1. The Chicago Tribune – Virtual dinner and a movie? Simulated dating ranks grow. “Paula Weisz’s favorite place to take her dates is the Millennium bar, where she can sip a glass of red wine and have a good conversation. She typically goes on one date per week with men she meets online at OmniDate.com.”

2. The Edmonton Journal (Canada) – Plug ‘n’ play. “Cyber sex isn’t just the late-night pastime of techno-tarts, sex addicts and pedophiles. Today, even the military thinks getting your virtual groove on is a matter of national security, says the creator of HighJoy.com, a virtual world where your vibrator meets your USB cable. “We create the technology that allows you to control another person’s vibrator over the Internet,” says Amir Vatan, co-founder of HighJoy Products.”

3. Linux Insider – Not Much Life in China’s Virtual Worlds. “Last November, Procter & Gamble’s Vidal Sassoon launched with much fanfare its first hair salon in China’s virtual world. There was even a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony. However, today the VS salon in HiPiHi, China’s oldest and largest virtual world (a simulated online environment where users adopt identities known as avatars), sits mostly empty save for the occasional visitor.”

4. Los Angeles Times – A Second Life for corporate America. “To save money in these tough times, universities, conference planners and global firms have started holding gatherings for far-flung employees and students in the online world known as Second Life. Sun Microsystems Inc., a Silicon Valley tech company, has only one rule: Employees should show up looking like humans.”

5. Science News – Scientists get a 2nd Life. “To track down neuroscientist Corey Hart, you could stop by his laboratory, located on the second floor of Drexel University’s medical building in Philadelphia. Or, you could visit the lab of Luciftias Neurocam, located in the virtual world of Second Life. Luciftias is Hart’s digital alter ego, or avatar. Like his real-life counterpart, Luciftias tracks the twitches of frogs’ muscles to find clues to the spinal cord’s ability to control movement.”

6. Gamasutra – GFH: Neils Clark On Moving Beyond ‘Game Addiction’. “Following his Gamasutra feature on the subject, writer and researcher Neils Clark spoke at the ongoing Games for Health conference in Baltimore on game addiction. In his talk at the conference, he covered the perceived problems, a run-down on why people might get addicted, and some proactive measures that developers can use to combat addictive behavior in the future.”

7. Reuters / Second Life – EVE Online experiments with virtual democracy. “It can be difficult for the most well-meaning of virtual worlds companies to understand what their customers want. But CCP, the company behind the sci-fi world of EVE Online, thinks they’ve solved the riddle: have users elect their own representatives. Sixty-one candidates are vying for nine spots in open voting on EVE’s website. The top vote getters will become the official representatives of EVE’s player community, and flown to Reykjavik, Iceland to share their thoughts on the game at the company’s headquarters.”

8. World Changing – Gold Farmers. “Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire (“farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.”

9. Reason Magazine – Virtually Free. “In February, subscribers to the virtual world of Second Life awoke to a surprise: The garish, skyscraper-sized billboards they had learned to tolerate as part of their three-dimensional landscape were about to be vaporized, the site’s creators announced.”

10. Accountancy Age – DO enters Second Life. “BDO Stoy Hayward has launched on internet virtual world Second Life in a bid to open up its services to a broader audience. Its launch of an ‘island’ on the world will enable the firm to holding meetings online, presentations and events for staff and enhance recruitment options by engaging with a broader, international audience.”

1. The Toronto Star – Let my avatar buy your avatar coffee. “Paula Weisz’s favourite place to take her dates is the Millennium bar, where she can sip a glass of red wine and have a good conversation. She typically goes on one date per week with men she meets at Omni Date.com, a Toronto-based company. For her dates, the 42-year-old single mother of two doesn’t need to leave the comfort of her living room sofa. And the Millennium won’t be found in any local phonebook.”

2. Reuters – Lego’s latest brick trick: a virtual world. “Millions of children pick up Lego bricks each year to spend hours — 5 billion, in fact — creating their own imaginary worlds. Now the manufacturer of the little plastic playing blocks wants to take them online to “Lego Universe,” a virtual world for fans of the ubiquitous toy.”

3. The Jeffersonian (USA) – Virtual world new marketplace for cars. “Owings Mills entrepreneur and iMagicLab CEO Richard Keith Latman is obviously tickled by last month’s opening of his company’s newest venture — a multi-brand automobile dealership. Set on its own island, the dealership looks like a car wheel and hubcap to shoppers as they fly toward the site.”

4. Tech Digest (UK) – Grand Theft Philadelphia, courtesy of virtual world GeoSimPhilly. “Fancy going to Philadelphia for free? And without leaving the house? That’s the AMAZING FUTURISTIC POSSIBILITY opened up by GeoSimPHILLY – an extremely realistic online representation of Philadelphia.”

5. The University of Texas at Dallas – Students Develop a Virtual World for Art Lovers. “High culture comes to gamers with the help of a group of graduate students from UT Dallas Arts & Technology program. Twelve graduate students have created a virtual art education environment in which art lovers can learn about museum practices and the visual arts.”

6. Fox News – Science-Fiction Writers Help Government Prepare for Attacks of the Future. “magine an attack by a swarm of armed micromachines … or a bioweapon small enough to fit in a suitcase and deadly enough to destroy the human race. It’s the stuff of Hollywood storylines, but to the U.S. government such plots are potentially very real and very dangerous. So the government has turned to an unlikely source for help in identifying these threats: science-fiction writers.”

7. T.H.E. Journal – Children’s Way Beefs Up Security in K-6 Virtual World. “Non-profit developer Children’s Way Foundation has teamed with eGuardian to bolster security on its Woogi World, an online virtual world for K-6 students. The agreement allows Woogi World to incorporate eGuardian’s online verification service as a means of safeguarding kids from online strangers who might be posing as other children.”

8. Science Daily – Virtual World Therapeautic For Addicts: Study Shows Impact Of Environment To Addiction Cravings. ” Patients in therapy to overcome addictions have a new arena to test their coping skills–the virtual world. A new study by University of Houston Associate Professor Patrick Bordnick found that a virtual reality (VR) environment can provide the climate necessary to spark an alcohol craving so that patients can practice how to say “no” in a realistic and safe setting.”

9. Profy.com – Are We Sure About This Virtual World Thing? EA Land Hits Deadpool. “Almost a year and a half ago, Colbert Low posted here on Profy that the future of the Web would be 3D applications, or virtual worlds, with Second Life leading the pack. It’s amazing to me that so much could have changed in such a short amount of time. Today it was announced EA Land, which was formerly called The Sims Online and rebranded only a short time ago, will be shuttering before the end of summer.”

10. IT Business (Canada) – Canadian college turns virtual world creation into real business venture. “After being the first Canadian college with a virtual campus, in Linden Lab’s Second Life, Loyalist College is now starting a commercial venture to help other schools and companies create their own virtual world space.”

1. New Scientist – A virtual refuge from recession. “Do these two graphs look related to you? This blogger concerned with virtual world Second Life thinks they might be, using them to suggest that the current global “credit crunch” has driven the growth of virtual world Second Life’s economy.”

2. Social Science Research Network – Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds. “When does conduct by an online player in a virtual world game trigger liability for a real-world crime? In the future, will new criminal laws be needed to account for new social harms that occur in virtual worlds? This short essay considers both questions. Part I argues that existing laws regulate virtual worlds with little or no regard to the virtual reality they foster. Criminal law tends to follow the physical rather than the virtual: it looks to what a person does rather than what the victim virtually perceives. This dynamic greatly narrows the role of criminal law in virtual worlds. Existing law will not recognize virtual murder, virtual threats, or virtual theft. Virtual worlds will be regulated like any other game, but their virtualness normally will have no independent legal resonance from the standpoint of criminal law.”

3. Wall Street Journal – Sony Again Delays PS3 Virtual Community. “Sony Corp.’s videogame unit delayed for the second time the release of its much-anticipated virtual-community service for the PlayStation 3, showing the extra care it is taking in vetting products as demand for the videogame console is increasing. The 3-D service called Home, which originally was expected to be sold starting last year, now is expected to be available in the fall, the company said. The service will let users create avatar characters, decorate homes and interact with other users in a virtual world.”

4. IT Week – The virtual world is your oyster. “While the influence of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace on firms’ sales and marketing initiatives continues to grow, some experts predict that their impact will soon be dwarfed by that of another Web 2.0 technology – virtual worlds.”

5. Times Online – McKinsey: ignore Second Life at your peril. “Virtual worlds such as Second Life will become an indispensible business tool and vital to the strategy of any company intent on reaching out to the video-game generation, one of the world’s leading consultancies has said. McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm whose observations about corporate behaviour are closely watched, said that virtual worlds were on the cusp of a major expansion – particularly as a way to reach younger customers – and that companies were “ignoring them at their peril.”

6. CNET – Real solar homes come to virtual world ‘Second Life’. “It’s about time green architects invaded Second Life. The organizers of the Solar Decathlon are hosting an event in Second Life on Thursday where people can attend a virtual conference and then get a virtual walk-through of a house designed to be powered entirely by the sun.”

7. Indianapolis Star – Celebrate the Earth with eco-friendly sites. “If the celebrations of Earth Day (April 22) and Arbor Day (April 25) have triggered your child’s interest in “going green,” here are some fun online ways to further that interest. At the PBS Kids EekoWorld, www.EekoWorld.org, kids ages 6 through 9 can explore environmental issues by participating in two simulations.”

8. Sydney Morning Herald – Why games matter. “Madison Reed, an 11-year-old Spinal Muscular Atrophy sufferer, is sad and mad. It’s not because “my muscles don’t work right” as she says on her blog, because she’s “just like other kids” and loves life, even if she needs help with most tasks. The reason she’s sad and mad is because Disney has decided to close its Virtual Magic Kingdom on May 21.”

1. VentureBeat – Mind Candy joins the online virtual pets fray. “Virtual pets are a tried and true market for those targeting young kids. Mind Candy is joining the fray against larger rivals with a kids offering of its own this week: Moshi Monsters.”

2. Strategy Page – Virtual, Persistent Battlefields. “Computer games have been a major source of training technology for the armed forces. Not just in the United States, but all over the world. Most of these adaptations get little publicity, some are even classified as secret. But all simply take the visual and physical aspects of video games and use them to simulate real combat.”

3. Wired – Virtual World Funds Hip Replacement. “An Entropia Universe player recently covered the costs of a hip replacement surgery using cash he earned in-game, according to a press release issued by Entropia creators Mindark. 42-year-old Brad Welch, an avid fan of Entropia, used the cash he earned playing the game to fund the $10,000 dollar surgery that included replacement of his left hip and 42 stitches.”

4. PC World – The Virtual Office Gains Ground. “Virtual reality is making its move from gaming and social sites into the business world. Project Wonderland, developed by Sun Labs, already allows businesses to improve distance collaboration by building online replicas of their offices or classrooms where colleagues may use 3D representations of themselves to attend meetings, give presentations, and interact.”

5. PR Web – Fighting For Tibet In The Virtual World. “In the virtual world of Entropia Universe a fierce hunting competition between 32 teams takes on a special meaning for one team. Team Tibet is fighting not only for the prize and glory within the virtual world, but to bring attention to the plight of the Tibetan people in the real world.”

6. GigaOM – Apple Store To Go Virtual? “Apple Store To Go Virtual? That’s the theory of MacNN, at least, citing an Apple patent application published on the US government site last Thursday, somewhat obscurely entitled “Enhancing Online Shopping Atmosphere”.”

7. Wired – Second Life Slowly Turning into a Record Store. “Keiko Takamura has figured out a way to sell her music inside the Second Life virtual world. Using a rough approximation of an iPod that she calls the myPod, Takamura allows Second Life citizens to preview her music and buy songs in the MP3 format using Linden dollars. The transaction happens entirely within Second Life, but the customer walks away with an MP3 that can be played outside the game.”

8. Wall Street Journal – Disruptions on the Virtual Trail. “The presidential campaign has gotten nasty in the real world. It’s getting nasty in the virtual world, too. As Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama duke it out in the Democratic primary, unofficial campaigns are being waged by fervent supporters in Second Life, the virtual world run by Linden Lab.”

9. Massively – HiPiHi reopens beta. “Chinese virtual world HiPiHi has reopened registration for beta accounts. If you want to give this a spin, you will be pleased to know that you can now perform account registration in English.”

10. Yahoo Games – WoW, Inc. “Ten million players. However you look at it, that’s a lot. World of Warcraft not only dwarfs all other massively-multiplayer games, it dwarfs a good number of countries — not silly countries like Monaco and Greenland, either, but perfectly sensible ones. Like Sweden, say, or Israel. But how do the holdings of this legion of players compare to the corporate giants of the world?”

1. Sydney Morning Herald – They’re virtually famous. “Imagine an art gallery where you can not only touch the works on display, you can walk over them, sit on them, even fly through them. Such actions would doubtless send security staff into apoplexy, but in Second Life, the world is your oyster. Today three Australian artists unveil their exhibition Babelswarm in the 3D virtual world of Second Life, an interactive sculpture based on the mythical Tower of Babel. For those who like the old-fashioned gallery experience, there is a “real” show at Lismore Regional Gallery.”

2. PC World – Hackers Increasingly Target Browsers. “Threats against browsers are getting more sophisticated and branching out into such exotic areas as gaming, experts told attendees at the recent RSA Conference 2008. New attacks from games and virtual-world Web sites can deliver bot-like control of browsers to attackers, said Ed Skoudis, a security consultant with Intelguardians, speaking at RSA. All that’s needed is for the infected image of an avatar to appear. “The character walks into view of the screen, and I take over the box,” he said.”

3. Fox Business – The Perfect Night For Spacing Out. “Saturday night is prime time for a party, and all the better if it’s a party celebrating our past and future in outer space. This year, Saturday night is Yuri’s Night, which marks the anniversary of humanity’s first ride into space as well as the space shuttle’s first flight. The executive director of Yuri’s Night, Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, says the event is particularly aimed at Generation Y, the young adults who will be building the spaceships of the future – and paying most of the bill. So it’s a good time to remember why space exploration is worth having a party over.”

4. Boing Boing – BBtv – Avatar Machine, Marc Owens’ wearable simulator of virtual worlds. “Avatar Machine, by designer Marc Owens, is a wearable device that simulates the experience of third-person gaming environments. By wearing this costume and head-mounted camera with VR goggles, a user can view themselves as a sort of virtual character while moving around and interacting in the real world.”

5. ZDNet – The 3-D Web Goes Thin. “Increasingly, it looks like Weight Watchers has gotten hold of the Semantic Web. Fat is out. Thin is in. And while no one’s counting points, it certainly looks like, thin clients will increasingly play a central roles in attracting organizations to the 3-D web. A number of companies are enabling organizations and users to build their own virtual worlds with little more than a browser, much the way Ning, GoingOn, HiveLive, Flux, Me.com, and BricaBox has done for social networks. These instant-virtual-world companies include Vivaty, Altadyn with 3dxplorer, and to a lesser extent ScreenCaster and VastPark.”

6. Contagious – Habbo’s Global Youth Survey. “To gain an insight into what those elusive teens think and what they spend time doing online, Habbo has conducted its Global Youth Survey, questioning 58,000 teens aged 11-18 over 31 countries, including Europe, US and Latin America.”

7. The University Daily Kansan – Osama is hiding-out in Orgrimmar? “The Bush administration seems to think that Osama Bin Laden is in Pakistan. They are wrong. He is cowering behind the auction house in Orgrimmar. From there he leads a vast terror network stretching from Kalimdor to the Eastern Kingdom and even into Outland. When he and his followers aren’t plotting the downfall of the West they are raiding Molten Core. As ridiculous as all of this sounds, that is what the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity group, a US government funded program, has come to believe.”

8. The Northern Star (Lismore, NSW) – First get a Second Life. “Lismore Regional Gallery is staging Australia’s first exhibition of Second Life art. Second Life is a virtual world where people all over the planet can go online and live part of their life in a computer-generated world which has, among other things, its own economy. The exhibition, call Babelswarm, is an interdisciplinary artwork in Second Life exploring words and art.”

9. Gamasutra – MI6 Creative Keynote: CSI Creator Calls For Games, TV To Converge. “Anthony Zuiker, creator and executive producer of CBS’ massive television franchise CSI, called for “cross-blending storytelling” across multiple media formats including television and games, in his creative keynote at the MI6 Game Marketing event in San Francisco.”

10. Reuters – Virtual world offers bands global stage. “Leo Wolff, a woman who joined the online world of Second Life in 2005, bought a small plot of virtual land with eight other musicians and opened the “Virtual Garage” to showcase and perform their music. Her online character, or avatar, Slim Warrior was the first British musician to perform in the popular virtual world with its own currency and a growing economy. She was also the first to duet online with another artist based as far away as Texas.”

11. TechCrunch – Erepublik Combines MMOG And Social Networking. “Madrid, Spain based startup Erepublik is aiming to make its mark in the online gaming community with a model that combines MMOG and social network. At its core, Erepublik is a massive online multiplayer social strategy that aims to be intricate and accelerated enough “to attract a spectrum of both fanatical and casual gamers.” Players can be politicians, soldiers, entrepreneurs or journalists in different countries, and much of the environment is user generated. The game is still in invite only beta testing, but has 10,000 beta testers from 43 countries currently playing the game. A key pitch of Erupblik is the time required to play the game: 14 minutes a day.”

1. Times Online – Second chance for Second Life. “The Wales-based new media whizzes Craig Morrison and Joel Cockrill are in the middle of building a second world in cyberspace. In the meantime they are having to negotiate this one.
Last week the boys from Bangor took the train up to Toronto from New York to see some new technology for creating 3-D maps.”

2. PC Quest (India) – Virtual Worlds: Live Beyond the Real. “The word ‘Virtual,’ has had a great impact on the IT industry. Virtualization has opened up new vistas for the IT industry and solved many a problem. Now is the time to go beyond platform or resource virtualization and look toward something totally different, a Virtual World.”

3. Wired.com – Paramount to Monetize Movie Clips in Virtual Worlds. “You know the promotional clips you can find for practically any movie online? Well, Paramount has found a way to monetize its collection. Oh, and it gets better — the film giant has earmarked its stash for sale within two virtual worlds.”

4. MrWeb – Forrester to Calibrate the Virtual World. “In the US, Forrester Consulting has been commissioned by a consortium of virtual world companies to help define standard marketing and engagement measures for the virtual space. The project is being led by agency Millions of Us, in partnership with virtual platform operators Sulake, Gaia Interactive, Metaplace, SceneCaster, Doppelganger, Vivaty and WeeWorld.”

5. PC Magazine – The Real-World Virtual Conference, Really. “Let’s begin by addressing the unavoidable irony of holding a Virtual Worlds conference in the real world. It’s not the most egregious of indiscretions, but I couldn’t help thinking about it while I was walking to the Jacob Javits Conventions Center in Manhattan.”

6. Online Media Daily – Virtual World Users To Marketers: It’s The Activities, Stupid. “Between six and eight million Americans will try at least one virtual world this year–the problem is that they think brands and marketers are too stupid to reach them. That’s according to panelists at the “Virtual Worlds By The Numbers: Today and The Future” panel at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York on Thursday.”

7. Fox Business – Multiverse Unveils 2D Flash Virtual World Technology. “The Multiverse Network, Inc., a leading provider of virtual world development technology for social worlds, Massively Multiplayer Online Games, educational worlds, and business collaboration spaces, today unveiled the ability for consumers to enter virtual worlds built atop the Multiverse Platform with either the company’s standard 3D World Browser or via Flash, embedded in a web page.”

8. ABC News (USA) – ‘Matrix’-Style Virtual Worlds ‘a Few Years Away’. “Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away.”

9. Mashable – Sponge Bob Gets A Virtual World. “Ever since virtual worlds reached a suggestive point of popularity, brands have been hoping to use them as marketing vehicles for reaching a wide range of people with a lot less money than their current advertising tactics. While Second Life didn’t become as large of a billboard as some had hoped it would be, it did help set the virtual world track onto one that would prove beneficial to brands in some form or another.”

10. Physorg.com – Should real profits in virtual worlds be taxed? ISU professors say there’s a way to do it. “In online virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, some game players are making real money — in some cases thousands, even millions, of dollars. But neither the Internal Revenue Service nor game administrators have a process in place for players to report their profits upon cashing out, making these virtual worlds a tax haven for some.”

11. Avatar | Anima – Cultures of Virtual Worlds Conference. “I just got the schedule for the Cultures of Virtual Worlds conference on April 25-26. I’d been looking forward to this – the event maps perfectly onto my interests, and I’ll fly out the evening after my last assignment for the semester is due…Panels 1 and 2 are concurrent, and in different buildings, which is seriously annoying, but overall, I can’t wait for the topics and the presenters.”

12. Eightbar – Industry growth in Virtual Worlds. “The Virtual Worlds 2008 conference here in New York was significantly bigger in exhibitors and attendees from last years one at the same time of year. Last year theer were 2 small office rooms with about 10 exhibitors including IBM. This year the trade floor was somewhat bigger. This is a quick wander around just to help share some of the buzz and atmosphere.”