New World Notes

Dutch Treat: Holland has most Residents by proportion

De Nederlandse Community in the early (for Holland) hours

The Lindens' latest demographic figures are now available, and within hours of them going online, Veritas Raymaker had crunched the numbers, and compared the total active Residents by country to the total population of their respective nations.  Here's his top five, by percentage of SL users to the whole:

New World SLURL: The Crimson Shadows of Jimmy Thomson

Dreams Lightcloud twirls in her own personal dance cage (customized for Dreams with exploding pink particle bursts)

DIRECT TELEPORT SLURL TO CRIMSON SHADOWS AT THIS LINK.

The man with the mohawk made of fire is back.  Last weekend, someone surreptitiously slipped me a landmark to Crimson Shadows, a new-- and apparently, still not officially unveiled-- region on the Rezzables continent, also home to the beloved Greenies. 

When I teleported there on a whim, my mouth went agape.  And then when I checked who'd created the place, it went even wider: Jimmy Thomson, a legendary builder, was its main creator.  With Crimson Shadows he's built a goth and vampire's paradise full of darkly gorgeous details and atmospheric effects, and to my knowledge, did so while totally beneath the radar of everyone who's admired him in the last few years.

One World, or Many? Metaplace's Web-eats-MMO versus Second Life's Metaverse-swallows-Web... versus Google

S. Zamboni wore this T-shirt around Second Life for years-- did he see the future first?

My interview with Raph Koster on his launch of Metaplace ran several days ago on GigaOM-- go here to read it.  Winding down, we talked a bit about his company's vision of the metaverse, versus the Lindens' vision.  Basically, Metaplace wants the Web to engulf everything we've come to associate with online worlds (avatars, virtual currency, etc.), which would be in marked contrast to the Lindens' idea of the metaverse gobbling all the Web's key features.  Raph believed it was unwise to force users as Second Life did into a single world, crammed up against neighbors they didn't like (often for moral reasons), and that this made them focus too much on the platform, as opposed to the network of different worlds.  Which is the wiser vision?

Made in China: Presenting Second Life in Beijing

China Tracy creates avatar of Hamlet Au's avatar (photo also by China Tracy)

As promised, here's a brief glimpse of my August trip to China to speak at the Get it Louder arts festival.  Posting this feels slightly self-indulgent (OK, very), but it's also a pictorial glimpse at how far Second Life's influence has spread.  It was also the ultimate mixed reality experience, because it would not have happened if I hadn't spotted a mysteriously beautiful avatar on an SL machinma speaking in Chinese subtitles a few months ago-- or for that matter, spotted my own avatar in the middle of Beijing's insanely busy airport.

Aimee Weber, Legalized: the first Second Life avatar filing for a US trademark

What you're looking at on the left is a screen capture of a page on the TARR web server.  That acronym stands for Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval, a site of the US Patent and Trademark office. On the page is a screenshot of Aimee Weber, the avatar who's a longtime star content creator (and whose byline occasionally shows up in New World Notes.)  Benjamin Noble, who broke the news last week, has an interview with Aimee here.  Note that the registration hasn't been approved yet, as Noble clarifies in the post's comments: "She says there were no challenges during the publication period, so she’ll get the '®' bling later, as long as she files a Statement of Use."  At which point, a Second Life avatar's name and identifying appearance ("The color blue appears in the wings and the hair accessories ", among other listed details) will exist as a legally recognized business trademark by the United States and all its trade partners.

Tateru Nino's Mixed Reality Headcount: Top 10 Corporate Sites in Second Life

How well did RL corporate sites engage SL's community?  Tateru counts heads...

Site (* = Popular native reality sites for comparison)	Est avg hourly visits	Est avg hourly visits (peak hrs)	Estimated total weekly visits
* Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge	141	153	23,772 (stable)
* Lost Gardens of Apollo	81	100	13,692 (down 5.00%)
* City of Lost Angels	76	73	12,828 (stable)
The Pond	70	34	11,808 (down 3.62%)
IBM	43	45	7,368 (down 2.38%)
The L Word	29	30	4,932 (stable)
Greenies Home	25	38	4,260 (down 4.57%)
Pontiac	23	20	3,912 (down 31.80%)
The Weather Channel	19	21	3,348 (up 7.31%)
Nissan	15	9.14	2,604 (down 7.26%)
Playboy	13	14	2,340 (down 5.34%)
Virtual Holland	12	10	2,148 (down 11.39%)
ABC Island	9.71	13	1,632 (up 37.37

Aussie TV clobbers Microsoft, Pontiac plummets; Ailing Adidas goes AWOL; AOL: A.O.K. after all?

America Online's much neglected site AOL Pointe has had some unexpected gains in the last three weeks, gaining a further 18%, bringing it up to 1,008 visits last week-- but not enough to make my Top 10.  AOL trailed just behind Microsoft, but well ahead of the next nearest competitor, Cisco Systems. Cisco only totaled 684 visits (and that's with a 38% gain.)  Surprisingly, after plummeting last week, Australian Broadcasting Corporation's ABC Island shouldered back into the top ten, with a startling 37% gain, shouldering Redmond behemoth Microsoft (1,284) back off the top ten. A lot of other slips in traffic this week, with Pontiac's sharp fall (after last week's equally sudden rise) causing Rezzable Inc's Greenies Home to rise from fifth to fourth.

After the break, I check in with the recently discontinued Adidas, and a slew of other top corporations (Dell, NBA, Comcast, etc.) that have been performing poorly.

Planespotting: Google Earth/Second Life mash-up tracks LAX airplane traffic in dynamic, immersive scale model

I haven't decided if this qualifies as cool-but-impractical or cool-and-revolutionary,  but it's very much worth a look:  a UK metaverse company called Daden recently partnered with flight tracking service fboweb to create a data modeling demo of plane activity over LA's main airport.  "We developed this ourselves as an example of mashing up Google Earth and Second Life," Daden's Corro Moseley tells me, "and then took it to fboweb to check that they were OK with our using their Google Earth feed."

Teleport directly to the Daden demo by clicking the image

They approved, and so the Daden system in Second Life makes a call to the fboweb site, then transmits that data into SL, representing it as simple model airplanes. Fboweb was so impressed, Corro adds, they plan to use it for this week's Business Aviation show.  Other commercial applications may follow.

Which brings me back to the original question: while cool, what's the practical use?

The week in New World Notes, September 17-21

Selected noteworthy posts from last week:

- Real world labor unions prepare to descend on IBM's Second Life campus to protest a pay cut affecting its Italian employees. Will the September 25th strike bring the hundreds of protesters a union spokesman expects, a couple thousand that IBM's continent-sized campus can bear-- or something less than that?
- When William Gibson first visited Second Life, did people think he was a griefer?  A fascinating theory in the Comments, to explain why Gibson found Residents so unfriendly on his first incognito visit to SL.
- Gwyneth Llewelyn on the New Idoru: SL and the imminent end of real world celebrity. A must-read essay by Second Life's leading analyst (and a metaverse celebrity in her own right.)
- The True Community Search Top 20: The first list in New World Note's ongoing search for the most genuinely active communities (i.e. without camping and excessive freebies.)  Be sure to post your own suggestions in Comments!
- Second Life, Furniture, and Big Gay Sex:  A brief history of the warehouse where SL was born.
- Tateru's Top 10 Corporate Sites in Second Life:  Last week, Australia TV went down, while Playboy went up.
- Select my South by Southwest panel!

Weekend Open Forum: discuss events, sites, insights here

You have the floor.  Monday, I'll highlight noteable Comments in an update below.

Update, 9/22: An early update-- Bettina Tizzy brings word of a giant party for the re-opening of the Crescent Moon museum, starting today (Saturday) at 5pm SLT.  All the details here.

Ready to Burn: Burning Life 2007 fully open for exploring

The final plots of land were claimed this week, and since I check in last, the fourth annual Burning Life has become a vast continent of strange and uniquely cool exploration: a chaotic and crazy jumble of sites free from advertising-- but so far, few Residents. (Like last year, crowds will probably start streaming in gradually.)  As always, the quality widely varies, and some installations don't quite fit the Burning Life/Man spirit, but there's more enough jewels of wonder to look for-- or like I did, just join the Burning Life group and ask in chat.