New World Notes

FULLY FEDERATED

Today New World Notes officially joins the Federated Media author list and is now accepting advertising. All the info you need here.

I've worked with FM's amazingly hip and helpful ad staff to make sure they have a rate spread that's affordable to most SL-based companies, from small clothing boutiques to fully established developers and everyone in between.  You now have a way to reach a large readership of Residents-- along with the much, much larger readership of anchor blogs in Federated Media's network, including Boing Boing and Fark.com.

CONCURRENT AFFAIR

Another milestone crossed tonight:  in a little over a month, peak in-world concurrency has gone from 5,500+ to 6,000+.  At this rate, before the end of 2006, prime time Second Life will comprise over 10,000 Residents who are simultaneously in-world.  (How many of them will actually be away-from- keyboard avatars sitting on L$-generating camping chairs, however, is still in the air.)

ISLAND OF JOI

Internet guru Joi Ito, last seen in Second Life doing a Scottish jig to help raise funds for Creative Commons, has purchased a private island that he plans to call Kula.  He intends to use it as an online respite for his famed World of Warcraft guild, We Know, during WoW downtime, but he's also taking suggestions and requests for other uses.  You can even sign up to request consideration for a plot.

Go to Joi's Wiki here to join the planning.

SL EVENTS OF THE WEEK, 3/20-3/26

This week:  Watch a German Expressionist classic, attend a Linux get together, enjoy the launch of the Arcadia Game Development Contest and join a groundbreaking real world/Second Life music simulcast playing live in Philadelphia and the Clovers auditorium in-world.  Details after the break.

Glöbäl ömissiön

Pro-umlaut protest signs at the Town Hall meeting.

For awhile there, full expression in Second Life was prohibited to Germans and fans of death metal.  This is because shortly after version 1.9 launched on the 15th, an extraordinarily unforseen bug was discovered the hard way.  When you sent an Instant Message to another Resident, and that IM contained umlauts, something strange happened. 

The server crashed.  Yours, and the server of the person you were trying to IM.

A bug like this was bizarre enough, but besides, say, members of SL's Mötorhead fan club, IM-ing umlauts isn't likely to be a top activity for most Residents.  Except, of course, for the thousands of Residents from a country that depend on umlauts like air.

"You have to understand that these characters are used quite often in German," Falk Bergman of Germany explains to me. "In fact they are right next to L and P on my keyboard-- can easily be pressed by accident even... they sound like 'ae', 'ue', and 'oe'.  We also have an double-s character.  That would crash the sim too.  Any non-standard character did.  French players will have had the same problems."

"Why not stop using the umlaut?"  I ask.  "It only seems to add a pronuciation rule, right?"

Falk snorts.  "OK, I dare you stop using 'e'... would you want to be unable to type one word in twenty improperly because the character is missing or 'bad'?"

So the next day when Second Life CEO Philip Linden appeared in-world for a regular town hall meeting, he had a special contingent of protesters waiting for him with signs ready-- angry Germans demanding restoration of their umlauts.

"I know we sounded a little bit overreacted," protest leader Kristina Simon told me later,  "but... our community island DIE INSEL crashed yesterday 23 times.  Not kidding.  When we write those umlauts in an IM to another German both sims crash, and we could crash a sim with shouting those letters too."

NEW WORLD SLURL: SERENITY FALLS

Direct portal to Serenity Falls here.

In an ongoing challenge to find the seven wonders of Second Life, so many Residents nominated this island that I finally paid a visit tonight.   It's a lush and craggy place with a vast waterfall, ambient sounds of nature, and more than a few surprises for the explorer.

"Before I came to SL I had absolutely NO 3D building experience," Serenity Falls creator Julia Hathor tells me.  "I learned by frustration, mistakes, and struggle in the sandboxes."  After becoming successful enough to afford an island, she set to work.  "It took about three weeks to build, but it is really never done."  It's a showcase for the homes and landscape items she sells, but at same time, it's a place open to the public for pure enjoyment. "I wanted Serenity to be a retreat," she says, "a place where nature could be brought to SL and soothe the soul, so gardens and water features play a prominent role all over the island."

NEW WORLD FORUM

Removing some of the last vestiges of my time as a Linden, the company just moved my Forum on the official site from the Linden Forums area to the Second Life Group Forums.

To visit, go here.  Be sure to bookmark that link, because otherwise you need to wade through several pages to reach it.  To inaugurate its new place, I just launched a new topic, "The thing Linden Lab needs to fix or add right now is...", taking suggestions and rants for a future NWN post.

ON SECOND THOUGHT, *DON'T* MESS WITH TEXAS

I caught some kind of nasty fever/cough in Austin, so blogging for the next day or two may be relatively light as the meat component of Hamlet heals.

NEW WORLD SLURL: GREAT BUILDS OF SECOND LIFE

Today's New World SLURL is actually a collection of SLURLs from veteran Resident architect Forseti Svarog, who has just released a collection of screenshots depicting some of the best builds in SL, as selected by him.  They're contained in a kind of coffee table book he created to present them-- you read it as a heads-up display.  All the builds chosen by him are stellar, of course, featuring fantastic towers and whole cities, and more than a few experiments in construction whimsy, though interestingly, of the 23 builds he chose for his first volume, only two of them seem designed to take full advantage of our ability to fly-- now a recurring gripe of mine.

Get a copy of his HUD-powered book at his shop in SL here.  And visit a handy compilation of his SLURL-enabled featured sites here.

INSIDE THE WORLD FROM THE OUTSIDE

Adenoraque Qin has created a silky-cool web application that converts and displays SL screenshots into an interactive 360 degree image, including tours through Juro Kothari's prefab homes, the Transylvania region, and the SL library of "new game journalists" Always Black.

Check out his Scene Globe here.  (Requires a Java plug-in.)  Be sure to explore Adenoraque's own Crystal Well shop, as it features one of the most strangely amazing avatars created in SL, and his ornately detailed tribute to the puzzle box from the Hellraiser films.