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One idea which is bouncing around among people interested in data portability is to only have one user account and freely go from service to service, taking your data with you. No need to signup again and again, importing your data again and again, finding your friends again and again and all that jazz. This vision seems to be somewhat away in the field of social networks (but we are fighting for it) but in the field of virtual worlds we are moving with big steps towards this goal! Today we (that is COM.lounge) launched syntronik.de, the first native Agent Domain implementation for the Open Grid Protocol based on Plone. This might not say much to you but let me explain it. What is the Open Grid Protocol? The Open Grid Protocol is developed by the Architecture Working Group founded by Linden Lab in September 2007. This protocol aims at breaking down the walls between virtual worlds, think of it maybe as the HTTP for the 3D internet. In the Open Grid Protocol there are Agent Domains which hold all the users with their profiles, groups, friends, etc. and there are Region Domains, the actual 3D environments. Given you have the permission the protocol allows you to freely connect from any Agent Domain to any Region Domain thus enabling a truly open and global virtual world. syntronik.de is our proof of concept of such an Agent Domain and it works! You can create an account and you can then use that account to login to any Open Grid enabled region. Right now there are about 30 of these regions listed for the Open Grid Public Beta program. This list is growing. After the initial teleport between grids done by Linden Lab and IBM engineers this is an important steps towards the goal of a global network of virtual worlds. The Open Grid Protocol is very much at it s beginning but we are moving forward quickly. What is it built upon? As the basis for the actual website we used the CMS Plone. The reason is simple: An Agent Domain aims to be implemented on existing user bases such as those in social networks. Using Plone gave us the opportunity to find out how such an Agent Domain component can be developed in a non-invasive way. This means without changing much of the actual data model etc. I will write more about how we solved this in a future article. The other component we used was the pyogp library, an open source implementation of the Open Grid Protocol as it stands today. We are also heavily involved in the pyogp project. The Agent Domain component we developed for syntronik.de will also be part of the pyogp project. Where is the source? The source code will be released soon. The Agent Domain component will be part of pyogp, the Plone related component will be put into the Plone collective. This will then close the gap in the open source environment where the only missing open source piece was an Agent Domain implementation (The Second Life client is released under the GPL, Open Sim which is used as Region Domain is released under a BSD license and the Agent Domain component now is released under an Apache License). How does it look like? Just check it out over at syntronik.de and create an account or watch this screencast: Syntronik.de Screencast from MrTopf on Vimeo What s the future? As said, this is a proof of concept. We will continue to work on this project on all fronts and would like people to join it. There is much to do in the specification of the Open Grid Protocol, in the implementation of it in pyogp and in the implementation of Agent Domains. It would be very cool of course would somebody also start a Region Domain or some sort of client based on pyogp. Maybe we can also influence the social networking scene with this work and vice versa. This at least is my personal goal. Thanks! I would like to thank Linden Lab for starting this effort, the OpenSim team for creating an open source server, David Levine (Zha Ewry) from IBM for creating the initial patch for making OpenSim Open Grid compatible, the pyogp team, especially Locklainn Linden for doing a lot of coding and Lawson English (Saijanai Kuhn) for knowing everything about the protocol. And of course in general everybody helping to make the Open Grid a reality! Technorati-Tags: opengridprotocol, ogp, opengrid, virtualworlds, secondlife, comlounge, syntronik

I was interviewed for the german radio program Deutschlandfunk and the interview is now online. They simply wanted to know if it s still around and what s actually happening. The Open Grid Protocol unfortunately didn t make it into the aired interview but I hope for next time. If you understand german feel free to tune in. Thomas Reintjes hatte mich ja letztens für den Deutschlandfunk über Second Life interviewt und inzwischen ist das Interview auch online. Es ging darum, mal nachzufragen, was denn eigentlich Second Life so macht, da man in den Medien ja nicht mehr soviel davon hört. Wie jeder weiss, der sich dort umschaut, passiert dort natürlich nach wie vor sehr viel und vielleicht mehr denn je (das Open Grid Protocol wäre für mich das wichtigste, ist es doch im Prinzip das HTTP für das 3D Internet, nur leider hat es das nicht in den Beitrag geschafft). Aber wie auch immer, hört einfach selbst: (Link zum Audiofile) Ich weiss nicht, ob es zu dem Beitrag/der Sendung auch eine Webseite gibt, wenn ja, dann gebt sie doch bitte in den Kommentaren an und ich verlinke sie dann. Ansonsten habe ich beim Stöbern auf den DLF-Seiten noch diesen Artikel über Second Life und virtuelle Welten generell gefunden. Der ist zwar schon ein paar Tage alt, aber dennoch recht fundiert. So sagt Medienexperte Norbert Bolz z.B.: Ich denke bei vielen, die da gescheitert sind, ist es auch so, dass sie das Ethos, den Geist, das Internet gar nicht verstanden haben und dass sie gar nicht begriffen haben, dass tatsächlich die Nutzer zuerst kommen und dass es deren Welt ist und dass es nicht primär die Welt des Kommerzes und der Anbieter ist. Was soll man da noch hinzufügen? Ausser, dass Linden Lab selbst inzwischen auch das Problem hat, dies zu verstehen. Wie sonst sollte man die Änderungen bzgl. des Trademarks sehen?

As you might have heard in the press, many people are quite active in making virtual worlds interoperability possible. So am I. Together with Linden Lab and other interested participants we started the pyogp project a little while ago and it seems to make great progress. But what is all that, OGP, pyogp and the AWG? OGP = Open Grid Protocol You can think of this as some sort of HTTP of the future. It will be for virtual worlds what HTTP is today for the web. It will be an open, standardized protocol which defines how avatars, virtual objects and all that can be transported over the network. You can read what s there right now in the OGP Draft 1. AWG = Architecture Working Group This is the name of the group working on the Open Grid Protocol. It is made up of people from Linden Lab, from IBM, from COM.lounge (well, me) and basically everybody who is interested on working on this. We have many regular meetings in Second Life, a mailing list and recently also an IRC channel (#gridnauts on irc.freenode.net). There are also many wiki pages on it. Another group is the AWGroupies group which is made up of interested Second Life residents. pyogp = A Python implementation of the Open Grid Protocol This is what I introduced above. As said, it s making great progress and login as well as initial teleport are working already. We have an IRC channel (#pyogp on irc.freenode.net), a mailing list (or via gmane) and of course many wiki pages already. Since yesterday we also have every other day meetings which will happen Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 AM Second Life Time at infinity is full of stars @ Levenhall/91/208/22 in Second Life. My EuroPython presentation about pyogp To give those folks at EuroPython a little introduction about the idea behind and the concepts of the OGP as well as an pyogp introduction I did a little presentation: | View | Upload your own (And please please please vote for me in the World s Best Presentation Contest!! ) I am not sure how much the slides alone will work and explain things (probably not so much) but maybe I will find some time to add some audio track to it as well. Status What we have right now is login and placing an avatar on a region. The process stops there right now and what we need is a way to establish a presence with that region which is done by implementing lots of UDP handling. Locklainn Linden right now is working on a UDP packet decoder and I am working on refining the code a bit and making suggestions on what we can improve. So far we decided on the following components to use: The Zope Component Architecture for having decoupled components which are easy to test and easy replaceable. buildout for setting up a development sandbox Python eggs for packaging the parts of the library (which right now is only one package but might grow into additional ones) unittest and doctests for doing tests (although Infinity Linden wants to look at py.test as well) probable grokcore.component for doing the component registration maybe WSGI for setting up test scenarios which do not involve running a separate server (we call the WSGI application directly) The Test Harness The main reason for starting this Python library was to have a tool for testing components which implement some part of the Open Grid Protocol. This is what the test harness is about and Infinity Linden seems to be the person right now working mostly on that front. We probably simply will use the normal unittest framework but will add some configuration option to setup hostnames and so on. Moreover we need some way to telling the component we want to test which test fixture to load. All this is in a very early stage and I will report back on this once we know more. All in all this project is coming along quite nicely I think. In the beginning there is of course lots of confusion about all the parts being used but I hope everybody in the end will be happy with those choices. We also seem to have a good team which communicates quite a lot via IRC, Second Life or the mailing list and so everything seems fine at the moment. What s of course needed might be more people participating, so if you are into Python and might want to work on a library which implement HTTP of the future just chime in on the IRC channel or mailing list mentioned above.

Apparently Philip Rosedale was in Paris and I wasn t That s bad luck. But good luck is that all of this is recorded and there s even a transcript! It was in the context of SLCamp which is according to their website an ad-hoc gathering, a unconference, born from the desire of people to share and learn about the latest innovations in terms of 3D virtual environment, mainly focusing on SecondLife, technology, communication and marketing in an open environment. Now this sounds great and is the thing I always wanted to have around. So I will keep watching it and might book a trip to Paris next time! But back to Philip. As you know he is right now in the middle of some transformation from being the CEO to being the chairman of the board. As well in transformation seems to be Linden Lab and the whole virtual worlds scene because everything is growing, Linden Lab has open sourced their client code and is in the process of creating an open protocol for a distributed grid. So the more interesting it is to hear Philips take on this. I will just post the videos here but you can read the transcripts here. I might also post a followup on some topics. Part 1: The Company Part 2: The Platform Part 3: The future of Second Life and the 3D Web Part 4: Questions from Bloggers Technorati-Tags: lindenlab, secondlife, philip rosedale, paris, slcamp4, slcamp

The Podcast Download as MP3 (66,2 MB, 1:13:14) How to reach me? E-Mail: mrtopf@gmail.com Call-In Line: +1 (206) 350-4566 (please start with your name and URL/Homepage and email me this information afterwards so it’s correct in the shownotes) Shownotes Sorrento Sprint 2008, my Sorrento Sprint report Marketing Failure at T-Mobile: The initial letter to Engadget, The Engadget Mobile reaction Data Portability Working Group, Robert Scoble on Data Portability, The Next Web Conference, Data Portability Lunch (upcoming), my DP video Second Life s 2nd AWG meetup report, The Architecture Working Group, The Protocol Draft Warning: The Archetype/Devilstick/Dexterity discussion might be a bit technical Plone Plone Strategic Planning Summit Updates Music Pension Tension by Cactus On Fire feat. Baba Brinkman (download mp3) Album: 52 weeks Label: http://www.peppermillrecords.com/ I Can t Stop by Paul Keely (download mp3) Label: Epsilonlab

Today the second meeting of the Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group happened. This group (of which I am part of and which is open to everybody to participate) is working on protocol to interconnect Second Life Grids. The outcome of the group s effort will be a document describing in detail how you can create your own server and hook it up to a grid (this can be but does not need to be the Second Life grid run by Linden Lab). Think Data Portability for Virtual Worlds. Today Linden Lab invited to the second longer meeting for discussing the first draft of the protocol which was released earlier. Invited was everybody interested and it turned out to be a great and productive meeting. It was held inside Second Life using voice chat (the first one was a mixed reality event with people in the Linden Lab office and in-world. The audio bridge wasn t working that well though). We talked about many things like Are the right logistics in place? Do we need more or less meetings? How do people feel about the draft? Is the form ok, should it be different. How should the process of creating it be? Who is planning or maybe already active in implementing something for this protocol? What is Linden Lab doing? What are the phases in which the protocol gets written? What actually should be in the protocol and what should be separate? All these questions were raised and we tried to come to a conclusion. So here s Zero s summary of what we discussed: the meeting structure is okay, maybe have better agenda and maybe have occasionally longer meetings with a special topic event queue: there have been some proposals for an alternative implementation, maybe XMPP? maybe we should do a meeting about transports at some point (to clarify: the problem is how the server sends events to the client because the server cannot initiate a connection because of firewall/NAT reasons. Thus the long-polling technique is discussed and actually already in use in Second Life. For more information look at this article by Jacob Rus explaining the techniques used for Comet. the planning of phases seem right with some exceptions. I will list them below L$ issues are maybe for a later phase. maybe optional and a separate standard. The problem is how to do micropayment. various projects for implementing this protocol are on the way, among others of course OpenSim. how do we deal with extensibility and baseline? what is the baseline? what can be opened up for innovation and evolution? (example avatar representation) also: how inclusive is the spec vs. how modular it is. So there are also some open questions which need to be answered later. I also brought up the point that we might need a good (and single!) name and a good/short URL so that one can tell people more easily about this project and they are able to google for it. Here is what Mark summarized in audio: Audio and Video I also recorded the meeting, here are the two ustream Videos, below that you will find the 2 mp3 files with just the audio. I didn t work that good with the camera and the capturing region was somewhat small for whatever reason. Will try better next time But maybe the audio is sufficient anyway. Beware of silence though, I didn t edit anything. Unfortunately I also had some gap inbetween because it stopped recording. But I think not too much is lost. (download mp3) (download mp3) Technorati Tags: slga, secondlife, awg, lindenlab, interconnectivity, dataportability

It was posted to the Machinima mailing list and I think it s a great one so I share it with you (ok, music is not totally my thing but the video is ): It was created by Orpheus Kurosawa, which is probably a Second Life name. You can find more version (like 300 MB full res) on blip.tv. Definitely great scenes and camera/editing work on that one. (another nice one is here, good work on sound there). Tags: secondlife, video, machinima, music

In diesem Artikel denke ich ein bisschen über den Sinn und Unsinn von Pressekonferenzen nach, vor allem im Hinblick auf die heutigen Möglichkeiten, die Datenautobahnen so bieten. People following me on Twitter might have noticed my recent thinkings about this traditional entity called Press Conference and in fact it is an interesting thing to think about. My thinking of Press Conferences is somehow twofold. First of all for me they represent some relict from ancient mass media only times. Back then when companies had world wide customers but only limited tools to interact with them it was a problem to reach the mass if you wanted to get the word out about something new. Luckily newspapers, TV and other means of reaching a lot of people emerged and they indeed reach quite a lot people. Now it is logical to use these institutions to spread the word and thus press conferences have been invented. A small group of journalists gets the scoop and hopefully will distribute it through their mass media channels. Of course this sort of communication is only one way, from the company, filtered through press to the (potential) client. Thus it s sort of the old way to do communication just because it wasn t differently possible back then. On the other hand a press conference is maybe as close to a conversation as you can get (if we take the Cluetrain Manifesto here where it says Markets are conversations ). Of course this conversation is sort of limited to a small group and probably not very personal. But it s at least a small form of a two-way conversation. Now we live in different times and as you can read in the Cluetrain Manifesto and other publications, the world has changed and we have the internet now (esp. the web, version 2.312352 public alpha). With the web and today s bandwidth (unfortunately not everywhere but still) it s easier than ever to reach a lot of people directly. Mass media for doing that is not that much needed anymore and that is why I am wondering if press conferences might not be completely different in the future. Imagine that everyone of them gets broadcasted, that ordinary people and even bloggers ( ) can ask questions, if it maybe takes place in Second Life as it already happened and so on. Wouldn t this make more sense? There is even some problem with having the press as a filter due to many reasons: The journalist in question could just not be competent (be it a bad journalist in general or just not his or her topic) Newspapers and TV features only have limited space or time so you only can summarize. In News programs it migth even be just 5 sentences. Journalists might not be that well paid and might be unmotivated Journalists might have time constraints as they have too much on their plate. Journalists need to make sure the newspaper/TV program sells and thus might be more up for catchy stories or headlines All of this might also be true for bloggers of course, esp. those earning a living with it (and I really wouldn t differ too much between those two groups anyway although some individuals from these groups seem very eager to discuss this over and over again in very generalized terms). So all of that might make up for a bad filter and information might get lost. Thus it might make even more sense to open these events up to the general public. How I came to think about this? Yesterday I was attending the office hour of Robin Harper/Linden in Second Life and there was talk about a press conference conducted by Linden Lab in Second Life supposedly for the in-world Second Life press. I wasn t there but what I heard was the following: It is supposed to be a regular event probably in different time zones There is a list of invited in-world press (no sign on how to get on it and it wasn t too clear what the requirements are for it but somebody suggested that probably any blogger who reports regularly about SL can ask for an invite and probably Catherine Linden is the one to ask). The event is done via Voice Chat It is done in the form of a presentation (this time it was about the new search functionality) and a Q s the first one that s probably ok. Unfortunately I did not hear that much about the press conference and wouldn t have attended that meeting I still wouldn t know. My idea here was that this could even be streamed live inside SL, maybe as they do it at the Metanomics events where SLCN.tv is filming and broadcasting it and you can watch this at many places all over SL. There is also a group backchannel chat available and moderated questions get asked. I attended some of these and I think that s quite a good solution given the sim limitations you have in Second Life. But there seems to be some hesitation from Linden Lab to do that as this seemed more like a townhall meeting. These have been conducted for quite some time but dropped for now as it wasn t possible to reach that many residents. Now all in all I don t see a difference between a townhall and a (modern) press conference, you can manage it the same way as at monday s press conference but with more people (double virtually attending). You can still limit the questions and by not having everybody on one sim you can even handle the chat noise . With this approach you have solved many problems: Information is first hand and not filtered by somebody Press can still write about it as not everybody will attend these You only need one type of event and can better manage your time So if you want to reach the most people possible IMHO you should open it up as much as possible. Update: Thanks to Mal Burns for telling me about the MP3 recording Bernhard Drax (one of the reporters attending) made: mp3 link Technorati Tags: pr, press, marketing, secondlife, newmarketing, cluetrain

Now up on stage is Tristan Nitot, co-founder of the Mozilla Europe Foundation. Looking back to 1999-presence: Mozilla is doomed, even JWZ quit. He asked the audience to stand up and then those people sit down who use Firefox mainly and nearly everybody sat down. So he s now more positive about the future again Germany is the second biggest market for Mozilla in the world after the US. Poland and Slovenia are approaching 50% of FF users. Firefox 3 Although rumours say it, beta 1 is not yet ready. Engine update Better mem management, Snappier, Better standards support Full page zoom Advanced font rendering native form control (no custom buttons) UI changes Visual refresh still to come Toolbar rearrange Page info redesign new download manager visual drag awsomebar , formerly Places reinvent bookmarks Merging history, bookmarks, and adding tagging He then showed a demo of some of the features: Mozilla 2: problems trying to get solved More performance, smaller footprint (mobile devices), more secure DeCOMtamination (rewriting tools to massively update the codebase) Tamarin JIT compiler JS2 engine Firefox mobile Plans announced October 9th, 2007 Based on Mozilla 2 (e.g. will take some time, and FF3 will *not* run on your mobile) Ways to get involved Use Firefox Spread the word (spreadfirefox.com) Give us feedback Write an Add-on (developer.mozilla.org) Become a contributor Tags: web2expoberlin, berlin, web2expo, expo, conference, firefox, mozilla, foundation

Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale was one of the keynote speakers at this year s O Reilly Open Source Convention and he talked about Second Life and it s relationship with Open Source. Just click the image and listen to Philip Technorati Tags: oscon.open source, philip rosedale, lindenlab, keynote

This interview with long-term residen Eggy Lippmann was made a while back, after the SLDEVU in London in December 2006. We talked about the past and future of Second Life and also mentioned the opportunities and problems of an open source client (which wasn t released back then but was talked about at the SLDEVU event). [Click here to download the Quicktime version] (produced by COM.lounge TV)

So the new lighting system has arrived and it looks great. Look at this photo or click on the next one to start a little video of mine which I did at the wedding of Walker and Destroy, what a nice couple Click here to play the video (this is from my german blog over at http://mrtopf.de, btw) More information about the new viewer and lighting system is on the official Linden Lab blog and you can download it here.

Adam Reuters informed me that today there will be two Second Life interviews with Raph Koster and Jerry Paffendorf. Raph is right now working on a eventually-to-be Second Life Killer called Areae. He will be interviewed today at 2 pm CST (3 pm EST, noon Pacific) at the Reuters Auditorium. Jerry, well known to Second Lifers, is part of the Electric Sheep Company and will be interviewed at 12 pm CST (1 pm EST, 10 am Pacific) about Sony’s newly announced PS3 virtual world and where Second Life is heading. It will also take place at the Reuters Auditorium. Definitely interesting interviews so make sure you are there! Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, reuters, sxsw, interviews, media, areae, esc, taotakashi

Yesterday the winners of the The Second Life Business Magazine machinima contest have been announced. The goal was to produce a commercial within Second Life for whatever product, company or service that exists within Second Life (and I was part of the panel for judging the entries). So here are winners: 1st place: Trent Hedges and his Griffin Ad 2nd place: Trent Hedges and his Tugboat Ad 3nd place: Francis Chung for the Dominus Shadow Ad Congratulations to the winners and esp. Trent Hedges (who I accidently met yesterday evening and who is a nice guy :-). BTW, one video I also like, is the promo by Metaversatility which has a nice RL/SL blend and great editing. All in all I think machinima in SL is getting better, which I was also noticing during the last machinima festival. Sometimes compression and camera technique could be better but some people seem to have an eye for good camera angles and editing. And speaking of machinima, I also did a new piece, this time for Crayon and you can watch it here. Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, taotakashi, machinima, contest, slbusinessmag, media

Just realized it. This time it s from Aren Mandala (aka real life famous blogger Michael Verdi) and you should check it out here. For more informations look at my other posts here, here and here. Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, intel, machinima, nyc, art, campaign, taotakashi

Back on last tuesday the SUN press conference was happening. See here my video summary of it (done for Millions of Us who ran the event in Second Life). Technorati Tags: secondlife, sun, virtualworld, millionsofus, press conference, machinima, taotakashi

The video I made about the second part of the 72 hour build-athon by Versu Richelieu (see here, here and here for other posts by me) is now online. Check it out below. Technorati Tags: secondlife, machinima, taotakashi, millionsofus, nyclivewindow, versurichelieu, campaign, art, mixedreality

Thanks to Rikomatic for discovering the CyberOne Course announcement over at the Berkman Center homepage. I was actually waiting for that as it features a video I helped making by filming the SL parts. So congrats to the Berkman team to create that nice video out of it (and they also use Crazytalk which maybe I slowly should get, too For the actual description of the course I hand over again to Rikomatic s post as he explained it nicely already. Technorati Tags: secondlife, berkman, harvard, machinima, taotakashi, cyberone course, cyberlaw

So finally we made it and the first episode of The Tao and Topf show is online . A podcast done by MrTopf and Tao Takashi in cooperation. Hope you like it and don t feel asleep directly Download Episode It is a mix of Real Life, Second Life and music. Details of MrTopf: Company Homepage: COMlounge.net Video-Blog: mrtopf.tv Plone Blog: dev.comlounge.net E-Mail: mrtopf@gmail.com Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/mrtopf Details of Tao Takashi: Blog: taotakashi.wordpress.com (just videos are here) Blog Aggregator: planet.worldofsl.com Fashion-Blog Aggregator: fashionplanet.worldofsl.com E-Mail: tao.takashi@gmail.com Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/taotakashi Homepage of Second Life: http://secondlife.com Storylinks: iTunes, eMusic, Napster, Suzanne Vega performance, Relay For Life in Second Life, Python, Zope, Plone, Plone Conference, WSGI, CacheFu, DZUG Tagung, vox, Michael Verdi, whenwewererobots.com, Creative Commons, Burning Man, SLCC, BanLink, Music in the show Skyway Jerry Mane Little Rascal Records Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at eMusic Download Skyway (MP3, 192kbps) Giggles In The Dark - The Remixes LP Lesbians On Ecstasy Alien8 Recordings Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at eMusic Download Tell Me Does She Love The Bass - The Jealous Mix (Sean Kosa mix) (MP3, 192kbps) Better Sucre Mek! Music Inc. Buy at iTunes Music Store Download Better (MP3, 192kbps) Technorati Tags: podcast

When I was offline this morning I got some inventory delivered by Anya Ixchel, maybe know to you by being the female actor in Kronos Kirkorian s Lip Flap movie (which was winning the Best Movie Award at the July take5 festival of alt-zoom studios). It turned out to be the first issue of the in-world edition of the slatenight magazine. Here s a little quote what it is about: Slatenight is a monthly magazine dedicated to showcasing the Arts, education, and all forms of entertainment in Second Life. Covering topics such as photography, machinima, art, role-playing, new media, gaming, and including Second Life poetry and fiction, slatenight aims to be a guide to all things creative, imaginative and fun in SL. I just had a quick look over the first issue and it looks quite promising to me. It has stuff about fashion, some fiction, stories about education, an interview with BuhBuhCuh Fairchild and much more. The magazine comes in various formats: - an online edition at slatenight.com in a blog style (but without RSS feed ) - a PDF version (which actually for some reason stopped loading for me) - and as mentioned an in-world version which can be found here (SL URL) The layout of the PDF was done by the team of Dell Wilberg, Scarlet Singer and Richie Waves. More information about the whole project can also be found at Anya Ixchel s blog. So actually I think it s cool that it comes in different formats so you can choose what fits you best (but I really would like to have that RSS subscription possibility ). I hope the PDF will download at some point (on the first try it actually crashed my browser, another point which actually speaks against PDFs) so I can have a look at that as well (but I guess the in-world version will be the same as the PDF). The good thing of the in-world version is actually that you can zoom in more easily than with the PDF reader So looking forward to the next issue (and I missed the release party, doh) Technorati Tags: secondlife, slatenight, magazine, media, pdf, in-world, virtualworld

Yesterday night (for me) the second show of the SL version of The Infinite Mind has been taped and held live inside Second Life. Guest this time was John Maeda. As the stage at the Vega event was a bit empty (and unfortunately the stools have been moved after I did setup my camera angles and thus I had to improvise a bit) I thought about improving it a bit and thus Shukran Fahid came up with this: So I used my TT Lounge Chairs and adjusted them a bit, Shukran added some carpet and finally I did some simple backdrops (low-lag ones . I ve also put my head movement animations into the chairs so that the head at least moves a bit as if they were talking although lips aren t of course. So here is how it looked during the event: The interview itself was again interesting but apparently it was Maeda, too, hasn t really visited SL before that much. I hope though he does more after that event as it might be of use for both sides. The most interesting part about this whole The Infinite Mind thing is though that they themselves plan a lot in Second Life. John Hockenberry (who actually also has a video blog). First of all who don t know the Infinite Mind: It s a national weekly 1 hour Radio program (national means US of course) being on the air for 9 years. It covers the human mind, brain and behaviour. According to him the sim will be used for the community to listen, discuss and get in contact with the producers of The Infinite Mind. So they want discussion and residents might even be part in the planning of shows. So I am looking forward to what they gonna do there. Ok, enough talk. The video of Suzanne Vega is finished and here it is: Watch the Video Technorati Tags: secondlife, infinitemind, suzanne vega, stage, set, taotakashi, radio, hockenberry, maeda

Watch the video So a quick little video from recent RFL footage.Really sad when these great sets are gone!Congrats again to all the builders! This video was originally shared on blip.tv by Tao Takashi with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Although the movie trailer contest is going on the take5 machinima festival of alt-zoom studios had again 16 submissions! This is great! Machinima in Second Life seems to get some drive! Check out the list of all videos at the alt-zoom page and check also out Angela Thomas review of that event. Congrats especially to the Kronos Kirkorian with his movie Lip Flap which is truely great and of course to the other winners and everybody who submitted a video! Keep them coming! Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, taotakashi, machinima, alt-zoom, take5, video, contest, event

So here is another video for you to watch! Come over! Watch the video Here s the LM for the starting area and the LM for the Auction. The auction will be on until Sunday, 4am and make sure to go there and catch something! The Relay For Life will be on until 7am in the morning.

Some weeks ago I heard the first time about a thing called the Relay For Life and it s Second Life part. Back then I did not know anything about it and it seemed very hard for me to find any information about the SL part online. Thus I kept asking people and now I know and I think it s time to write it down for all the other people out there who wonder what it is. What is the Relay For Life The Relay For Life (RFL) is an annual event held by the American Cancer Society for raising awareness and money for the fight against cancer. The main idea behind it is to have members of teams continuously walking, running or rolling around a track for 12 or 24 hours, to honor those who are surviving cancer, those who have died from it, and the efforts of all who fight it . And last year and this year the same event is held in the virtual world of Second Life, organized by Jade Lily. Relay For Life in Second Life In Second Life there will also be teams competing in a friendly manner to do the most fundraising. They are holding their own events (I reported about the Dominus auction) before the main RFL event in order to raise money and they are placing RFL donation kiosks all over Second Life to which you can donate. At the main event their job is it to run around a track which is layed out on 12 sims for 24 hours. People (YOU!) are supposed to come there and cheer them and to donate money in the luminaires which are placed around the whole track. Residents from all over Second Life are busy right now to fill the 12 sims with buildings representing the whole world. Moreover there will be concerts and other events (more details will be posted later) during that day so make sure you attend and have some fun! And here s that video I created as my contribution to the event: Watch the Video. I just submitted it to the alt-zoom take5 festival and any prize money which might come out of it will go to the Relay For Life. Technorati Tags: secondlife, taotakashi, rfl, relay for life, event, videoblog, video, cancer, virtualworld, american cancer society

Michael Verdi, also known in Second Life as Aren Mandala has a cool new video blog up which is called When We Were Robots. It s about, yes, Robots For the first episode he actually asked me if I want to be an actor in it and I said YES! So I ended up playing myself and interviewing two robots about their plans and background. So here s the video: Be aware though that although my intro is coming there it s actually mostly made by Aren Mandala (including the script). Looking forward to episode 2! Technorati Tags: secondlife, aren mandala, tao takashi, vlog, machinima, video blog, robots, virtual world, 3d, second life

So I am living now in Theta and today I suddenly found the London Eye in front of my little home. A little investigation and I found out that my neighbour Timeless Prototype is building it for the Relay For Life event on July, 23. So I dug out my RL photo of it and here s some comparison: And here s a little movie about it: Watch the Video Technorati Tags: art, community, event, Marketing, photo, photos, Real Life, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world

Watch the video This episode is about the peak day of the birthday party, the parade, the protesters and the doom of the database server..

Watch the video Second Life is 3 years old now and the birthday party just started! These are my first impressions of some dance dome events. Much more to come!

Thanks to Spin Martin, the video blog conference under the name of vloggercon held in San Francisco at June 10 11 will also take place in Second Life. Location will be the hipcast conference center at the Shalida sim. And because it will happen I will be there and thus I did some promo for it! Watch the video It #39;s a quick little thing so please excuse any mistakes here Technorati Tags: 3d, architecture, event, media, Mixed Reality, vloggercon, Real Life, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world