Orient Lodge

I spend two days away from my computer and come back to over 2000 unread email messages and several interesting discussions. Last year, Gartner, “the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company”, predicted that 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A "Second Life" in the Virtual World by the End of 2011.

Not everyone is happy about the prospects of this. Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois is pushing for legislation that would Ban 'Second Life' in schools and libraries. Needless to say, educators that use Second Life for pedagogical purposes in schools are not particularly supportive of the proposal and there has been a lot of discussion about this on the Second Life Educators list.

Meanwhile, on the Group Psychotherapy mailing list, there has been a backlash against the discussion about the therapeutic potential of virtual worlds. Some of it seems to be motivated by discomfort with Second Life. Some of this may be motivated by concerns about possible dangers to children in Second Life, particularly related to sexual content, that is the big concern of Rep. Kirk, it seems like other concerns are more prominent, such as people spending too much time in Second Life at the expense of face to face social interaction.

This concern sounds fairly similar to concerns about kids watching too much television, and it is interesting to note that one therapist talked about how one of his patients had increased time for Second Life by decreasing time watching television. From a McLuhanesque perspective, this is perhaps a positive step, since Second Life is much more immersive and interactive.

It may also be that some of the concern comes from a fear of the unknown. For many of people, Second Life is something they haven’t experienced. They’ve read about it in various places. They’ve read about the dangers of video games. Second Life and video games remain a foreign and threatening technology to them.

There is perhaps another underlying theme on the Group Psychotherapy list, the concern about ‘alternative therapies’. The discussion about therapy in Second Life often centers around art therapy or psychodrama. People aren’t sure what to make of alternative therapies.

Yet this ties into yet another parallel process. As I was driving by daughter home from college yesterday, she talked about what she wanted to do. She is a musician, an actress and an artist. She is interested in psychology and was very interested in alternative therapies.

One of my todo items for today, as I tried to dig through emails that have piled up was to ask friends on the group psychotherapy list for good material for my daughter to read to find out more about alternative therapies.

So, I’ve read through a bunch of emails, I have many more to go. Let’s see what the folks on the Group Psychotherapy list have to say.

Over on the Second Life educators mailing list, a member asked for an 'Idiot's Guide to Second Life'. I wrote a reply there, which seemed like it might be a useful post here as well.

OpenSim is a project to create software so that others can create their own servers that run similar to Linden Lab's Second Life servers.

Typically, people running OpenSim set up a grid, similar to the Main Grid, the Teen Grid or the Beta Grids that Linden Lab runs.

Some example grids like this are:

Central Grid has about 20 regions and about 1,400 active members. They are focusing hard on the business community.

OpenLife has nearly 200 regions and a population of over 20,000. They support the RealXtend viewer.

OSGrid claims 240 Regions and 2400 active users. They are running as a non-profit.

When you use a Second Life client, you can specify a parameter to get your client to connect to one of these other grids. (e.g.
"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -multiple -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002 )

If you have a reason to, you could create your own Grid that you control, e.g.

Orient Lodge Grid

In the old days of MOOs, this was a common thing. People would set up their own MOOs for their universities, or any other place they wanted. I ran LogMoo, which is actually still sitting around in mothballs. When I get a better Internet Connection, I may bring back LogMoo and perhaps setup LogGrid.

As a general rule, there is essentially no connectivity between grids. Just as it is at best very difficult to move stuff from TeenGrid to the MainGrid, etc., it is very difficult to move stuff to the any of the OpenSim based grids.

There are a few interesting exceptions.

SecondInventory now supports OpenSim. What this means in theory as that you can create something on one grid, say the Main Grid, or an OpenSim grid, and then restore it to other grids. I've had limited success with that, that it looks very promising.

For communications between grids, there has been some work done on using IRC channels so that a space in the main grid could listen and/or talk on an IRC channel and a space in an OpenSim grid could listen and/or talk on the same IRC channel. I've heard this discussed, but I don't know anyone who has done this in practice. I think this fits in nicely with the talk about Twitter as well.

The folks at Central Grid have been working hard to get currency working in OpenSim, including working with a company to do intergrid currency exchange. I believe it is still in development, and it raises a lot of issues. Most notably, some of the folks behind Central Grid have been accused of being scammers on the Second Life main grid and people have expressed skepticism about financial transactions on any OpenSim grid.

It is also possible to run a portion of OpenSim so that you run just a region and that region becomes part of another groups grid. Some of the OpenSim grids discussed above have been exploring allowing remote regions to be part of their grid. I'm not sure how well that has worked yet. You can also run a region without it being part of a grid. I've done that from my laptop when I wanted to have a small Second Life environment that I could bring with me.

As a final note, Open Sim is still in early development. Unless you are pretty geeky and like playing things that might break even more frequently than the Linden Lab Main Grid, you might want to leave Open Sim to others. I'm a hard core geek, so I love OpenSim.

Okay. Perhaps that was a little bit longer and geekier than a true idiots guide to Open Sim, but I hope it is helpful.

Bears gather to talk about Metanomics, originally uploaded by Aldon.

The show on BlogTalkRadio failed due to technical difficulties. I’m still waiting to find out from them what went wrong. I’ll probably write up more details later. On the other hand, Utterz has worked nicely. I hope to add both of them into my mix. Depending on timing and talk about them when I visit Fiona’s class on Friday. Also, at some point I want to put up a blog post about how all these and other new sites are changing my approach to posting different forms of content online.

Today, per Chris Brogan, is supposed to be blog commenting day. Leave a comment on at least three or five blogs, depending on whom you listen to. I haven’t started adding my comments, but will try to get to that later. It does give me more reason to put off writing a serious blog post today.

Metanomics will be speaking with Glitteractica Cookie today. I intend to be there as a bear, instead of as the dolphin I sometimes appear as when reporting in Second Life.

On top of that I’m tired. Lack of sleep from PodcampNYC, rainy day, allergies or a cold. Just not a lot of energy to write up the really great blog posts that I have pending.

At the Metanomics session Monday the 21st, Mitch Wagner of Information Week and Gartner Fellow Steve Prentice expressed concerns about the future of Second Life. As a business collaboration tool, it is loosing ground to competitors like QWAQ.

Yet the back channel seemed more concerned with whether or not Mitch at Steve were analyzing Linden Lab properly. Is Second Life an application that needs to be constrained? Is it a platform that can serve many applications? Is it a community based upon a platform? Much of this will be questions that need to be answered by the new CEO.

Today, the new CEO was announced. His name is Mark Kingdon. He has been CEO at Organic, a leading online marketing firm, since 2001. During his time there Organic doubled in size.

Everyone is pouring over comments Mark has made, blog posts, interviews, etc., to get a sense about what he will bring to Second Life. Yet the view of what Linden Lab was looking for can be found in an interview Philip Rosedale did with Reuters in March where he said they were “someone who has experience with and a passion for growing this type of company — a software platform company.”

Presently, residents of Second Life expressed cautious optimism, waiting to see what sort of changes Kingdon will bring. Some of this reflects the different views about what Second Life is all about that different residents have.

A good summary of Mark’s background, and some of his articles can be found at ClickZ

The blog post from Linden Lab about Mark can be found here.

(Originally published at SLNN.COM.)
Last week, residents of Second Life grappled with their views of the Second Life value proposition and how they felt that Linden Lab was doing to defend the value proposition.

I believe I can fly
I believe I can touch the sky
I think about it every night and day
Spread my wings and fly away

When my eldest daughters were in kindergarten, they learned this song. They would sing it with the hope and optimism that you only seem to find in healthy young children. They have grown and they have flown. They are living lives beyond our imaginations those many years ago.

But what about a child born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare birth defect? Children born with spinal muscular atrophy rarely live beyond the first couple years of their lives. Do we believe these children can fly?

If you said no, I urge you to consider the case of Joseph Button, known in Second Life as Hunter Talon. Hunter Talon’s imagination soared and brought many people with it. He shared his imagination online and as a screenwriter and a graphic novelist. He passed away earlier this month.

I never knew Joe, so I think it is best to let other sources speak for themselves. First, I would encourage you to check out Joe’s MySpace page. His ‘About Me’ section starts off:

I slayed a hundred Nazis with a Swiss Army Knife and a standard issue PCL, or a Paper Clip Launcher to you civilians. It was slow, it was gruesome, it was a complete lie. But I need friends and killing Nazis always earns friends.

A local television station interviewed him here:

When, Joseph Button passed away. His sister added this comment on his MySpace page:

Joe defied the odds and lived nearly 25 years with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a rare medical condition, when doctors predicted he wouldn't live past age 2. He lived each day with enthusiasm and accomplished so much in life, always with the desire to help others. In death he chose to donate his body for medical research with the hope that something might be learned about his disease. We would like to continue Joe's wish of helping others and have created a memorial fund for those that would like to contribute in
Joe's name.

Joseph Button Memorial Fund
c/o The Button Family
2748 Sharon Road
Jarrettsville, MD 21084

So to any of you that don’t believe you can fly, take a lesson from Joe Button and spread your wings and fly away.

The other day, I received a product evaluation of the laptop version of 3Dconnexion’s SpaceNavigator for Notebooks. I am starting to test it as a navigation and building tool for Second Life. Support for the SpaceNavigator is part of the Second Life Client Release Candidate 1.20. The Release Candidate still seems a little flaky, and I need to do more testing.

However, SpaceNavigator also comes with some very nice demo applications and it works quite nicely with Google’s SketchUp. I showed Fiona, my six-year-old daughter SketchUp and she spent quite a bit of time playing with it. It helped with the old rule that I have about computer games. My kids are free to play any computer game that they can program. For my older kids, they started programming in Logo and MOO code. Yet as virtual worlds become increasingly 3D, they need to hone their 3D creation skills.

The older girls got a chance to play with systems like Open Croquet and Blender. It seems like the SpaceNavigator might be a great tool these systems, but I suspect that they don’t have a large enough user base to justify the development.

I explained to Fiona that I was working on a product review of the SpaceNavigator, and she wanted to add her how comments. They ended up being about SketchUp, instead of the SpaceNavigator, but I thought some of you might enjoy Fiona’s product review of SketchUp:

Well, first you make a square or a circle and then you see this little arrow pointer thing and you click on that and pull up the square or circle. After that, you can make the square crazy by clicking on the thing on the top line with four arrows. Then you might want to color them in. Click on a paint bucket that you’ll see on the top, then all different words come up. Click on any one of them. Then really cool pages will come up. Then click on anything you want to and then click on a piece of the lines that will appear there.

So, over the next few days, I’ll continue to test the SpaceNavigator. However, I’ll also be pleased to see Fiona busy building new objects in SketchUp instead of playing on some of the other, less creative, pre-packaged virtual worlds.

(Originally posted at SLNN.COM)

Following the Congressional hearings about Second Life, Jon Stewart delved into the underlying issues as part of his news broadcast, The Daily Show.

(Originally published at SLNN.COM)

There were many high points to Virtual Worlds 2008; new ideas, new worlds, and new tools.