Second Blog

Markus Breuer (Elephant Seven AG) und Sebastian Küpers (Pixelpark Agentur) haben gemeinsam ein umfangreiches Whitepaper mit dem Titel “Second Life und Business in Virtuellen Welten” erstellt, das kostenlos heruntergeladen werden kann.

Auch, wenn der Schwerpunkt naturgemäß vor allem auf dem Marketingpotential virtueller Welten liegt, wurde der Hinweis auf den Nutzen für Trainingsangebote nicht vergessen. Als Beispiel für diesen Bereich wird das Berkman Island der Harvard Law School angeführt.

As I had promised, here’s the recording of the interview on our seminar:

We talked about our plans for the course, the background, the didactical concept and the tools available in Second Life.

Today, a famous visitor was seen in our village, a medieval celebrity! May I introduce Sir Geoffrey Chaucer, customs officer and poet.

I hope he can be induced to stay around a bit longer, since I’m sure he will have much to teach. 

According to Claudia Linden, the number of subscribers to the SLED (Second Life Educators) mailing list is 3777 as of August 9th.

As Jeff Hiles notes in his posting to the list: “I find such numbers useful when talking with faculty and administrators about education in Second Life.” You can say that again! So thanks for bringing it up.

In the simteach.de blog I discovered a reference which is another indicator just how seriously IBM takes virtual worlds and other 3D Internet environments – I think that’s especially interesting in the light of the recent lamentation in the press about the migration of companies from Second Life.

As is well-known, IBM “believes that virtual worlds and other 3D Internet environments offer significant opportunity to our company, our clients and the world at large”. Accordingly, they encourage ”employees to explore responsibly and to further the development of such new spaces of relationship-building, learning and collaboration”. To support them in this endeavor, IBM’s Virtual Universe Community has created Virtual World Guidelines.

In addition to listing eleven rules, these also cover such topics as avatar appearance and digital personas, intellectual property, doing business in a virtual world and dealing with inappropriate behavior.

If any of you are curious what this seminar I keep mentioning is all about, the official description of the module is now online and accessible to anyone.

And if you’d like to take a look at the current state of the Medieval Village in-world, clicking here will take you right there.

As of this night, the Second Life Voice viewer is part of “normal” life. The update is still optional, and the feature itself is also turned off by default so that each user has to choose to activate it.

 All regions have now been voice-enabled but sim owners may disable it and parcel holders can control how it is used.

According to the Linden Blog, more than 45.000 residents tested the Voice First Look over the past weeks (see also my post on the German Web Monday in SL). Based on their findings, a special FAQ was compiled.

The second Second Life Round Table in Cologne? Does that equal Life to the power of 4?

Well, anyway, to anyone who is interested in joining us on Thursday, August 9th 2007 in the 4 Cani Della Cittá in Cologne, welcome! Speaking from past experience (see my post from July 13th), it will be worthwile indeed to meet some interesting people and have fun talking about all things SL.

Here’s the Wiki registration page: Stammtisch SL.