By Stone Culdesac

Deconstructing Second Life My job is to develop social media strategies and recommend programming to clients. As such, my approach is holistic, recommending everything possible that will help the client achieve their goals. Second Life has become a popular topic when clients start asking about social media. While I can claim no vast expertise in Linden Land, I find it hard to believe so many companies are setting up shop and social media strategists are quick to recommend it as a good place to reach consumers.

Regulating Your Second Life: Defamation in Virtual Worlds Although the issue of virtual harm has never been raised in real-world courts, virtual worlds like Second Life have become increasingly significant in terms of both time and money for their users. As such, it is important to develop theories of how the law may apply to and resolve disputes that originate in these worlds. This Note will therefore argue that because users have imported real-world concepts, specifically currency and economy, into the metaverse, it would behoove brick and mortar societies to provide for redress if a user suffers pecuniary loss in these worlds.

Copyrights in SL??? I have been seeing a bunch of people complaining about their products being resold. This bothers me greatly when 99% of the time the person sold or gave it away full perms by accident or on purpose. People sell it full perms then, in the future, complain that someone is breaking a copyright. People need to relax and take responsibility for what they have done.

Boycott the American Indian Movement — and All Sign Extortionists in SL Let’s hope Electric Sheep’s ad network don’t end up on signs like these.

Here we go, hoo-boy, extremist groups in the U.S. now using the land-extortionist tactic to raise funds for their causes through Second Life. They saw it worked for rapacious micro barons who extort you to buy back the view, why not put Whitey McMansion on the run with these $2000 16 m2 spaces that also extort your emotions by telling you that the proceeds go to help Native Americans through the American Indian Movement?

Light Waves, Starax Statosky, and Hallucinogen I didn’t start out looking for proof that Light Waves was Starax. Originally I just wanted to figure out who was bankrolling Rezzable. They’ve built 35 sims and have no defined business model. Who is spending tens of thousands of dollars on these vaguely defined art sims? Why are all the employees under contract to not reveal where the funding comes from?

The week in New World Notes, October 8-12 Light blogging today, as I’m still recovering from the Virtual Worlds Conference. While there, I got a hands-on look at the Sheep’s new SL viewer (with pics!) and will post on Monday. Here are some other highlights for weekend reading:

- Hope versus Understanding: the Yankee Group and the Rimm Effect
Relating the acclaim that greeted a dubious anti-SL report with an earlier backlash.

Keynote Shorthand Two good things about the keynote today at Virtual Worlds 2007….(1) There’s no test, and (2) we can do simple things like list the references used in the slides on a blog, like this one!

One of the first references (of a non-demographic nature) used in the presentation was the reference to the Industry Solutions Partner Network, which Cisco announced on September 14th, 2007. This is an environment specifically built for Cisco channel partners (systems integrators, resellers, etc.) to interact and learn about the excellent offerings by our application service provider community. It is a hybrid of a trade show and a matchmaking service, in that channel partners can not only browse, but also converse with representatives of our ASP partners.

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