Substandard Living Podcast

Found at govtech.net, The Conference Board will hold its first virtual meeting in Second Life. The Conference Board is a global business research and membership organization.

Holding meetings in Second Life or any other virtual world is not new news, what is interesting is that, among others, Clay Shirky will be presenting. Clay Shirky has been very vocal about aspects of Second Life, especially how Linden Labs counts how many residents there are.

Welcome back to Second Life, Clay.

For some more information on the conference itself, the article says:

“This is the first Conference Board meeting that is a true hybrid between ‘real life’ and the reality of ‘virtual worlds,’” said Roche. “By having half of the meeting in Second Life, we will be joined by experts from as far away as Finland, Japan, Malaysia, Scotland, Germany, Chile, and France.

“These “remote” participants in the meeting will be presenting both videos and slides presentations within the virtual facility. All participants worldwide will be linked together via a telephone teleconferencing system.

“This unique meeting will feature business strategy, innovation, marketing, legal, and technology leaders.”

I haven’t used it much, but another stab at search in Second Life has been announced. search.sheeplabs.com. Brought to you by Christian from the Electric Sheep Company.

I’ll be there! I didn’t go to SXSW because I had to do the Dean Koontz event and I and because it is so long.

The other reason I’m really looking forward to going to New York for this is because of the metaverse meetup that will be the following weekend. I’ve heard the legend of Jerry Paffendorf’s meetups, and looking forward to experiencing it myself.

If you are going to be there, look me up, I look forward to chatting with you. If you can’t find me, call my mobile: 623.670.2365. Leave a message and I’ll call you back or just txt me.

btw,my employer, the Electric Sheep Company, is the primary sponsor of this conference.

You’ve probably heard of it, but just in case, today is Bum Rush the Charts day. Read about it all over, Accident Hash, BumRushTheCharts.com (although it is as ugly as a myspace page), yada yada yada… A technorati search brought up far too many to mention.

Just do it!
Mine Again by Black Lab

I heard a rumor that LL is considering charging sims that are not under the new price plan, to have voice enabled. So basically if you pay $195 in tier for a private sim, you may have to pay for something that the more expensive sims, and the mainland will get.

This is wrong on a number of levels. 1st, I’m very much against nickel and diming your customers. Especially when the actual cost of the sim will not go up at all due to voice.

Next, if LL is so Libertarian in the way they handle Second Life, then creating premium sims is a move away from this stance. Especially when it favors their own mainland, which, last time I checked, nothing of significance is happening on the mainland, it is all happening on private sims. And if you want to charge more for servers as you did, fine, you make the move just like you did. You say, “from this point forward, the new price for a private sim is this and the tier is this.” But then you don’t go back and artificially try to get the previous sims up to the new price point.

I call bull on you LL, and I hope that you come down on the side of right on this one.

I will be streaming Dean Koontz life into Second Life this evening at 6:00 SLT. There is more information at SLNN.

Yesterday Dan Krueger (Danny Odell in SL) and I went to Mr. Koontz home and got all set up for tonight. Tonight I will be streaming Dean Koontz live into Second Life. He will be reading from his next book, a portion that has not been released yet. He will also be doing a live Q&A from your questions in world, and asked by Elizabeth Hulsebosch from Bantam Dell. Come check it out!

The squiggly line means I’m talking :-) Check it out in the preview grid.

So for analysis……..
THIS IS AWESOME! I was hanging around on beta grid with all the cool kids and we were testing out the voice chat in Second Life. This is going to change SL in a significant way. There are so many possibilities that this opens up. Will builds be built the same going forward? I imagine this will change.

Some fun we had tonight is the fly by… that is when you sing the Superman theme, (da dada da) and fly by a group of people. The stereo audio makes it awesome. Follow the same idea and fly around buzzing like a bee.

Another good time…. fly up in the sky and yell, “ahhhhhhhhhhh” as you fall. As you come into range you get louder as you hurl town virtual earth. Hah! An instant classic.

Also, word from the Lindens is there will be an anti-Spin button.

But seriously… all in all, it works fantastic. The voice server crashes from time to time, but it is a simple fix to turn it back on. The audio is superior over Skype. There are obvious features that will need to be implemented, like muting an individual avatar, or turning off audio on all avatars like during a concert. Audio griefiing is the new mauve.

2nd UPDATE: Here is a better version of the piece.
UPDATE: Here is a video link to the segment, shown in it’s entirety.

Sibley Verbeck, the CEO of The Electric Sheep Company (my employer) was on the Today Show this morning. He was joined by many sheep in attendance in avatar form on a sim previously built for NBC for the tree lighting ceremony before Christmas that coincided with the Al Roker special.

Here is the link to my set of pics.

And a few select pics below:

I’m cracking up after watching Lordfly’s youtube video. He introduces a new design called Cube Haus.

I love the video, it is well done, snarky, and snarky is often funny.

(Lordfly is a build of custom and prefab homes in SL. He is also a member of the podcast SecondCast)

I’ve had to hold my tongue for a while now, but Reuters just announced it, so I guess that means the news is announced.

Yay us!