John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Go, and Charlie's Chocolate Factory, spent 30 minutes in Second Life on August 20^th, answering questions about his upcoming film, The Nines. The movie plot explores the intersection between the real and the virtual, while the promotional methods are heavily using transmedia to engage fans into alternate reality games. August announced that he is hoping to release a version of the movie that would allow fans to re-edit it.

The premiere for the The Nines is set for August 31^st in New York and Los Angeles, and September 28^th in Austin, TX.

Connecticut based Information and technology research and advisory firm Gartner, has been in the Second Life part of the news of late with predictions that "80% of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011" [via Reuters] followed by a warning that there are 'significant' risks for business in getting involved with virtual worlds [via ZDNet].

Potentially, both these statements are true. The intrepid 57 Miles from Metaversed is gathering Gartner's Steve Prentice, who was responsible for both assertions along with a number of other interested commentators together for a panel discussion about Gartner's assessment and position on Second Life and virtual worlds (which some have described as 'conflicted').

The discussion will take place in Second Life at Noon, on Thursday. Check the Metaversed group or blog for details.

[This is most likely to be an audio-session (technology permitting), so be prepared]

The New York Assembly passed a bill on the 30th of May which would make selling or renting video games with mature content to minors a Class E felony. This is about the tenth time a US non-federal legislature has passed such a bill, and each and every one has been struck down by a Federal judge on first amendment grounds, because it is - basically - censorship.

Making this a class E felony makes video game boobies and pixellated mutilation fall into the same class as riot in the first degree, criminal anarchy, first degree aggravated harassment, bigamy, incest and wiretapping.

US citizens in the audience, I'd like you to think about three things. The people proposing these bills know they are unconstitutional, but they burn your money on them anyway. The fact that these bills cost a lot of your money to draft, pass and strike down is actually not the most important issue here.

The first annual Virtual Worlds Conference will be held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City from March 28-29th 2007. The conference looks to be the place for companies looking to understand how they can utilize the power of Virtual Worlds in their business and marketing strategies.

Recently the Game Initiative, the creators of the Austin Game Conference, was purchased by CMP, the people behind the Game Developers Conference and rebranded as the Show Initiative. Additionally the conference is supported by both Linden Labs and Makena Technologies the creators of There.

Eric Gordon is editing a special issue of Space and Culture -- The International Journal of Social Spaces. This special issue "The Place of Synthetic Worlds" will explore the function of place in virtual spaces. It will examine how individuals, communities and institutions form identities in relation to sims. And it will interrogate the role of "real-world" places and networks in the construction of meaningful "virtual" spaces.

Eric is looking for essays for this special issue. 500 word abstracts are due by March 2, 2007. Completed essays are due July 16, 2007. All questions and abstracts should be directed to Eric_Gordon[at]emerson.edu.

"Advertisements ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that they work at all, on an inattentive public."

- Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 3.

To the extent that I turn my television on, and soak up bland and homogenous pop-culture funded by five minute blocks of 30-second pleas for my money, there's one virtual world who turns up again and again. Hour after hour. Day after day. Habbo Hotel.

No ActiveWorlds, There.com or Second Life grace the flickery phosphor dots of this window onto the culture that everyone seemingly would like me to have. No Lineage, Final Fantasy, City of Heroes, or World of Warcraft. Habbo Hotel.

What differentiates Web 2.0 from Web1.0 (not a whole lot) and what does that have to do with Second Life?

Some say the big deal of Web 2.0 is user created content. Well ... yes, and no. You see, the web has always been user created content. What has changed is who is doing it, and how. I could say 'back in the day, any old fool could publish almost whatever they pleased on the web' and that would be relatively true. Realistically, though, it was any old fool with a domain name (when did they start charging for those?), an Internet connection, a computer (not all web servers were up 24x7. Many operated only a few hours every day) and sufficient technical skills - since all the software was open source, or custom made that didn't cost. So not any old fool. Just some old fools.

So, why the clarion call of user created content rung out so loud and clear? And why does the Web2.0 cater to those users so slavishly? Because you can't stop them...

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A friend of mine, Tim Holt who is working on a pretty cool looking Mars Based MMOG, went off the the Austin Games Conference last week, and he decided it was fun to rub it in my face that I missed an awesome talk on the future of virtual worlds. Well in your face Tim, Mark Wallace posted the audio of the talk on his website. As it turns out it is an excellent talk featuring Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Raph Koster formally of SOE, Cory Ondrejka of Second Life, and Mark Wallace of 3PointD. All of this hosted by Jerry Paffendorf the resident futurist of the Electric Sheep Company. This is a stellar group of people with a broad variety of virtual world experience.

I almost titled this talk the clash of the Corys, but it was a much more equitable exchange than that title would imply. The talk provides a great deal of information on Second Life, the future of Second Life, and also who is gunning for Second Life's thrown as king of the virtual worlds. I left feeling really excited about what is coming in soon to a virtual world near you.