A tesseract. For all the talk of real world businesses and celebrities and gray goo attacks and assorted griefers and conflicts of all variety, by far the most popular New World Notes entry of the year was about Seifert Surface, a graduate student who-- not for fame or profit, but the sheer intellectual and creative challenge, and the pleasure of dazzling his visitors-- created a Second Life home that seemed to exist in four dimensions. "-- And He Rezzed A Crooked House" easily generated over 50,000 page views shortly after publication, and by the close of the year, perhaps nearly twice that. (Someone added it to Wikipedia's Tesseract entry, where it produces regular traffic to this day.) The next two hit entries are also instructive: a report on a self-contained, artificial life ecosystem, and a report on, well, an artificial life pot plant. The fundamental story of Second Life, in other words, remains a tale of creation.
Other hits after the break.
Top Ten Most Viewed NWN Entries, 2006:
Rankings based on daily eyeball estimates of site traffic, highest first:
"-- And He Rezzed a Crooked House"
"God Game"
"The Second Life of Governor Mark Warner"
"Second Life of Lawrence Lessig"
"Your Tube, Your Imagination"
"The Second Life of Julian Dibbell"
Freakin' awesome! Great roundup, Hamlet! Really intriguing to see what's up there; I knew you were onto something when you started doing more videos too.
I'm personally thrilled because I got so excited seeing some of these inworld, coming across them and being sparked by the churning wheels of invention.
I saw a picture book for kids the other day — dang I don't have the name, but one of the final pages was a composite of sheer awesomeness, throwing all these fairy tale characters into one seen, like a Shrek-exponent (Shrexponent?). I figure, put all 10 of the People's Choice in a blender... and we've got something very potent and scintillating.
In any case, something like this: http://commercial-archive.com/125761.php needs a Second Life equivalent.
(For 2007, I'd love to see someone fuse Great Good Places and Where's Waldo? and come up with a veritable megamix straining the avatar rendering limit and a pansection of modern avatar civ. Means BIZNESS!)
One more tangential thot for the machinimakers: on the topic of birth and life and Second Life, we should see a prim baby sonogram, and the emerging gynaecological video. It'd be backed by a series of bold string stabs like the latter section of BT's "Antikythera Mechanism", and result in much happiness for pixelflesh parents and child alike. Notably, the video would be filtered in several ways: clinical hospital-cam, as well as nervous Papa shaking hands, fumbling around. Expect recreations of analogue film grain.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, HERE'S TO RENEWAL!!!!
Posted by: Torley | Monday, January 01, 2007 at 03:26 PM
Nothing else that wishing you a happy new year !
Posted by: Kefrens | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 01:03 AM