Gallery Beleze 1st Annual Dragon Photo Competition: 2nd Place award goes to artist Molly Montale for her cleverly composed “Dragon Chow” entry. Congrats Molly! Curator: Wealthy Mizser
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Feb 08
Dragon Photo Contest – 2nd Place: Molly Montale
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Feb 08
Dragon Photo Contest – 3rd Place: Orpheus Kurosawa
Gallery Beleza 1st Annual Dragon Photo Contest: In third place, “Dragon Rider (3)” by Orpheus Kurosawa, an impressive silhouette with fiery skies and a truly gorgeously constructed dragon. Curator: Wealthy Mizser
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Feb 08
Dragon Photo Contest – Hon. Mention: Liz Galeach
Gallery Beleza 1st Annual Dragon Photo Competition: Honorable Mention goes to artist Liz Galeach for her cleverly done entry “Through the Looking Glass”. This piece plays with another favorite haunt of SL residents, showing a miniature dragon facing off against the giant kitty over a tasty Greenies treat. Curator: Wealthy Mizser
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Feb 08
Gallery Beleza Award Ceremomy – Wealthy Mizser
Just arrived at the awards ceremony for the Dragon Photo contest sponsored by the Gallery Beleza. I served as a judge in the contest, so I’m dying to know the results! Gallery owner Weatlhy Mizser (above) will be announcing the top three prize winners, as well as the People’s Choice Award. Drumroll please!
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Jan 08
Komuso’s Joint Best Place to Be
If you’re looking for a live music performance of the experimental, fabulous, and ethereal jamming variety, there’s no better place to be than Komuso’s Joint in Artropolis. Musicians MoShang Zhao and Komuso Tokugawa stream live musical improv and collaborative compositions through a mist of atmospheric visual effects. The star studded audience doesn’t hurt the ambience, either!
posted by Fleep Tuque on Artropolis using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]
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Jan 08
Kapor says “Let’s end the tyranny of geography”
Work is being done to increase the “sense of presence” through better gestures, avatar animations, and interfaces. “If you do the math, the cost savings to do meetings virtually at a distance instead of putting people on planes is enormous,” says Kapor. “Carbon offsets are one of these intermediate solutions, if they are done well they do make a difference.. but it’s like trying to fill a bathtub with the stopper open. I see this causal change from 3D cameras, body language, more realistic intereaction, to make virtual worlds more useful not just for people who want to explore a different identity.. but ending the tyranny of geography [through virtual meetings] is important.”
posted by Fleep Tuque on Reuters using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]
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Jan 08
Mitch Kapor says “Second Life is in the DOS Era”
Linden Lab Chairman Mitch Kapor acknowledges that Second Life is still difficult to use, but says Second Life will be as big as the internet and will merge with the internet, but only if it is open like the internet. Will Linden Lab and Second Life make it to that point? “Well,” says Mitch, “That’s the 64 bllion dollar question, it’s like a video game, you have to win on earlier levels but that just gives you a ticket to play the next round, if you look at other disruptive technologies, the companies that did well early on didn’t necessarily reap the big benefits at the end.”
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Jan 08
Scoble Interview Part 1
Robert talking about the recent flap with Facebook, in which his account was flagged and disappeared temporarily due to a script he ran to “scrape” his Facebook friend contact data to import into another service. Robert points out that the script he ran was functionally the same script that _Facebook_ runs to scrape data from Gmail. The biggest issue with Facebook’s current system, according to Robert, is if you are suspected of doing something bad, they ERASE you and there is no review process, which he sees as a problematic process. He also asks, what does “friending” mean on these systems?
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Jan 08
Robert Scoble Interview from World Economic Forum
In the Reuters Auditorium in Second Life, waiting for the interview to begin with famed tech evangelist Robert Scoble from the World Economic Forum in Davos. Better known as The Scobleizer, his blog at http://scobleizer.com is followed religiously by techheads and geeks.
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Jan 08
Adam Reuters Interview with Philip Linden
Live on Reuters island in Second Life, Adam Reuters interviews SL CEO Philip Rosedale, currently discussing entrepreneurship. Philip disagrees that there is a PR strategy problem, and says that transparency is the way to go, but pre-discussion of policies may be more damaging than just announcing policy changes when they are made. He also suggests some sort of currency/billing changes by May 1st, but I missed that part of the conversation.
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Additional edits post crashing, not sure if any of the other bloghud posts got sent:
Rosedale said the two things limiting SL growth is the stability of the system and people’s first experience with it, and that he wished they could go back in time and capture more of those people, but the one thing LL can’t control is what people find when they get in world – the people, the things users create, the things there are to do – and expects that as SL matures, more people will stay as more things are offered. (paraphrasing)
In response to a question from Adam Reuters, Rosedale says his purpose for attending the World Economic Forum is to serve as not just an evangelist, but also to explain that Second Life is fundamentally about the people, it’s not just an advertisement or a website, and that there are opportunities for entrepreneurship.
I missed the first half and then crashed, sorry for the lousy reporting! Hopefully Reuters will be doing a much better job, and Hank says to check their site for the schedule and more interviews coming up.
Some commentary:
Well that was hectic, thanks to iAlja for the tweet that brought me in world for the interview, sad to say I missed most of it because of Time Warner Cable’s flaky broadband connection at my house. Grrr. At some point in there, Adam Reuters remarked that in some ways, 2007 was the Year of Restrictions in Second Life, and Philip responded that it really made him sad every time they have to restrict behavior, and that despite these changes, SL is still an incredibly open platform.
Two thoughts about that, the first is that I can’t help but believe him when he says the restrictions make him sad. I’m always interested in the individual, the person, at the center of these zeitgeists, and I’m always listening for clues to Philip Rosedale the person, rather than Philip Rosedale the spokesperson in these PR stunts. The consummate professional never sounds really _human_ in my mind, humans admit to mistakes, humans recognize their stumbles, while talking heads and empty suits admit no error and promise an ever more perfect future. I don’t hear that from Rosedale, sure there is the evangelizing, but when he said the restrictions made him sad, that’s such a funny thing for a CEO to say. It sounds almost hokey, and that if anything makes me believe its sincerity.
The other thought is that I haven’t commented much on the restrictions and changes in Second Life, not because I don’t think they are important or controversial, but because it seems to me the issues are so incredibly complex, I’m still trying to figure out the implications for myself. The banking restrictions on their face make sense to me, that the company took a position to say hey, you can’t come in and claim you’re a bank and be completely unaccountable, that’s a good thing. Was this specific implementation a good thing? I have no idea, I’ll leave that up to those who consistently give good analysis of such things, like Aldon Huffhines and Beyers Sellers, but I do think _something_ needed to be done, and Philip’s presence at more events like the World Economic Forum will hopefully help better inform him of the options when considering these major policy changes in the future.