Second Life

By SLHamlet Linden Lab just announced the acquisition of Enemy Unknown, a Swedish company whose main asset is Avatars United, a social network for users of multiple virtual worlds. To create an account, you can use your Second Life name and password...

Related articles from danielvoyagerblog (WordPress), Second Life, larsjuhljensen (WordPress).

By SLHamlet H]umanity," virtual world blogger Lauren Jones recently observed, "has become a multitasking parallel processor." She illustrates that point with this screen capture of her desktop, which must be seen to be believed. "Second Life was open where I was involved...

By SLHamlet Redd Columbia is a Second Life content creator who turns everyday objects into SL creations that take on a quirky wit, when they make the translation across realities. (A steering wheel for a pretend car! An airline pillow!) Basically, Redd's...

By SLHamlet This is excellent news -- according to Jon Brouchard of the Arch Network, the Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum, which launched in Second Life last year to much enthusiasm, is now officially partnered with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which...

By Iris Ophelia Exclusive to NWN, Iris Ophelia's ongoing showcase of all things stylish in SL It's been a long, arduous journey to develop the ten Hottest Second Life Male Avatars List this year, but we've finally arrived at Part One. I've pored...

By SLHamlet One day Emerald Wynn peeked inside her Second Life account to discover that during her years in SL she had amassed over 100,000 virtual items in her inventory. "Seriously," she begged in this long Plurk thread, "I need help. Don't...

By SLHamlet Somewhere near Shanghai, aston Leisen sends a farewell to Google from Second Life... and a greeting to New World Notes readers from China Last Friday I briefly noted the beautiful new China simulator in Second Life, which its creator, Aston...

By SLHamlet This year's Sundance Film Festival opened late last week, and one of the very first movies to launch the event was "Life 2.0", the feature length documentary on Second Life by Jason Spingarn-Koff (known in SL as Jay Spire). Here's...

By SLHamlet Back in 2008 I noted "Spontaneously Me", a Flickr group that challenges Second Life Residents to reveal the real person behind the avatar with an impromptu self-portrait, and was glad to notice recently that people are still adding photos. Here's...

By SLHamlet Los Angeles Architect Uses Second Life to Develop Multi-Million Dollar, Mixed Used Shopping Mall Project in Egypt 50 Second Life Avatars Grossed US$100,000+ Each From the SL Economy in 2009! 769K World: After Brief Plateau, Second Life Ends 2009 With...

By SLHamlet Acacia Merlin of Symphonic Notes has a poignant requiem for a Second Life sim called Symphony, "a loving and authentic tribute to the Pacific Northwest Coast", which the owner and creator had to remove due for financial reasons, "leaving a...

By SLHamlet Marisol Koenkamp has a lovely fashion spread taken in the refurbished China sim, which only recently boasted a large boat and a community built around it, but has been transformed to resemble a Chinese brush painting made immersive. See more...

By SLHamlet As always, it's SL Blogger Friday on New World Notes. What posts by Second Life bloggers should I highlight today and next Friday, for everyone to read over the weekend? Post links and descriptions in Comments, please!

By SLHamlet I often write about the remarkable reach of the Second Life community across numerous Web 2.0 sites (as here, and here), one that's far more pervasive than any other virtual world. Here's another example: Take a look at the top...

By SLHamlet A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the Crowded Empty paradox, the unique aspects of Second Life which makes large swathes of the world seem abandoned, even when there are 75-80,000 concurrent users logged in. Looking over the reader commentary,...

By SLHamlet Your Voice as Art" is a cool project from Aequitas, "a group of Second Life artists working on a project involving the voices of Second Lifers", as spokesperson Sowa Mai put it to me recently. Using the phonecall-to-Second Life technology...

By SLHamlet thesixtyone, a great social network/content sharing site for indie musicians, has a new website with a beautiful user interface that makes it even greater. As noted by Vint Falken a couple years ago, Second Life musicians and fans were among...

By SLHamlet Total War is a new Second Life combat game system from Tokuno Wind, an SL developer run a Resident named Teclo Flow. It's billed as being compatible with weapons made for most of the other major SL combat systems, such...

By SLHamlet Cleopatra Water Courts Project construction site in Cairo; DB Bailey in SL conceptual build he showed to client to win the commission What you're looking at above left is the construction site of the Cleopatra Water Courts project in Cairo,...

By SLHamlet The Lindens published a massive economic wrap-up of Second Life's virtual economy in 2009 earlier today, but as with most macroeconomic reports, the broad strokes tend to overwhelm. It's impressive that user-to-user transactions of Linden Dollars totaled US$567 million for...

By SLHamlet Last week I asked readers if they were interested in publicly associating their avatars and in-world activity with their real life identity, and here's the results: One in three responded that they did. Though admittedly not a scientific sample, my...

By SLHamlet Second Life isn't the only virtual world using the success of the movie Avatar to advertise its own avatars. The 3D chat world IMVU has also been doing that in recent weeks, and because the company often runs banners on...

By SLHamlet Last weekend I briefly attended an SL wedding ceremony in a sooty industrial music club which included a maid of honor with steel stiletto fingernails. That was pretty unique, but then I noticed Chestnut Rau was recently a guest of...

By SLHamlet Harper Beresford got a chance to give Jonathan Lethem an orientation and tour of Second Life prior to his appearance in-world this coming Sunday. Which raised a uniquely contemporary question: What's the best way to dress your avatar for a...

By SLHamlet the fool in the JunkYard" is a wonderful marriage of Second Life dynamic shadows and setting -- in this case, the junkyard of the Wasteland, a popular post-apocalyptic roleplaying zone in SL. An ideal setting to re-imagine the Beatles' masterpiece...

By SLHamlet A number of Residents have noticed this web-based ad for Second Life showing up on various websites, which is notable partly because Linden Lab rarely engages in advertising campaigns, but mostly because the ad depicting an avatar bears more than...

By SLHamlet News from Haiti in the aftermath of the recent earthquake has been horrific, and in times like these (such as Katrina), the Second Life community often rallies together to start fundraisers, for donating Linden Dollars converted to cash for the...

By SLHamlet At the last Second Life Community Convention, Chief Product Officer T. Linden gave a milestone presentation on the new SL viewer, aimed at making the Second Life experience more intuitive and user-friendly. Created by veterans of Adobe, TiVO, and other...

By SLHamlet Here's a warm but melancholy machinima for a cold Tuesday morning, brought to you by expressionist master Lyric Lundquist, who I profiled last year. In "trix", she combines Second Life footage with real video of herself and her girlfriend, Kelly,...

By SLHamlet Second Life Blog: Next Chapter! A year after ceding the CEO position to Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale just announced that he will no longer work at Linden Lab full-time, suggesting that work in his capacity as Linden's...

By Chestnut Rau Chestnut Rau’s weekly round-up of upcoming SL events… Ahhh.....Burning Life. I just love this celebration of creativity and community in Second Life. The SL Burning Life Celebration is modeled after the RL Burning Man Festival that takes place in the...

By SLHamlet SL music aficionado Crap Mariner has word of a "bouncer bot", created by veteran performer Mankind Tracer. As the name suggests, it's a payment system for live musicians, and it addresses the problem of earning a decent gig fee, which...

By SLHamlet As a perusing of the ongoing New World Tableau series will show, a lot of Resident artists who use SL screenshots as their medium often process their images through Photoshop. The challenge is often figuring out how to use it...