dcinput

Cory Doctorow: “By opening up the source code for Second Life, Linden is inviting a competitive marketplace for Second Life hosters. Indeed, they describe a “Second Life grid” of multiple Second Life hosters who interconnect — the way that today’s Web consists of a single Web with millions of servers that are all linked together by their users”.

Certainly is pretty big news. Long term Second Life might even replace the world wide web. huh!

Four Eyed Monsters screening in Second Life tomorrow night

I talked about Arin Crumbley and Susan Buice a while back and was really impressed by the piece on Net Neutrality. I was aware that they had made a film called Four Eyed Monsters but I didn’t get around to watching the video podcasts until a few days ago.

Through the video podcasts they’ve managed to generate an incredible amount of interest and it’s well deserved: everything about them is entirely captivating. If you want to see how to really use the web as a tool make sure you watch.

Their latest offering is a screening of the film in Second Life. Here is their invitation. I’m going to do my best to be there. If all goes well I might even have a date, and get this I’ll be here in London and she’ll be in Montreal.

I’ve been listening in to the live wecast for Bloggercon over the last couple of days. Very interesting in many ways. All the usual suspects are there in some shape or form: Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Robert Scobble etc etc.

I’m impressed by the technology. The fact that a conference can go on the other side of the planet yet I can listen to it live over the internet, on my lap top, in a cafe with wireless is great. The fact that I can also participate in some way through the IRC channel is even better [IRC is new to me and it’s been quite a challenge listening to the conference while reading and writing in there simultaneously!]. When you think that people all around the world are doing this, how great is that? Well I think it’s great.

Plus it looks like we’re all watching the Argentina - Mexico World Cup match.

They are calling this an unconference. The idea being that in the room at any one time there is more knowledge in the room than a panel of speakers can ever have. Everyone in the audience becomes a participant and a discussion leader walks around and guides the discussion.

Interesting session on Building Bridges. Made me think quite a bit.

Boris Johnson has a blog!

Kosso needs a VMware brain [from the IRC]: “we got football = bigbrother - SL and irc”

Geez i’m really finding this crazy multi-tasking hard. Listening to the webcast, writing on my blog and reading the IRC channel and watching the football, following URL links from the IRC. Does this get easier with practice. I bet the kids these days find this a doddle.

I’m going to try and find Kosso in second life at his RSS platform. Grrr it’s asking for me to download a new version of second life and for some reason it won’t download…

OK so I am now in Second Life (SL) on the RSS platform listening to Bloggercon live and direct to Real Life (RL). Weird. Kozzo seems to be somewhere else though I can see his avatar.

Oooh my poor powerbook is freaking out.

Me and Kosso are sitting around the fire on the RSS Platform listening to the Bloggercon webcast from within SL. Cum bah yah!

Some photos from Bloggercon.

Right enough of this shenanigans. I’m off to meet some real people in a real bar and actually chat to them. Might even have a beer and everything.

God is this the future?

Hollywood Reporter: “George Lucas has Industrial Light + Magic, Peter Jackson has Weta, and now Michael Bay has Digital Domain”.

The BBC is in Second Life: “The BBC has staked a claim to a virtual tropical island where it can stage online music festivals and throw exclusive celebrity parties”.

Skype has announced free landline and mobile calls for people calling within the US and Canada. I wonder what this means for the net neutrality issue. Surely the big telcos aren’t going to like this. Will they start sniffing for VOIP packets? We shall have to wait and see.

Steve Garfield has an amuzingly geeky picture of himself inside second life, inside real life. Far out.

Mark Nelson: “Sony has caved in to the dominance of the iPod and started supporting AAC”.

Computer Graphics World: “TruePlay works online to allow multiple participants to join the same 3D space. It can also be used in conjunction with trueSpace7, Caligari’s flagship real-time collaborative 3D authoring technology, to allow participants to not only view and share information, but also to create, manipulate, and edit 3D objects in real-time within the shared virtual workspace”.

If the current trend with massively parallel multiplayer online games such as Second Life, Entropia and World of War Craft continues then being able to collaborate in 3D space over the internet is going to be huge. Currently in these virtual worlds it is the programmers that rule, and often make all the money. Imagine what will happen when VFX artists start venturing in there. I’m sure there is lots of money to be made.

Adam Curry is looking for “animators, scripters and people involved in machinima” to work with him on making some cool stuff for second life. Sounds like its for money too. I heard this on Thursday’s DSC while on my way out to the final day of my Redhat course in Guilford (after I’d written the previous two paragraphs..funny how things go). Sounds interesting to me. I can think of quite a few great people who might be interested.

Those of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormous screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

I bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.