order to attend university. Raised in Dubai, El-Fatatry wanted wider horizons and a chance to see more of life. American universities were generally expensive, so El-Fatatry sat down at his computer, Googled for “media technology studies in Europe,” and found a Finnish university as his third hit. Finland offers free higher education, even for foreigners, so El-Fatatry applied, enrolled, and only then headed to his new country for the first time.”

5. Indiatimes (India) – Beware, your avatar under threat. “Imagine filing a complaint in a local police station to free your gaming character, worth hundreds of dollars, stolen online. As it is it was very difficult to get hostages released from terrorists hands, now local cops have another problem to handle – to release your virtual identity from cyber terrorists. And unfortunately, the NSG or Marcos are not trained in that. The online gaming world is becoming increasingly lucrative. In countries like China, US, South Korea, many companies are employing hundreds of youth to play free games in their parlours. These kids are then asked to make their characters, powerful and arm them with magical virtual weapons.”

6. exduco (Italy) – Research aims to make ‘virtual worlds’ as world wide as the Web . “If you haven’t yet been invited to send a digital representation of yourself to a business meeting or a family reunion in a “virtual world,” it may be because these richly graphical online environments are hamstrung by technical and economic limitations that constrain their reach. So far, virtual worlds have been built by just a few companies, using proprietary technologies that cannot grow in the same free-flowing way as the traditional Web. As a result, while millions of enthusiasts see them as providing unprecedented richness to online interaction, they’re stuck in niche status. ”

7. TechCrunch (USA) – JumpStart’s Virtual World Teaches Kids While They’re Busy Having Fun. “When it comes to educational software, the trick is to make kids think they’re just playing a traditional escapist game, while they’re really being surreptitiously fed facts and logic problems that put their brains to work. But while many games have done this for years, the technique hasn’t really made the jump to online virtual worlds – most of the kid-friendly virtual worlds are more focused on socializing and having fun than learning. Now JumpStart, a best-selling educational software developer, is looking to fill this niche with its new JumpStart Virtual World, which launched this week in public beta.”

8. Gamer.Blorge (Australia) – PS3 Home is surprisingly quite fun. “The PS3 Home open beta just launched recently and I had the chance to try out the latest version of the software (1.03). Even though I have been in the beta for some time, the latest version feels like a completely new experience. If you read my previous article, I did talk down the value of the PS3 Home calling it useless. During my time within Home prior to 1.03, I felt like the whole experience was uneventful and almost forgettable. However, after version 1.03 the whole experience changed within Home. For starters there are now lots of people everywhere. Previously, the Home square was a desolate place, because there was nothing to do there. Now the square is bustling with Home users everywhere. The square received a complete redesign, with a new saucer based game smack right in the middle of the area.”

9. The Industry Standard (USA) – Virtual worlds patent battle brewing? “A controversy is brewing over patent licensing plans by Worlds.com. The General Patent Corporation, which handles Worlds.com’s patent licensing and enforcement, announced Thursday it had retained the law office of Lerner David Littenberg Krumholz & Mentlik for its client. No litigation plans were announced, but Virtual Worlds News reported that GPC would be contacting other companies regarding “licensing opportunities” for its patents.”

10. The Guardian (UK) – Games can have a serious role to play. “People have been saying for years that it was about time that computer games grew up. All that awesome technology being wasted on escapist fantasies – why couldn’t it be used to generate interest in learning maths or something? Well, whisper it quietly, it might be starting to happen. It is, of course, a bit of a libel on the still-booming videogames market to say it isn’t educational. You can’t play Entropia Universe or Eve Online without learning skills that are useful in a capitalistic world, nor Football Manager without acquiring organisational skills. But they were unintended consequences rather than the game plan.”

1. Forbes.com (USA) – Second Life’s Second Wind. “In what tech pundits at Gartner Research call the curve of hype and gloom, Linden Lab’s virtual world, Second Life, has officially entered the gloom stage. In October, Reuters pulled its full-time Second Life reporter Eric Krangel, who had written daily news stories about the virtual world’s economy for a year and a half, out of the virtual world.”

2. The Times (UK) – Days of tedium in front of a computer: corporate gaming is just like real life. “The recent news that a couple are divorcing after a woman caught her husband’s character hitting on a female avatar in the Second Life virtual world, and the subsequent revelation that a 15-year-old boy collapsed and went into convulsions after playing the World of Warcraft online game for 24 hours, have demonstrated how blurred the lines between reality and virtual reality are becoming. The business world has not been left unaffected by the trend. Companies such as BP and IBM have conducted real business meetings in Second Life and business simulation games are, suddenly, everywhere, with students across the world competing in online “invitationals”, in which they run fantasy companies in competition with one another. One games publisher has even produced a title, Informatist, for the Apple iPhone, so that the work-addicted can get a fix of the office while on the move.”

3. iReport.com (USA) – Miss Virtual World. “The Miss Virtual World 2009 pageant was held Saturday (December 6) from 11 AM to 5 PM by Frolic Mills of “The Best of SL (BOSL)” enterprises. Set in a glitz and grand glam four-sim auditorium, the event was received by a live audience of over two hundred avatars, as presented by several judges, a dance troupe, and a cast of 18 models representing Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA, and Venezeula. At the end of the landmark event, Miss Virtual World 2009 was announced as Mimmi Boa, representing Italy.”

4. Express Buzz (India) – virtual war on terror in cyberspace
.”Video games have often been the target of criticism for simulating violence, with journalists, particularly after high school shootings in Western countries, going to the extent of labelling them ‘murder simulators’. Fortunately, video games haven’t yet been blamed for the terrible incidents that occurred in Mumbai last week. I, for one, expected anti-video game lobbyists to immediately blame “Grand Theft Auto IV” and bring to our attention “obvious” parallels between simulated drive-by shootings in the game and the actual incidents.”

5. The Seoul Times (South Korea) – Internet Addiction A Reality in A Virtual World. “With one of the most advanced IT infrastructures in the world and almost universal access to surfing the net, Internet addiction is on the rise in South Korea. Often called “the worlds most wired country,” over 10 million people are subscribed to super fast broadband connectivity and have made using the internet part of their daily life. Now efforts are underway to control this growing problem as it is thought that more than a third of web users are at risk of dependency and what experts are calling a compulsive disorder.”

6. New York Times (USA) – Original Sim. “I’m sitting in front of a long glass desk in the office of the architect Scope Cleaver. It’s quite a place, with undulating concrete walls, sharply angled yellow-tinted windows and long, cantilevered balconies. And then there is Cleaver himself. He has dark shoulder-length hair, he’s about 3 years old, and he can fly. Welcome to the surreal world of architecture in Second Life.
Unchecked by the usual limitations, designers in Second Life are creating unbelievable structures and entire worlds — either for the money or simply because they can. From sci-fi cityscapes to towers made of French toast, there are endless chances to experiment here.”

7. Kotaku (USA) – U.S. Army Invades Second Life. “You know the United States Army is hard up for recruits when they start poking around in the unicorn-filled virtual world of Linden Labs’ Second Life. The Army will be setting up two islands in the virtual world. One is a recruiting center with information and means to contact the recruiting office in case you feel so inclined, and the other will be filled with activities like parachuting and rappelling with weapons, both of which are activities you can already perform in SL, only afterwards you can go and relax at a dance club dressed as Optimus Prime with a unicorn for a penis.”

8. Physorg.com (USA) – Scientists demonstrate their commitment to the environment by going ‘virtual’. “Scientists from around the world proved their green credentials by participating in a conference on climate change and carbon dioxide storage in the virtual world, this week (3 December). Organised by Imperial College London and Nature Publishing Group, the conference encouraged scientists to meet in the virtual environment of Second Life, instead of the real world, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions normally associated with travelling long distances to international events.”

9. Gamers Daily News (USA) – See Wii Sit, See Wii Play, Speak Wii Speak. “Today sees the launch of an exciting new communications tool, as Nintendo launches the innovative Wii Speak accessory and its associated communications portal, the ‘Wii Speak Channel’. The launch of both will help Nintendo to create new social gaming experiences for all. From today you can also experience the full benefits of Wii Speak with the launch of Animal Crossing: Let’s Go to the City for Wii which comes bundled with the game. The Wii Speak accessory enables Wii users to easily connect to and talk directly with each other* through their Wii console, using the free-to-use Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection**. Wii Speak is placed on or in front of the TV in the centre of your living room, which means conversations can be picked up from an entire room of people. This ensures that your friends and family can converse in comfort with you – whether they are just up the road or half way across the world, enabling true global communication on your Wii.”

10. VentureBeat (USA) – Youth media ad network GoFish reels in $22.5M. “GoFish, a media-based advertising network targeting six to 17-year-olds (and moms), announced that it has brought in $22.5 million in private placement funding, which it will use to pay off its $14.5 million in debt and expand its sales and marketing staff. Backers Panorama Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners and Rembrandt Venture Partners will choose whether or not to kick in an additional $2.5 million in the next few weeks, according to the structure of the deal. They will also be able to purchase new preferred stock at $0.20 per share.”

1. BBC (UK) – Virtual worlds with real purposes. “The idea of having a virtual you following the real you around may seem rather strange – for those of us used to having our feet firmly on the ground.
But the creation of a virtual Berlin lets people be in two places at the same time – as 20km of the city has been faithfully replicated into an online world. By the end of 2008, 50,000 buildings in the German capital are expected to have been copied into the virtual world.”

2. Gamasutra (USA) – Interview: Sony’s Buser On PlayStation Home’s 2008 Launch. “Sony’s PlayStation Home online world for the PlayStation 3 has had a somewhat tortured genesis, with a long period of beta testing and a release date originally pegged for late 2007, before being delayed to Spring 2008 and back to now. However, PlayStation Home director Jack Buser tells Gamasutra that the release of the tardy but much-discussed PS3-defining virtual world “will launch this year”.

3. Licensing.biz (UK) – Nelvana content goes online. “Corus Entertainment’s Nelvana will now offer its aminated content on demand in the US UK, France and French speaking Europe.
Programme including 6teen, Tales from the Crypptkeeper and Di-Gata Defenders will be available through Tribal Nova’s KidStudio online environment.”

4. The Courier-Journal (USA) – Virtually addictive. “Every night, Dillard Raymer wields a sword, hunting wild boar and giant spiders and night elves. He meets his buddies, embarks on quests and occasionally finds himself in a battle. He uses magic and trades in gold in the lands of Azeroth. Then he goes to bed at his Valley Station home. It’s another successful night inside the World of Warcraft.”

5. The Guardian (UK) – Playing socially: virtual worlds with a gaming bent. “It’s my last day before I return to Blighty and the Friday after Thanksgiving, and I’m still stuffed full of last night’s mighty dinner. Rather than give myself indigestion with too much pontification and heavy-duty gaming mumbo jumbo, I thought I’d take the time to point you to some nice social play environments recommended by PC World. These spaces are the more playful, structured cousins to Second Life (although author Darren Gladstone does give that virtual world a whirl), which centre on gaming, but with a social element.”

6. iTnews (Australia) – Despite reports, Telstra and Second Life remain inseparable. “It’s a match made in heaven: Telstra is Australia’s biggest telco and ISP, while Second Life is one of the world’s hottest social networking tools. So when the media reported that “the game was almost over” for Second Life, Telstra was quick to defend its investment. Recently, Tourism Victoria withdrew its advertising funding from Second Life’s ABC Island. This prompted Deacons technology and media partner Nick Abrahams to comment to The Australian that “the drop in commercial interest in Second Life had been noticeable over the past nine months”.

7. mad.co.uk (UK) – Work and play. “The toy industry is a tough market, with retailers and brands fighting for consumer spend. Digital lets toy makers extend their connection with kids. The toy market is facing its toughest Christmas in at least two decades. While toy retailers are reporting it has already been quiet in the run-up to December, most are hoping the approach of the big day will spur shoppers to action. When they do start shopping, digital will play a crucial role in the fortunes of the industry.”

8. New Brunswick Business Journal (Canada) – Innovation Fredericton-based Syntesi heightening the training of tomorrow’s worker. “Syntesi Corporation, a subsidiary of Accreon, a Fredericton-based business consulting and information technology service provider, is looking for ways to train current and future workers that will meet its clients’ needs and teach the workers using media they can relate to. Tim Workman, vice-president of capability development for Syntesi, cites an American study suggesting more than 55 per cent of teens aged 12 to 17 are participating in online social networking, and half of them are gaming.”

9. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Google: Lively Didn’t Meet “Tough Targets”; Looking to Use Tech Elsewhere. “When Google shut down Lively last week, it did so with as little fanfare as when it launched the virtual world, just a short blog post. Not much more has come out past the thoughts of a few partners and observers, and Google has been fairly tight-lipped. When I reached out to find out why the virtual world project was being canceled after only five months (and years in development) and to find out what might have been, I heard much the same thing as the official announcement. Google wanted to take risks, but also recognize when a gambled hand was finished.”

10. The Guardian (UK) – How an avatar on Second Life sparked a real-life court case. “Who is Victor Vezina? That’s the question bloggers have been asking since this Second Life avatar – a 3D representation of a real person – became embroiled in a legal dispute that could prove a test case for how much jurisdiction courts have over virtual worlds. Richard Minsky, an artist and publisher who also operates in Second Life, is suing Vezina, along with two directors of Linden Lab, owner of the virtual world, over use of the word “SLART”. Minsky obtained a US trademark in March 2008; Vezina had launched an art gallery called “SLart” in Second Life early in 2007. Curiously the case may turn on something as simple as a space between the letters SL and art: literally much ado about nothing.”

1. The Independent (UK) – Cybersex rules: Inside the world of ‘teledildonics’. “When I first deposited Journalist Hellershanks in Second Life, I wanted him to stand out. I gave him a shock of bright- orange hair, and a crisp white shirt, and I adjusted his height to about six-foot-four. He looked pretty good, I thought; but he was still missing something. And so, one morning earlier this month, I sent Hellershanks off to buy a penis.”

2. E-Commerce Times (USA) – Healthcare for Avatars? Medicine in the Metaverse. “In December 2007, Palomar Pomerado Health broke ground on a 600-bed hospital in Escondido, Calif. Just two months later, officials held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, allowing patients, staff and others to tour Palomar Medical Center West and play with new technology deployed throughout the facility. No, this wasn’t the most rapid hospital construction in history. The ribbon cutting took place in Second Life, a 3-D, virtual world that exists entirely on the Web.”

3. CNET (USA) – Avatars to run Altadyn business meetings. “Altadyn, a company that specializes in 3D virtual-world creation platforms, announced on Tuesday that it has released a new product that will turn business meetings into a living virtual world. Dubbed Online Meeting, Altadyn’s service aims to bridge the gap between 3D virtual worlds and Web conferencing. The service offers basic conferencing features like shared presentations, instant messaging, and live conversation through Skype, but it believes its main selling point is that it uses the company’s 3DXplorer virtual platform to create a virtual world that resembles a conference room.”

4. New York Times (USA) – Immersion. “Photographer Robbie Cooper shows just how focused young video-game players can be.”

5. iTWire (Australia) – Second Suicide as Google drops bomb on Lively avatars. “Back in July, when news of the Google Lively launch reached us here at iTWire, we said that the immersive 3D world populated by avatars in which you could create your own space to chat sounded a lot like Second Life. In fact, we went as far a to call it a ‘me too avatar world’ which it really very much was. Not just Second Life but with shades of There.com and IMVU thrown in. ”

6. The Globe and Mail (Canada) – So much for my so-called second life. “My name is Edith Firanelli and I was born in Antarctica. I have short dark hair, which I hide under a wool tuque, and a hot, if unrealistically proportioned, body. I’ve got no money, no job, no home, no skills and no friends. The good news is, I can fly and teleport. The bad: I still occasionally walk into trees and buildings. I spend my days wandering around a strange, computer-generated landscape, having disjointed, acronym-heavy chit-chat with strangers called things like Dimitry Barbosa and Beautiful Barbara. Maybe one day I will fulfill my dream and get a job as a nightclub dancer (like I said, I have no skills), but until then I will stand around like a wallflower in the suburbs of cyberspace waiting for my controller to finish checking her e-mail. It’s an aimless existence, being an avatar, but someone’s got to do it.”

7. The Escapist (USA) – Over 100,000 PlayStation Home Invites Tonight. “The PlayStation Home team hit a milestone last night with the release of beta 1.0 for testers of Sony’s virtual world application for the PlayStation 3. While the release marks a series of improvements for the service, the real news for those outside the secret confines of Home is that tonight, over 100,000 beta invites for Home will be sent out to European PlayStation Network users.”

8. MSNBC (USA) – Second Life bank crash foretold financial crisis. “A string of bank collapses prompted Alan Greenspan, U.S. economic guru and former head of the Federal Reserve, to admit last month that lending institutions could not always be trusted to regulate themselves. He could have taken a cue sooner by looking at the 2007 collapse of Ginko Financial, a virtual investment bank in the online game “Second Life.”

9. Silicon Valley Insider (USA) – Exclusive: Why Reuters Left Second Life, And How Linden Lab Can Fix It. “So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone. For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Lab, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups.”

10. The Industry Standard (USA) – Linden Lab focusing on higher-end systems for Second Life. “A senior Linden Lab executive has indicated that Second Life’s client software is being developed to take advantage of more powerful computers, but did not rule out future efforts involving low-end systems. Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab’s VP of business affairs, told The Industry Standard in an interview last week that the “core part” of the Second Life experience were best shown on higher-end computing platforms.”

1. Sky News (UK) – Woman Divorces Over Virtual Lover. “Amy Taylor, 28, cited unreasonable behaviour in the court papers, describing how their three-year marriage came to an end when she twice walked in on her husband pretending to have sex in an online game. Her estranged husband is now engaged to one of the women he had an ‘affair’ with on Second Life – even though they have never actually met in real life.”

(more than 500 publications have run this story in the past week)

2. China Digital Times (China) – China: Too Much Time Online? You’ve Got Psychosis. “On a update of an earlier post on CDT, China has become the first country to list internet addiction as a mental disorder as stated by the Ministry of Health. According to one of the definitions in a manual by Chinese psychologists, anyone who spends over 6 hours on the computer with a mouse has the disorder, and a guideline is expected to head to hospitals soon.”

3. The Times (UK) – Open Minds: Caught in the Net. “The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan famously said. And by changing the message we change ourselves. Never has this observation been so relevant as it is today, when many people spend their days at the computer, conducting friendships through Facebook and MySpace, posting videos on their websites, going into real society shielded by an iPod, or simply sending their avatar across the Grid in Second Life, looking for virtual relationships, virtual excitement and even virtual sex. Some welcome this, as a form of liberation. Shy people used to go trembling into society, hand in mouth; now they can go boldly into virtual society, hand on mouse.”

4. i09 (USA) – What Happens in Virtual Reality … Probably Won’t Stay There. “Cross Reality, Dual Reality, X-Reality: all of these terms describe the recent work of an MIT Media Lab team to bring the virtual into the real and vice versa. So far, the X-Reality group has focused their attentions on Second Life; last year, its Shadow Lab project allowed the game’s users to virtually check out real-life activity inside the Media Lab building in Cambridge. Later this month, the next X-Reality project goes live — and they’ve got big, wormhole-tunneling, reality-crossing plans for it.”

5. The Guardian (UK) – Art, music, gossip – it’s (virtually) all there in my parallel universe. “It has been quite a week for virtual worlds, the three-dimensional sector of the internet where people can live a parallel existence with their own avatar or alter ego. The world’s most profitable virtual game, World of Warcraft, which has more than 11 million paying participants, released a long-awaited expansion that generated midnight queues as enthusiasts vied with each other to steal a march in the new version. The Chinese government, realising that virtual worlds are an unstoppable phenomenon, announced it was planning to impose a 20 per cent tax on profits earned within them rather than, as hitherto, banning such virtual transactions. And a British couple who got married after meeting in Second Life are divorcing after the wife caught her husband chatting up another woman in the virtual world.”

6. Gearlog (USA) – Hands On: Disney’s Pixie Hollow Clickables. “If your daughter is one of the many girls obsessed with Pixie Hollow, then this year’s gift list will probably feature Techno Source and Disney Consumer Products’ new Clickables Fairy Collection featuring Disney Fairies. Pixie Hollow is Disney’s newest virtual world, and over 7.5 million Disney Fairies avatars have already been created. Girls can escape into Tinker Bell’s world to help bring about the change of seasons by meeting friends, playing games, and collecting items in nature.”

7. The Telegraph (UK) – Second Life infidelity is no less real. “A man and a woman fall in love and get married. The man’s head is turned by another woman. The marriage breaks up, and the man becomes engaged to the new woman, while his wife goes on to find a new partner. Nobody’s a villain here. It’s a sad story, the break-up of any marriage. There’s betrayal, sure – but there may also be the beginning of two separate love stories, and the end of something that was causing neither partner happiness. It’s the second-oldest story in the world: the one that comes right after “boy meets girl.”

8. The Herald (UK) – Sinister reality of fantasy game. “At 4pm on a Thursday in central Edinburgh, Aaron Campbell is beating the traffic with an armoured wolf. The shaggy creature leaps across a wooden bridge and through a market-place unimpeded by the assortment of gnomes, dwarves and orcs milling around. No, it’s not Lothian Road on a fancy dress club night, but the virtual world of Northrend, a newly released continent in the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Aaron, 20, and several other members of his playing “guild” have met up at the Ministry of Gaming cafe on Bread Street to try out WoW’s hotly anticipated expansion set, Wrath of the Lich King, which was released at midnight on Thursday. Three of them went as the clock struck 12 to pick up their pre-ordered copies at Gamestation on Princes Street. The shop sold out the same night.”

9. Eurogamer (UK) – Blue Mars gets beta, launch dates. “Avatar Reality has let Eurogamer know that its massively multiplayer virtual world Blue Mars will enter beta testing at the turn of the year, in January 2009. The first-time developer expects this to last for around three months, before the full game launches in April. And perhaps there will be time for some tea and biscuits if all goes well.”

10. Ars Technica (USA) – Snowy game, VR goggles take burn victims’ minds off of pain. “You’d think being seriously wounded on the battlefield would be the most painful thing a soldier could go through, but the recovery from burns can take months of agonizing physical therapy that prolongs the suffering. In some cases, healing can be more painful than the original trauma. What if you could take patients away from their immediate surroundings when cleaning their burns or stretching the skin during physical therapy? A virtual reality game created to help patients deal with pain hopes to do just that.”

1. The Japan Times (Japan) – Need for reality checks. “The line between real and virtual worlds has become more confused than ever. Two weeks ago, a woman was arrested after “killing” her virtual husband who had divorced her in an online game called “Maple Story.” She was arrested not on charges of murder, but on charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data. She was taken to face real charges in Sapporo, where the real man whose “avatar,” or online persona, was “killed” really lives.”

2. Linux Insider (USA) – Virtual Learning and the Avatar Generation. “Online learning is evolving into much more than discussions via Blackboard. Today’s online learners are spending time engaged in discussions, meeting in virtual classrooms, and combining online and on-the-ground learning, even if they live time zones away from campus. In response, universities are adjusting their curriculum, learning expectations, and changing how instructors approach topics online. One major challenge, creating and maintaining learning communities in virtual space, is testing both existing and emerging online tools. Jeremy Kemp, assistant director of San Jose State University’s Second Life Campus, never meets his students. Instead, he gets to know them through their avatars. The first thing Kemp teaches his library science graduate students is how to do basic things, like how to share information without interrupting each other, how to outfit their avatars and how to deal with technology problems, like when one avatar is in and out of class as their computer crashes and reboots.”

3. London Free Press (Canada) – Gamers, at any cost. “We are stalking the mountainous terrain on our horse in this world of warlocks, druids, hunters and warriors. Thick purple clouds hang in the sky, blanketing the area and casting it into a permanent violet dusk. Lightning strikes fall around us. Here, in this virtual landscape, where relationships are formed through pixilated images on a computer screen and a few dashes of the keyboard send us into a language with its own dictionary, we have reached Level 70 of World of Warcraft – the most popular online role-playing game on the market.”

4. BBC News (UK) – Capturing the scents of warfare. “Video games use realistic graphics and sounds to create virtual worlds. Now researchers in Birmingham are adding smells to the experience to prepare soldiers for war.
I’m walking along an Iraqi street. I can hear the sounds of a crowd somewhere in the distance.
The call to prayer echoes around as I move towards the still-burning wreckage of a bombed bus. The smell of charred rubber fills my nostrils.”

5. Emirates Business 24/7 (UAE) – A virtual victory. “While crowds gathered at public rallies and millions of others glued themselves to cable news, many spent US election night online – and they had plenty of company this time around.
Across the internet, users were discussing, celebrating and bemoaning Democrat Barack Obama’s unfolding election victory inside virtual worlds, on social networking sites and liveblogs and in online games. Others used techno-savvy websites to share their individual voting experiences throughout the day. A motley crew of election voyeurs gathered to watch voting results pour in from across the country on a giant map inside Second Life, the online virtual world developed by San Francisco-based Linden Lab where pixelated avatars fly around and interact with each other. For months, volunteers have been unofficially campaigning inside the behemoth virtual world.”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – The China Angle: China Tries And Buys Social Gaming. “One of the things that people in the game industry say is that the industry is in some way recession-proof because games are viewed as a cheaper alternative entertainment than eating out and going to expensive clubs. Of course, one still has to buy the appropriate console and software, but on a dollar-per-hour measure, it is still cheap.”

7. Forbes.com (USA) – A Realer Virtual World . “For the large majority of Internet users, virtual worlds like Second Life remain a confusing landscape of empty buildings, failed marketing and furry strangers. But Joe Paradiso believes that virtual worlds could be more than an over-hyped gimmick. They just need a dose of reality. Paradiso, a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is working to create what he calls X-Reality or Cross Reality, a system designed to bring virtual and real worlds into a practical sort of alignment. With funding from Second Life parent company, Linden Lab, Paradiso aims to use sensors, displays and software to bring real-world data into virtual worlds and to integrate access to virtual worlds with real-world situations.”

8. PC World (USA) – Second Lifers Split on Linden Lab’s Open Spaces ‘Compromise’. “Linden Lab oversees one of the most successful social virtual worlds in existence, but it is still struggling with residents about how Second Life should be governed. Case in point: The debate over the use of “Open Spaces,” a virtual world land type that the company designed for residents to use for, common sense would dictate, open spaces like forests and water. As residents took advantage of the lower-priced land tier and over-developed and over-used the land, Linden Lab took exception at the increased CPU drain on their servers, and raised prices.”

9. The Daily Mail (UK) – Long live The King. “Next Thursday, I will be queuing at midnight in a line of people dressed as Orcs and elves, questioning what I’m doing with my life. I keep telling myself that I’ll be covering a milestone in the history of games – the launch of Wrath Of The Lich King, the long-awaited expansion for the online PC game World Of Warcraft. But in reality, like 11 million other people worldwide, I’ll be doing it because I’m a helpless addict.”

10. Dusan Writer’s Metaverse – Are Virtual Worlds Ready For Business? “When you think business in virtual worlds you think brands. The wave of polished yet mostly empty sims that followed the press infatuation with Anshe Chung’s mythic millions. And how the brands came and then slipped out into the night, the press flaks from Linden Lab and elsewhere calling the whole thing a brilliant experiment from which, heck, we learned a lot, that was the point really, this was never GOING to be the killer app of virtual worlds, keep your hat on folks, and by the way I have a sim for rent with a nice view.”

1. Marketing Week (UK) – Second Life appoints new Euro chief to boost business. “Second Life, the virtual world, has appointed Clare Rees to the new role of European marketing director. Rees will be responsible for boosting activity on the online platform, including adding more members and encouraging more businesses to use the virtual world as a promotional tool. She joins on October 31.”

2. The Times (South Africa) – Virtual worlds are coming to businesses near . “You’ve probably heard someone in your organisation argue that virtual worlds are the next big thing and that your company had better figure out how to use them before rivals do. At which point you may have thought: “Who’d do business in that terra incognita?”

3. ScienceDaily (USA) – Researchers Find New Way Of Measuring ‘Reality’ Of Virtual Worlds. “A research team, led by North Carolina State University’s Dr. Mitzi M. Montoya, has developed a new way of measuring how “real” online virtual worlds are – an important advance for the emerging technology that can be used to foster development of new training and collaboration applications by companies around the world.”

4. The Guardian (UK) – Elevator Pitch: Myrl builds bridges between virtual worlds. “Myrl is setting out to add a bit of ‘joined up thinking’ to virtual worlds, building a ‘social gateway’ that links competing worlds with the web, and with social networks. Founder and chief executive Francesco D’Orazio, who has a PHD in new media and sociology from the University of Rome, describes the concept as ‘outeroperability’, and says the ultimate goal is to turn the series of different virtual environments into one integrated playground.”

5. Forbes.com (USA) – Making Virtual Worlds Portable. “It’s just another day at work. You’re bored, unmotivated and have a few minutes to kill before lunch. You make your way over to Facebook, where you’re able to jump straight into the virtual world of your choosing–say, “Second Life”–without launching an application. You wander around the world, perhaps buy and sell a few virtual items, before jumping back to your profile page to see who’s left you a Wall post.”

6. Linux Insider (USA) – Virtual Training for Disaster Response. “A groundbreaking training tool for the global energy industry which uses virtual worlds to simulate potential disasters is attracting significant interest within days of its launch. The technology has been developed by Second Places, which has a base in Aberdeen, Scotland, and specializes in creating presences in online virtual worlds for corporate clients.”

7. iReport (USA) – Anger and Frustration Continue In SL. “Well when I posted my first article about the dramatic price increases for Openspace sims, I thought I would wait a couple of days to see what impact there is in the virtual world. It’s plain to see that feelings are running so high inworld that there is a very unhappy portion of the community that now feel alienated from Linden Labs. Albeit that the Lindens are keeping a close eye on the forums and trying to answer all they can on their Website at SecondLife.com. I find it hard to believe the reasons they give for the increases.”

8. CNN Money (USA) – Protest Threatens Linden Labs Profitability. “The denizens of Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life are a passionate lot, so when the San Francisco company recently announced a steep purchase and maintenance fee increase on popular regions of their virtual land, sign-waving avatars were soon gathered outside Linden’s SL office, in protest. Some even set themselves on fire. There have been protests like this throughout the world’s five-year history, but without a competing virtual world offering all the unique features of Second Life, angry customers have largely stayed put, despite their grumblings.”

9. Gizmodo (Australia) – Things Virtual Reality China Will Not Prep You For (And What You Can Do Instead). “The U.S. is injecting a good $US1.25 million into a new “virtual training ground” for American diplomats who plan on working in China called “The Second China Project.” It’s a pretend city in Linden Lab’s Second Life that purportedly will help almost-expatriots get used to the environment in the world’s most populous nation. While some of the training activities sound useful (for instance, what to give as a gift, how to seat guests), as someone who’s lived in this country for years, I can tell you there are things that diplomats should get ready for that the virtual world doesn’t even seem to touch on.”

10. The Inquisitr (Australia) – Is Second Life screwing its users? Second Life, the once highly hyped virtual space has dropped from the radar this year for many. And yet for the lower coverage, the Second Life universe has continued, with new peak concurrency rates, and a loyal user base going on as they’ve always done. But lately, things are not great in Second Life. The company has slowly shifted its focus to high yield business services such as teleconferencing and the private “Second Life Grid” while giving less attention to its existing users. To make matters worse, Linden Lab has increased monthly fees for some users by 66%, resulting in large scale protests within Second Life itself.”

1. CNET (USA) – Metaplace secures funding for its virtual world. “Metaplace, a company that plans on letting users build a virtual world and use social networking conventions to allow groups to enjoy them, announced today that it raised $6.7 million of funding in a round that was led by Charles River Ventures and Crescendo Ventures, as well as independent investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.”

2. Salon (USA) – Muxlim Pal to be world’s first Muslim-themed virtual world. “For the last couple of years in Second Life, there have been reproductions of Islamic holy sites, including a virtual Mecca (with a virtual Kabaa), and a small handful of virtual mosques, including replicas of the Hassan II mosque in Morocco, the Chebi mosque (a replica of the Mezquita mosque in Cordoba, Spain), Istanbul’s Blue mosque and a few others.”

3. Times Online (UK) – Jilted Japanese woman questioned by police after ‘murdering’ her virtual husband. “It was a classic crime of passion: a bored husband walking out on his marriage, his spurned wife so enraged by the desertion that she was driven to kill him. The murder, in May, was swift and cold-blooded but justice is inexorable. The perpetrator, a piano teacher from the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, sits in police custody awaiting charges that could send her to jail for years. One thing sets this apart from the standard crime passionel, however: it happened in a virtual world to online characters in an interactive game. But the legal consequences for the “killer” are being played out in the real world.”

(The mainstream media have loved this story in the past few days – nearly 600 publications have run the story so far)

4. The Canadian Press (Canada) – Compulsive gamers build strong emotional attachments to online world. “When 15-year-old Brandon Crisp occasionally got out of line, his parents would discipline him with the method they believed worked best: take away his prized Microsoft Xbox. Steve and Angelika Crisp would eventually return the gaming console to the Barrie, Ont., teen, who would resume playing his favourite game, “Call of Duty 4,” late into the night.”

5. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Reality bites? A second life is virtually yours. “Ricardo Malveira has a simple piece of advice for those faced with the grim reality of the slowing global economy: avoid it. While the Australian dollar and the All Ordinaries shed huge chunks of their value in recent months, Mr Malveira’s business has been booming; where other businesses in the retail sector have seen a downturn in demand, he has a long list of clients. The business Mr Malveira created with his wife, Maria, exists in the virtual world Second Life, though his profits and business prospects are more stable than those of the outside world.”

6. iReport (USA) – Virtually Very Angry. “n real life you have to deal with all sorts of emotions, joy, sadness, love and anger. CNN have asked the members in their Second Life group of ireporters to tell them about how people deal with anger in the virtual world and what makes them angry. Well, real life is stressful enough, as most people know, and sometimes anger is a hard emotion to cope with. I have seen people angry in Second Life when personalities clash and they argue, resulting to name calling and even using the limited power of SL weapons to pay their enemy back.”

7. Wired (USA) – Dutch youths convicted of virtual theft. “A Dutch court has convicted two youths of theft for stealing virtual items in a computer game and sentenced them to community service. Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods.”

8. Globe and Mail (Canada) – U.S. campaign heats up in Second Life. “It’s not just Earthbound voters who are intensely following the U.S. presidential campaign: The race also is a hot topic in the virtual world of Second Life. John McCain supporters and Barack Obama supporters – more accurately, the personas they have created – meet regularly in Second Life, described on its website as “an online, 3D virtual world imagined and created by its residents.” They watch the presidential debates together. They make T-shirts, banners and yard signs. They hold voter registration drives and rally on Capitol Hill.”

9. PSFK (UK) – Augmented Reality, Virtual Insanity. “There is an old curse that goes like this: “May you live in interesting times” It doesn’t get any more interesting than two recent strange news stories about digital worlds sparking irrational behavior in the real world. These two items illustrate the weird problems we could be encountering on a regular basis as bleed-through increases across the border of the real and virtual worlds.”

1. The Industry Standard (Canada) – Virtual world advertising: A wasteful expense, or a bargain for marketers? “Are virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com about to feel a chill from advertisers? It depends who you talk with. This week, an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that marketers are cutting back on digital and “experimental” ad buys, including video game advertising, cell phone advertising, and virtual world advertising.”

2. Minneapolis Star Tribune (USA) – Game strives for Web success. “”I don’t think there’s any other field where you can find a failure rate this high and still find people willing to invest,” said Mark Jacobs, general manager of game studio EA Mythic. “The failure rate is unbelievable.” Jacobs was talking about his section of the video-game industry, the realm of online games where players pay a monthly fee to participate as characters in a virtual world. In the past 11 years, by his count, fewer than 10 titles have met some level of financial success. The number of expensive flops is a lot larger.”

3. nextgov (USA) – Web 2.0 technologies are seen as vital to attracting younger employees . “The federal government must adapt and embrace Web 2.0 technologies such as virtual worlds, wikis and social networks to attract and retain younger employees, because the technologies are here to stay, two federal knowledge management practitioners said in a presentation in Washington on Thursday. Comment on this article in The Forum.Speaking at a conference on knowledge management and business intelligence organized by the Digital Government Institute, Giora Hader, the Federal Aviation Administration’s knowledge architect, said agencies must embrace the world of social networking and collaborative technologies or risk losing out on a generation of new workers who are needed to fill gaps left by the upcoming wave of retirements.”

4. CNET (USA) – Hello Kitty gamers take on New York. “If your kids start to show serious signs of loving New York and you don’t know why, this might be the reason. Sanrio Digital, maker of the Hello Kitty Online 3D virtual world that’s currently in beta, announced Friday the game’s largest in-game event: the building of New York City. Players of the Hello Kitty Online Founders’ Beta can take part in a series of quests to collect and organize materials for the building of a new New York area that will appear in the next phase of the game–and will undoubtedly be far more pink than the real Big Apple.”

5. BBC News (UK) – The Cost of Warcraft. If you’ve got any bandwidth limit on your internet use, you may have bust through it this week, especially if you have a teenage son. Why? Well it could be the cost of war – or rather World of Warcraft.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on my bandwidth use at home because I keep breaking through my 25gb per month limit. When I signed up to my ISP I thought that would be ample, but then found that we were using as much as 1gb a day, which seemed a lot. Then on Wednesday this week we broke all records, with more than 2gb downloaded. I was away from home, my wife’s surfing habits are mostly limited to reading obscure economics blogs, so the spotlight fell on our teenage son, who spends a certain amount of time online in his room in the loft.”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Ubisoft Opens Far Cry 2 Space In PlayStation Home. “Ubisoft’s just-launched Far Cry 2 “space” in PlayStation Home’s closed beta in North America and Europe is the first third-party game area to hit Sony’s PlayStation 3-based virtual world, the company says. The Far Cry 2 space in Home features details taken from the game universe and promises it “will become a fully-interactive experience” and “continue to grow and evolve alongside PlayStation Home.”

7. Express Computer (India) – Got your enterprise avatar? ” A Balasubramanian on why enterprises should experiment with virtual worlds, but look for community benefits rather than commerce. Returning, once again, to the hustle and bustle of the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), you Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, are in the jaunty company of Danny DeVito, your CTO at Baffle.”

8. LA Times (USA) – PlayStation Home: Sony’s open house. “This fall, Sony will throw open the doors to PlayStation Home, an ambitious project to turn its online game network for PS3 console players into a lifelike 3-D virtual world where people can cruise around with their avatars. Sony has mentioned the project in past years, but had not released details. Last week, the company held an open house to give reporters an early tour. The software gives players the ability to create highly customized, realistic avatars. Each player also will be given a waterfront condo with a walk-in closet where they can try on various accessories purchased at Home’s virtual mall.”

9. SOA World (USA) – iTech Fitness and Softkinetic Collaborate on Groundbreaking Active Gaming Project for XRKade. “iTech Fitness, the industry leader in active gaming development, and Softkinetic, the leading 3D gesture recognition software provider, today announced a partnership to develop the future of active gaming experiences. For the first time ever, users can exercise in a virtual world by simply moving their bodies, without the use of any game controller or peripheral.”

10. Daily Yomiuri (Japan) – ‘Born-digital generation wants to share’ “If you haven’t yet digested the concept of massive, multiplayer online games, or MMOs, then watch out: James Crowley has announced the advent of what he calls MMO 2.0. And if you can’t guess what that means, you probably weren’t “born digital.” Crowley is the president of Turbine, Inc., which runs such MMOs as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. In an Oct. 10 speech at the Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, Crowley called MMOs the place where social networks, virtual worlds and conventional online games overlap. But he also said that MMOs would have to reinvent themselves to appeal to the new “born digital” generation.”

1. TMCnet (USA) – Diabetes UK: Second Life launch for diabetes campaign. “Diabetes UK has this week launched its Silent Assassin campaign’ within the virtual 3-D world of Second Life. The charity launched both its headquarters and the campaign in the virtual world that boasts 15 million residents’ to coincide with its biggest ever UK-wide campaign – created to raise awareness of the seriousness of diabetes.”

2. CCTV (China) – Beyond space and time: 3-D Forbidden City. “A three dimensional Forbidden City is now open in a virtual world. People can get a glimpse of the imperial palace and experience the lives of ancient emperors without having to be there. And the interactive platform allows online tourists to take on an ancient identity.”

3. Herald Sun (Australia) – Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s Playstation launching rival ‘virtual worlds. “Microsoft and Sony are taking their battle for gaming supremacy into cyberspace, launching competing virtual worlds.
Microsoft announced its New Xbox Experience at this weekend’s Tokyo Games Show.”

4. DMNews (USA) – Machinima is a futuristic, viral option for marketers. “Although still in its infancy, machin ima — animated films created by using a number of different game or virtual world engines — is rapidly emerging as a surpris ingly effective new tool for marketers. Currently, most machinima is produced through the online virtual world Second Life. However, it is expanding to include other online games and virtual worlds.”

5. Stars and Stripes (USA) – Game developers tap into social network. “As the Internet continues to increase in complexity and social networking grows in popularity, game developers are working to utilize the full potential of these technologies. “Social technology has fundamentally altered the means by which we communicate,” Jim Crowley, president and CEO of Turbine, said during a presentation Friday at the Tokyo Game Show.”

6. VentureBeat (USA) – Twofish raises $4.5M to create economies for virtual worlds. “Twofish has raised $4.5 million in a second round of funding for its business of creating the economic infrastructure behind virtual worlds. The deal is another indication that the virtual goods economy is heating up, even as the real world economy spirals downward.”

7. Gaywired (USA) – A Virtual Lesbian Life: Revisiting Second Life. “Although I dabbled in the massive online world of Second Life back when it was first becoming really popular 3 or 4 years ago, I didn’t have time to really explore and didn’t end up playing for long. It was not until Showtime made a big splash in SL by creating a virtual L Word island in the game a couple of years back that I ventured back in for another go. My passion for the immense virtual world comes and gos, but there is no denying that Second Life is an addition that’s hard to kick.”

8. bMighty (USA) – Welcome To Fantasy Island. “With fewer dollars to spend in the real world, consumers have been hanging out in virtual worlds — where their money goes farther, according to operators of such sites. Take Habbo, a self-described hangout for teens that charges a small fee for access to specific site features. Visitors are spending twice the amount of time on Habbo than in days past, the site’s EVP told Forbes.com. U.S. users, who account for 25% of Habbo’s 10 million customer base, spend around $18 per month buying virtual items. You do the math.”

9. Pittsburgh Post Gazette (USA) – The Next Page: The triumph of the gamer. “If he were alive today, Shakespeare might very well have rephrased his famous observation stating “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” by describing this worldly existence of ours as more closely resembling a videogame than a theatrical production.”

10. BBC News (UK) – Virtual worlds carve out new path. “If you are walking with orcs in the World of Warcraft or setting up a business on planet Calypso, the real world is probably very far from your mind. But for attendees at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London this week, the question of how to bridge the gap with the real world is a very pertinent one. As well as gaining an audience beyond the core teenage male gamer, virtual worlds with real world connections offer a whole new way to make money.”