Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

As this article speculates, Microsoft might be throwing its hat into the ring. Daniel Schiappa, general manager of the entertainment and devices division at Microsoft, and reportedly in charge of MSoft's virtual worlds strategy, attended the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, with the enigmatic line " ... by this time next year, you'll probably know more about why I'm up here."

Well, so much for speculation. That's pretty much an open invitation to assume that they're going to have some form of virtual space, whether for a PC box or the XBox 360. Will this signal to the world that it's time to take virtual worlds seriously? Or will it seem another nail in MSoft's coffin to those who say the giant company just doesn't get the online model?

(Via tech.co.uk)

It looks as though we're closer to developing the Metaverse than I thought, if this story is any indication. According to Lost in the Magic Forest, the Metaverse 1.0 project is being developed by a consortium of research institutes and universities to create a set of standards by which virtual worlds can interoperate. Among these entities are high-profile names like Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens IT, and IBM.

This is a huge undertaking, and the site lists some of the challenges already in sight, including:

• No feedback-interfaces exist into / from real world
• No security, trust and privacy management
• Metaverse content cannot be ported between virtual worlds
• Metaverses are limited to "chat / text" oriented interaction
• Metaverses are imperfect and incomplete

More information to be disseminated at the Virtual Worlds Conference, coming up on October 9 - 10. I'll be there; will you?

(Thanks, Tao!)