If Linden Lab couldn't find any evidence of wrongdoing at Wonderland, perhaps they need to hire some journalists to investigate incidents like this. It seems that most everyone else found something broadly offensive in the place, and well, the journalists apparently found the worst sort of offense in next to no time.

Linden Lab has apparently shut Wonderland down now - we don't know if they found evidence of wrongdoing themselves, or if it is a reflexive reaction to the mainstream media putting the story in front of about 150 million people so far.

Sky News, previously covered here, has 'discovered' Wonderland, a sim in which Ageplay is condoned at best, and encouraged at worst. A representative from the Kid Avs community has made this statement: "It's really upset alot of us as we've known about this place and its reputation for weeks, and no matter how much we AR linden lab or IM the Lindens ourselves, they don't seem to want to close it down. Now it's our Kid Av community that's going to get it in the neck. Its like, what was the point of starting up all those policy reviews about broadly offensive behaviour, then not doing anything when a real problem sim appears? Its very frustrating, all our hard work ignored."

Now, let's understand a few things here. According to the article, "Wonderland is a virtual children's playground where paedophiles cruise and kids are solicited," said Jason Farrell, a Sky News reporter who's reportedly been researching this for some time. Well, on the surface of it, there's no actual proof, once again, that these child avatars are being driven by actual children. It's likelier that these are adults roleplaying as children. Regardless, this is exactly the sort of 'broadly offensive' behavior that Linden Lab is famously against, yet nothing has been done about Wonderland, despite repeated entreaties over a period of weeks from the community of residents who roleplay nonsexual children. Of course, the mainstream press pick this up and run with it, making Linden Lab look bad, the child avatar community look bad, and all of us in Second Life look bad by tenuous association.

We've contacted Linden Lab for a statement, but received no response by the time we went to press. If/when we get a reply, we'll follow up. The way Sky News is pushing this right now, you can bet that none of us have heard the last of this.

For those of you having difficulty visualizing the recent Metaplace story, here's a YouTube video via Wonderland that describes it a bit more in-depth.

I just don't quite get the strange instances of Extreme Closeups™ -- Raph's hand, the lower-right corner of the screen, etc. If this was meant to hide sensitive content, why even keep that content in the video?

Following GDC, I'd heard of this Flash-based virtual world being developed by Three RIngs, the makers of the popular Puzzle Pirates game. However, their own website has little information on the product, so I'm linking to Alice over at Wonderland instead.

Three Rings is calling this thing Whirled (get it?), and it's what the kids nowadays are calling 2.5D. They plan on making the source for their in-world minigames available to encourage hackery, which is brave enough. Even better, they want people to upload their Flash-based content as well. Quick note: have you seen Newgrounds? This could either be really great or really horrible ... actually, I take that back: it'll likely be both at the same time. And it hits SL right where it's weak: no Flash. Considering the number of people out there who already create Flash-based content on their own, this could be big. More as it develops!

Picnic is an annual tech event hosted in Amsterdam, with a focus on cross media content and technology. This year's guest speaker list includes such luminaries as Craig Newmark, of craiglist.org; Dr. Michael B. Johnson, Moving Picture Group Lead of Pixar Studios; and our very own Philip Rosedale.

Alice over at Wonderland has compiled an impressive document of her notes on Philip's speech. It's not verbatim, she avers, but it's pretty darn close. Take a look and see which bits match up to your experience.

(Via Wonderland)

Alice over across the pond at Wonderland has called my attention to this sleep-preventing bit of news. There's a new HUD on the market, and it's called BlogHUD. It allows anyone wearing the HUD to post a comment or two to bloghud.com, where it will join the posts of many other residents.

Obviously, this is a great tool for everyone but the staff of Second Life Insider. This sinple little device turns any resident into a blogger. Granted, the tool does not allow the posting of images, but it does provide a direct link to where the post originated from. What's to keep you all from coming to check us out? Your sense of civic duty?

Obviously, I'm being facetious here, but it did give me a nasty knock when I first read the story. My days of posting some snarky bit of "humor" are over; now I have to actually come up with something interesting to say. Tremble, world!