Tom Boellstorff (better known in Second Life as Tom Bukowski - pictured right) is holding a contest for the image on the cover of his upcoming book, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human to be published in April 2008 by Princeton University Press.

Entries for this competition close at 5pm SLT (US Pacific) on 7 August. The contest terms and conditions are reproduced below the fold. Happy snapping!

Linden Lab has announced the winners of their sculpted prim exhibition. Many fun and interesting entries were put on display in the Luna sim (for the Main Grid) and the Coelacanth sim (for the Teen Grid).

The winners are Nomasha Syaka, Locke Cardway, Artisan Hawks, Pumpkin Tripsa, Zazu Zenovka and DonPain Babenko. The winning entries will be made available to all residents through the inventory library folder. Do yourself a favor though and get on down to the sims where the entries are displayed. It's totally worth seeing the invention and imagination on display.

You can see images of just the winners here, on Linden Lab's announcement, or check our huge gallery below for images of many of the entries.

I have to declare an interest right away:  I led the team which built the Pot Healers game on Numbakulla. The Island belonged to Moopf Murray, who has become a friend in SL, who ran an independent competition for a team of people to develop Numbakulla for six months, in which time he would pay all tier fees.

Seven teams entered, my team won.  We spent four months building, developing and testing the game.  When the Pot Healers Mystery opened, we had a few problems with continuous crashing, due to some change to the server code which luckily was fixed in the following update.

After a couple of months, Moopf reasonably wanted the island back ... but we had put in such a lot of work, and the players loved it soo much, that we didn't want it to be deleted and consigned to nice things that existed once in SL. Due to the generosity of a few players, we were able to buy the island.  Since then, tier fee has been paid by donations. 

I have been to Numbakulla thousands of times, and I hope it won't sound immodest to say that I love it as much now as I ever have.  I think we built a lovely thing.  Check it out.