Here's the results of my latest reader survey: with 332 votes received, 60% predict there will be 600K or more monthly active Second Life users by the end of this year. (Currently it's about 500K, give or take 50K every month.) Over a quarter of our respondents predict that number will stay roughly the same, while almost 15% believe the usage rates will drop.
Now that the results are in, what's my take? Barring a drastic change to SL's server architecture, anything close to a million seems highly doubtful. I think a more plausible guess is somewhere in the vicinity of 750,000. That also happens to be pretty much what Cory Ondrejka thinks, and he knows better than me.
Looking for new live music in Second Life? Take your friends on a visit to the island of Trax, home to dozens of small listening booths, each featuring streams of several songs from a Second Life musician. (There's also artist info and gig listings, and occasionally, a link for buying their music online.) In other words, it's pretty much like a 3D version of MySpace, except without annoying video ads and friend requests from webcam sex workers.
Launched in November on an Openspace sim, the owner, Bones Writer, recently moved to a full sim, and it's already attracted thousands of visitors. He charges each musician L$800 a month to rent a booth, but says that fee goes to cover the island costs-- "We're right on the cusp each month," he tells me, "give or take a Linden." A musician himself, Bone says they feature a "meet the artist" event every month; at the moment, the booths host 95 individual musicians, each with their own audio stream, with more to come soon. Thanks to Delinda Dyrssen for the heads up!
Fashion Slurls is a new directory of in-world fashion stores, all with a direct SLURL teleport link. Conceived by Cajsa Lilliehook and Gidge Uriza of It's Only Fashion and launched last week, it already has hundreds of locations. They're slowly categorizing each by fashion type (jewelry, lingerie, etc.), and if they introduce more functionality, could become an invaluable resource for fashionistas. (Some kind of Digg-style rating system, for example, would be a great addition.) With the Lindens' recent acquisition of the xStreetSL virtual e-tail site, it'll be interesting to watch how this list is impacted. Many SL entrepreneurs believe web-based shopping spells the end of in-world stores; on the other hand, others have argued that buying SL fashion works best as a fully immersive, social experience, and will probably remain strong in-world. I suspect that's right, at least for the very most innovative locations and designers. Image credit: cajsalilliehook.wordpress.com.
This is a chart created by Bryon Ruxton of SL Earth, an in-world advertising network, and it flies in the face of much received wisdom. After the Openspace land pricing rebellion last October, many Residents noticed that the world was literally shrinking. And while that seems true from the perspective of the last few months, Ruxton's chart tells a broader picture-- the area he's highlighted in red represents Openspace land that's since been abandoned by their owners. However, even with that bubble gone, growth of Second Life's landmass has still been growing steadily over the last couple years. (At least according to him.)
"They've certainly pissed off a lot of land owners with the mishandling of this Openspace issue which has completely distorted the land market," Mr. Ruxton wrote on this blog reacently, "led to the price of land to plummet, tarnished Linden Lab's management image once again, as well as a considerable loss for many." Still, he argues, "From a Resident perspective, I would say the land market is being
corrected from the artificial path is was on... From this observation, saying that Linden Lab is on the decline is misguided."
This is a really good Twitter feed for events about to launch in Second Life. As the account name suggests, the listings come with a SLurl teleport link, so when you see something interesting coming across your Twitter feed, you can click the link and jump right in. It's run by Ozzy Wozniak, who not only has an SL name with heavy geek karma, but has a great awareness of diverse happenings in-world. Definitely recommended as a supplemental resource to Chestnut's Choices.
At the end of every week, the folks with NWN partner Koinup sends me a list of Second Life locations in their directory clicked through most by users of the virtual world social network. Here were last week's the top five:
Left, Mrs. Fanny Starr; right, her daughter's avatar beneath a photo of Fanny as a young woman
Sometimes when Mrs. Fanny Starr of Colorado speaks about her time in Auschwitz and other horrors, waves of green light emit above her head, like a beacon. This is just a small part in the latest telling of a story she's recounted for many decades. The essential story remains unchanged, it's just the setting that does; sometimes she tells it in schools or civic centers or places of worship. Or as it was last week, sometimes as a digital representation in 3D graphics, at a seaside theater that isn't real.
Fanny Starr is a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust; last week, she turned 87. She spent the last hours of her 86th in Second Life, with a VOIP microphone perched on her head, speaking to fifty or so Residents. This was at the suggestion of her daughter, Helen, a multimedia producer who's known in Second Life as "Explorer Dastardly". Normally, her avatar looks like a young woman with fiery red hair, but when her mother takes over, Helen transforms Explorer into a dignified old woman dressed in old European finery. (Had Fanny Starr remained in Poland and the Nazis never came, one wonders if she would now look like this avatar.) Helen's mother has made it her life's mission to recount her experiences to as many people as will listen. Extending her voice to Second Life, Helen tells me, is just another venue to do so.
The presentation happens in a collective setting, but with each member of the audience able to hear Mrs. Starr's voice as intimate as if she was sitting right beside them. Here's a small sample from her January 18th lecture, recounting the time she met SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele, who once had the decision of life or death over her and her family. (You may want to boost the volume, before viewing.)
"I did not have to convince her, I just asked," Helen tells me. "SL technology can reach a broad base of people in a small atmosphere, something a RL classroom cannot achieve." Then there's another consideration, for a woman on the cusp of 90: "[S]he can lecture from the comforts of her home versus the classrooms she has lectured in for the last 30 years."
While Mrs. Starr speaks, Helen has prepared and uploaded a photo montage to run in the background. Some are from the general historical archive, others are more persona, photos smuggled by the family to the US; one shows Fanny Starr’s former home in Lodz, Poland; another shows her brother being burned alive by Heinrich Himmler. Another is of her husband Zesa Starr, posing with General Felix Sparks, the US Army officer who led the liberation of Dachau.
Helen and her mother plan to give other appearances in-world. "Fanny will make another lecture appearace very soon," she tells me. "Fanny is ready and is at ease in SL."
In the meantime, here's a video of the full January 18th lecture, recorded and edited by Geo Meek. In it, you'll see Mrs. Starr speaking for an hour, taking many questions, some from audience members very young, and others quite close to her age. A few ask questions that would probably be too painful or embarrassing to ask in person but are crucial all the same. Others leave speechless, overcome.
"The responses are amazing," Fanny's daughter Helen tells me, "but the emotions outweigh the comments."
This is a really cool video demo, using the Augmented Reality Toolkit created at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory (free download/instruction guide available here.) Normally, the ARTkit is used to integrate 3D virtual images into a real world video feed, but here, metaverse developer Christian Contini uses it to integrate virtual images onto the surface of a monitor that's displaying Second Life. The effect, as you see in this video, is that Second Life objects seem to "pop" out of the monitor into 3D form. Hat tip to Andrew Hudson-Smith at Digital Urban, who describes this as "a really unique concept of importing/moving and visualization objects in a virtual environment." Maybe, and while it's definitely a lot of fun, the practical applications for this aren't popping out to me as quickly as this 3D snowman. What would you use it for?
Illustrated Second Life blogger Seraphine Khorona recently made a real life trip through Costa Rica, culminating in a hairy encounter with a massive earthquake, which she only escaped via a rescue chopper. Now safely back home, she's sharing photos from her trip in its more placid moments, cleverly merging them with SL screenshots which add wry or ironic counterpoints, as here. Not only do these mixed reality comic panels spice up her vacation photos, they dramatize the way we experience the world, with our tactile perceptions interwoven with our memories and the ongoing 3D stream of consciousness in our mind.
