New World Notes

Leading Second Life Musician Featured in Today's Los Angeles Earns USD$100-200 Per Gig

Today's Los Angeles Times has a long profile of Second Life's live music scene, which will not come as news to New World Notes readers, but is pretty good nonetheless. Much of it features LA-based performer Craig Lyons, whose music has been licensed by MTV and Universal Music, and who regularly performs in Second Life as the avatar known as Craiglyons Writer (a name the Times story failed to mention.) Here he is performing in-world at the POP ART LAB sim for Treet TV, in an impromptu show arranged for the LA Times reporter:

Excellent stuff. And according to the Times, Lyons makes $100-200 in Linden Dollar tips per gig, often performing three shows a day.

Which helps answer a question another writer just asked me last week: Can you make a living as a musician performing in Second Life? I answered that the top performers can definitely make a decent side income, but unlike real estate barons and top fashion designers, they probably can't do it full time. But assuming Lyons performed 8 gigs a week and averaged $150 in tips per show, that'd come out to $4800 a month, a pretty good living for an artist. (To be sure, that's assuming Second Life's market is large enough to sustain enough foot traffic to the same performer for that many shows.) Geek rock superstar Jonathan Coulton made around that amount selling his music online before going bigtime, and it's nice to know some of SL's top musicians can also reach close to that level even now.

Thanks to Claus Uriza of POP ART LAB for link to and background on the Treet video! Photo credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times

Second Life Featured in *Hot Tub Time Machine*!

Hot Tub Time Machine, the wacky John Cusack comedy opening tomorrow, has a lead character who's a Second Life aficionado named Jacob (played by Clark Duke). Or as reviews describe him, "a basement-dwelling Second Life aficionado", or less charitably, "a kid who would rather play hours of Second Life than talk to actual humans." And only last week, I was talking about the ingrained nature of the "guy in a basement playing Second Life" meme, though at least here he's also not notably fat or naked. (Then again, you never know.) Ironically, I'm writing this post next door to a Second Life aficionado who doesn't log in from a basement, but near Albert Einstein's old office in Princeton, and given that he's an acclaimed astrophysicist, could probably help John Cusack and friends with the time travel troubles which send them back to the 80s. (But if that's the case, shouldn't the Second Life kid wind up back in Habitat?)

Anyway, it actually looks like a pretty good movie if you're into that kind of thing (and I often am) -- if you catch it in the next few days, report back here. Photo: UA/MGM.

BBC's "Virtual Revolution" Host a Second Life Expert Too

"The Virtual Revolution" is a great-looking BBC series on how the Internet has transformed the world airing now, presented by my pal Dr. Aleks Krotoski. Ironically*, the show is region-blocked, and you can only fully view it online in the UK, but here's the opening few minutes on YouTube, with Aleks at her best, globe-trotting with her laptop while lucid and gorgeous. Also, she talks to a lot of obscure geeks:

In the site bio, the BBC describes Aleks as an "academic and journalist who... completed her PhD thesis in Social Psychology... examining how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web." Which is true as far as it goes, but to be more precise, her PhD thesis was devoted to studying the social interactions in Second Life. Her behemoth paper [giant PDF file link ahead] "Social Influence in Second Life: Social Network and Social Psychological Processes in the Diffusion of Belief and Behaviour on the Web", is based on many years of studying and being active in Second Life. I hope to write about it soon, but for now, here's some SL posts from her academic blog, like this post on SL Relay for Life, which she ran in.

Aleks tells me there's not much of Second Life in the BBC series, except indirectly via an interview she does with early SL investor Mitch Kapor, but that's fine; as you watch her crisscross the globe explaining the Web, it's still nice knowing that one of her many key stopping points was this 3D node in the larger net.

*Note to BBC executives: Don't you think it's immensely silly to produce an online program claiming that the Internet has transformed the world... then prevent almost everyone in the world from viewing it on the Internet?

iPad Will Give Us a Second Life We Can Hold in Our Hands

What does the just announced iPad mean for Second Life? Quite a lot, actually. There's already two iPhone apps for accessing and interacting in Second Life:

• Sparkle by Genkii
• Touch Life by Pocket Metaverse

Based on what Steve Job says in his announcement, both will be compatible with iPad. What's more, it's now feasible to incorporate the 3D graphics elements of Second Life into those apps and others sure to come.

But that's only the beginning. Because at least two companies (that I'm aware of) have already developed touch screen user interfaces for Second Life. Here's one:

Read more about it here. Then imagine a similar display running Second Life on the iPad. The near future of the metaverse may not be in desktops or laptops or game consoles (not portable enough) or mobile phones (too portable). For today at least, it seems like the metaverse is moving toward a time when we hold it in both hands.

Jobs photo credit: Ryan Anson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

New World Newsfeed: 1st Reviews of "Life 2.0", Full-Length Second Life Documentary, are Mixed-to-Positive (Updated)

SLASHFILM: Sundance Video Review: Life 2.0

Here's the first reviews of "Life 2.0", the full-length Second Life documentary which just premiered last weekend at Sundance, by credentialed movie geeks Peter Sciretta of Slashfilm, Laremy Legel of Film.com, and Brandon Tenney of First Showing. They all have positive things to say about elements of the movie, with the segment about content creator Asri Falcone and her war with content theft generating the most praise. They're less enthused (to the point of being unsettled) by the other two segments featuring an adulterous relationship unfolding in Second Life, and an ageplayer who in real life is a man about to be married. Most curious to me, they wanted more of an editorial voice and broad overview of Second Life, perhaps because they had little background with SL beforehand. In any case, not having seen the movie myself, it's difficult to review their reviews, but their take may influence the fate of "Life 2.0" far as acquisition offers and distribution deals.

Update, 11:50am: Here's a much more positive review in the Salt Lake City Weekly, which calls it "a surprisingly complex study of virtual worlds both as unhealthy escape and as an opportunity for self-discovery". (Hat tip: Briana Dawson.)

Update 2, 12:15pm: The Onion AV Club's Nathan Rabin gives Life 2.0 a B, but ironically, that seems to partly stem from a negative bias against Second Life going in. (Changing post title to reflect broader gamut of reactions.) Excerpt after the break:

Depressed After Watching *Avatar*? Pandora Awaits You in Second Life! (Unofficially, at Least)

CNN reports that many people have become so besotted by the beauty of the planet Pandora in Avatar, they're leaving theaters depressed, noting "[s]uggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing 'Avatar' video games." Or perhaps explore a virtual world made to look like the planet, for as it happens, there's an island in Second Life dubbed Pandora Magic, and as you might expect, it's already inhabited by Na'vi-like avatars, and offers a pretty good facsimile of the place depicted by the movie (at many many times less its production budget):

See for yourself: Direct SLurl teleport to Pandora Magic here. On a brief visit of my own, I noticed a role-playing combat system, bi-lingual support in English and German... and no official connection whatsoever to the movie or its corporate backers. Rather, the lobby entrance was crowded with richly detailed Na'vi avatars busily chatting in German and furiously dancing to Mexican hiphop:

New World Newsfeed: A Second Life Green Lantern Featured in Time Magazine!

This is very cool: the story of KallfuNahuel Matador, the Green Lantern avatar who went from roleplaying as a superhero defending a virtual Darfur genocide awareness site in Second Life to helping with relief efforts in actual Africa, is a featured subject in "Can Video Games Save the World?", a Time Magazine article by Stephan Faris. I talked with Stephan for the story, because Faris first read about Mr. Matador in my post about him last year, but the seasoned reporter had already taken the time to log into SL and connect the Green Lantern Core member directly in-world. You can see the quality of that reportage in the substance of his writing -- especially in the final quote from KallfuNahuel.

New World Newsfeed: SendLove, the Public Version of Linden Lab's LoveMachine, Now, Well, Sending Love

I woke up this morning to discover a lovely person had sent me some love. SendLove, to be precise, the first project from LoveMachine, Philip Rosedale's new company, a public version of Linden Lab's internal employee rating system. You can "Send Love Quietly" (i.e. anonymously) or send Love bearing your name. Looks like fun, check it out here. I do think the implementation on the receiving end needs some tweaking, as the love messages at the moment seem a bit too much like Spam. (When I first got my SendLove message, I initially thought someone was offering me love of the hubba hubba-I'm a lonely Russian college girl-turn on your web cam-enter your credit card kind.)

Why's Slashdot Wondering "Whatever Happened to Second Life" When Interest in Slashdot Is Much Smaller Than SL?

Today, Slashdot asks the question, "Whatever Happened To Second Life?", citing a fairly wrong-headed article on a relatively obscure UK computer site. (More on that later.) The comment thread from the Slashdot user community is mostly full of predictably incoherent responses that remind me of my rule-of-thumb adage, "People who say things like, 'Second Life is for people without a first life' rarely seem to have very interesting first lives themselves." And in this particular case, the pachyderm in the antechamber is this: according to Google Trends, interest in Slashdot has been significantly smaller than Second Life since 2006, and continues a slow downward slide while SL is most recently trending upward:

Of course, some may call this an invidious, apples-to-oranges comparison, since after all, Second Life is a virtual world platform, while Slashdot is a web-based online community built around user-submitted news links. Fair enough. Here's another chart:

New World Newsfeed: Linden Lab's Former CFO Jumps to Blue Mars

I got rumors of this last night and his LinkedIn profile confirms it: John Zdanowski, Linden Lab's former CFO, is now consulting as a CFO for Avatar Reality, Inc., the Honolulu-based company developing Blue Mars, an upcoming 3D world with a user-created content aspect -- i.e., fairly direct competition with Second Life. Formerly known among the SL community by his Second Life avatar name, Zee Linden, where he earned begrudging respect for dealing with vehement Resident anger over various policy/pricing changes with patience, honesty, and humor, Zdanowski left the Lindens last March. Blue Mars has been in development for a couple years (I first wrote about it back in early 2008), and in closed beta since this year. With Zdanowski's management background, it will be interesting to see what other Blue Mars developments are also in store.