Writing from Hoover, Alabama. News comes through Reuters of a magnitude 6 earthquake in Italy today. I know at least one Italian Resident, Pier, the master of the Koinup photo hosting service; and there are many others. You might want to check your own contacts, and pray for their safety. There will probably be a [...]

Strawberry Singh has weighed in on the debate over whether or not the Second Life Marketplace is a good thing for in-world commerce.  As of my last check, she’s up to 11 comments and pingbacks, including my own submission.  I’d urge you to go read this and giveconsidered opinion to the matter, then offer up [...]

Reblogged from Daniel Voyager's Blog: A few days ago Oskar Linden replied to second life down again? unscheduled maintenance? thread on the SL Forums. Oskar talks about the recovery process of the recent hardware failure at one of the data centers Linden Lab operates.  Thanks to Oskar Linden for letting the SL community know about this failure. Check out the [...]

Linden Lab announced yesterday that Premium members would begin receiving a few new benefits, effective immediately, with more to come in the future.  (The original announcement can be read at the Big Blog.) First, Premium members would get the chance to claim exclusive virtual goods from vendors set up for the purpose.  The first package [...]

Miyo Darcy reports that bottom scum have arrived in Second Life, trying to victimize Residents with loose lindens. Read, and then avoid these people like the Plague! ===== So now the Gold sellers and spammers we know from other Games (MMO´s) like World of Warcraft are arrived in Second Life. The official Second Life Forum [...]

A moment of stepping into Real Life to offer sympathies to my Canadian readers, if any.  I learned a few minutes ago from the BBC that Jack Layton, the long-time leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, lost his fight against a recurrence of cancer yesterday.  He was aged 61.  The leader of the left-most of [...]

Mercy, today seems to be a big day for news.  New World Notes reports that the lovely animated globe map Hamlet Au saw while visiting Linden Lab’s offices back in June, a map that reports concurrency of users, is being worked on for availability to Residents.  Rod Humble mentioned this to Daniel Voyager, according to [...]

I just discovered this while running the Tag Surfer through the WordPress.com blogs.  Liv Leigh reports on a thread in the general SL discussion forum that talks about Abbotts Aerodrome, one of the old timers of the Grid, closing on September 1.  Reasons are uncertain at the moment why this is happening, but all regret [...]

New World Notes published an article an hour ago that Resident profiles are available, at least in part, on the open Web through their site and a special secure address.  The new page, attributed to Daniel Voyager, comes direct from your in-world profile with very little difference in content.   Mine is below, for instance: You [...]

New World Notes: Linden Lab Announces New CEO: Electronic Arts Executive and Game Developer Rod Humble This is an interesting move on Linden Lab’s part, as well as one that may fan the flames on whether Second Life is a game world, a business tool, or an alternate universe for us to build and explore.  [...]