My view of the WSOGMM

Second Life [SL] – The life you have when you’re not having a life… Maybe they should have called it Claytons Life?

For those of you that haven’t heard of Second Life, here’s an extract from secondlife.com: “Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 1,127,733 people from around the globe.”

I first checked out SL about 6 months ago and was completely overwhelmed by its possibilities. My only problem was time and bandwidth – which is still a problem… There has been a rapid fire of news stories regarding SL in recent weeks, even Reuters has appointed a journalist to cover news ‘in world’. The BBC has recently made the move with parties and events in SL, even Ben Folds had a listening party for his new album. This is just the tip of the iceberg, there is alot going on…

Late last year I was involved with a project at the ABC called ‘Everyday’ which we had the opportunity to take to LAMP (Laboratory of Advanced Media Production) run by AFTRS (Australian Film Television and Radio School). AFTRS have made the jump into SL in a big way. I went and had a look at the Island of Esperance where they are located ‘in world’ and I had the opportunity to catch up with Gary Hayes (Gary Hazlitt in SL) who runs LAMP and is currently mentoring projects within SL as part of LAMP. We chatted about SL and watched Birthday Boy on a large cinema screen. One interesting rumour he mentioned was google possibly making a move on Linden Labs (the makers of SL). Now that would be interesting… Could we possibly see a version of google earth crossbred with SL giving us a virtual Earth. That could be interesting from a advertising point of view… let your cursor do the walking and your fingers do the talking!

If you know me and want to catch me ‘in world’ my SL name is Arthur Alphabeta. I don’t know how much time I plan to spend in my second life, will just have to wait and see. And although it is still very early days for this type of community and technology, it is very powerful and is only going to get better, so much detail is possible in SL – I can understand why some people get addicted.

Here are my Secondlife bookmarks in del.icio.us