Maria's Worlds

Wed, Sep 1 2010
We all live in a virtual world

We all live in a virtual world

Mike Treder, the managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, recently asked a loaded question: If you could live in a world that was just the way you wanted it to be, with... 

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Wed, Aug 25 2010
Renting or owning your OpenSim land?

Renting or owning your OpenSim land?

Hosting providers with previous experience in Second Life are bringing some Second Life terminology with them into OpenSim. For example, Coral Estates draws a distinction between “owning” a... 

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Sat, Aug 21 2010
OpenSim business roadmap: past, present and future

OpenSim business roadmap: past, present and future

My company is a small, enterprise user of virtual worlds. Over the past year, we’ve used them for meetings with partners, new hires, internal collaboration, and external business networking. There... 

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Thu, Aug 19 2010
Whisper clear as a bell in OpenSim

Whisper clear as a bell in OpenSim

Tonight’s meeting of the Hypergrid Entrepreneurs Group was an eye-opener for me and several other attendees — well, ear-opener. We got a chance to try out the new Whisper directional voice... 

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Mon, Aug 16 2010
How to save Second Life’s Teen Grid

How to save Second Life’s Teen Grid

The TeenGrid has low traffic compared to Second Life’s mainland, and its primary renters — educators — pay half of what Second Life’s other customers do for land. It makes sense... 

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Fri, Aug 13 2010
Sitting and staring at a virtual screen wastes time

Sitting and staring at a virtual screen wastes time

In a post today titled 5 Reasons Why Users Flee from Difficult 3D Virtual Platforms, “Daisy” at VenueGen suggested that new users might like virtual worlds more if they don’t have to... 

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Thu, Aug 5 2010
Qarl Linden’s layoff is bad news for OpenSim

Qarl Linden’s layoff is bad news for OpenSim

Linden Lab developer Qarl Linden reported that he was laid off yesterday. The developer — known as Karl Stiefvater outside of Second Life — was responsible for such innovations as scupties... 

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Thu, Jul 29 2010
Grids should consider zoning

Grids should consider zoning

A couple of days ago, Second Life merchant Darrius Gothly proposed a plan to reinvigorate Second Life’s land market by  zoning regions residential or commercial. Today, Second Life does have some... 

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Fri, Jul 9 2010
The grid is another country

The grid is another country

For the past year that I’ve been attending meetings in Second Life and OpenSim, I’ve been thinking of the virtual platforms as another kind of collaboration tool. I compare it to Web-based... 

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Wed, Jun 30 2010
Fear of piracy can be more damaging than piracy itself

Fear of piracy can be more damaging than piracy itself

According to information presented at a recent U.S. International Trade Commission hearing, piracy may be hurting companies less than previously though. Fritz Foley, an associate professor at Harvard Business... 

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Thu, Jun 10 2010
Web viewer a potential turning point for SL

Web viewer a potential turning point for SL

Yesterday, Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon promised that Linden Lab is going to develop a Web-based viewer for Second Life. This is, potentially, a major turning point for the company. It could become a portal... 

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Thu, May 13 2010
How open are virtual worlds?

How open are virtual worlds?

There are three ways in which a particular platform or service can be considered to be “open.” One is whether it runs on multiple systems, or is locked into a system from one particular vendor. For... 

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Tue, May 11 2010
When will virtual land be free?

When will virtual land be free?

Today, Web space is free. Almost. You can get free accounts for blogs on Blogger.com and Wordpress.com — among many others. And storage space is so cheap that some Web hosts offer virtually unlimited... 

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Tue, May 4 2010
A call for a new viewer

A call for a new viewer

Second Life has rolled out some great features recently, such as media-on-a-prim, which are great for business. And chief product officer  Tom Hale’s promise of mesh imports in the second quarter... 

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Thu, Apr 29 2010
Resilience during virtual disasters

Resilience during virtual disasters

Virtual worlds have been offered up in recent weeks as alternatives to physical events because they are disaster-proof. No volcano or tsunami can take down the whole Internet. And virtual events are particularly... 

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Thu, Apr 15 2010
Joys and dangers of work avatars

Joys and dangers of work avatars

If you’re a business manager considering rolling out virtual workspaces, you may think that an avatar identity is nothing more than yet another user account, the login credentials for a particular... 

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Sun, Apr 11 2010
Planning for a virtual future

Planning for a virtual future

There are few things worse than making a large investment in technology only to find out a couple of years later that the rest of the world has decided to go in a different direction. Not only do you now... 

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Mon, Apr 5 2010
Business on OpenSim

Business on OpenSim

Last week, I surveyed the state of OpenSim commerce, in the column Business in OpenSim. This included the beginnings of in-world retail shops, OpenSim hosting providers, and design and development services. These... 

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Fri, Apr 2 2010
Business in OpenSim

Business in OpenSim

[Update: You can browse all hypergrid-enabled public OpenSim grids with Hyperica, the directory of hypergrid destinations. Directory indexes more than 100 shopping and freebie store locations.] Is it... 

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Wed, Mar 31 2010
The OpenSim front porch

The OpenSim front porch

The Internet is a wide, and anonymous place. For me, it’s always a slight shock when I comment on someone’s blog post — and they comment back, or send me a personal “thank you”... 

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