Virtual Woes
Second Life is an immersive experience however much we may consider ourselves "Augmentalists" in the first instance. No better evidence of that that the shock I suffered last night. Happily working away in my new virtual ofice area, the world suddenly started to come apart at the seams. This was no lag problem, the "usual glitches" or impending crash - this was something all together more serious. Panicked to the degree of absurdity, I did what any sensible person would - immediately quit the viewer program until I could get my thoughts in order.
As it transpires the event was serious - but also an accident. It seems our land was in the process of being "deeded" to our group and the process was not taking into account the individual partitions that had been constructed in the build process. As a result, default prim limitations were imposed on our individual partitions - which in the case of my office area meant a random number of objects were "de-rezzed" and returned to various peoples’ own inventories. It was an indiscrimate process which resulted in losses of both furnishings, scripted objects and indeed parts of the very land fabric itself. For something actually standing in the centre of things as it happened, the effect was like a virtual earthquake. Not an experience I would wish on anyone.
At the end of it all it looks like a load of rebuilding will have to start soon and a lot of last week’s efforts will have gone to waste. It is symptomatic of the fraglity of this new world that such things can happen and that there is no recourse for compensation or any method of rolling back to a previous configuration. It is probably the most compelling reason for needing our personal spaces available offline in some fashion - I work seriously within the interface and this was like seeing the destruction of my desktop and operating system in front of my eyes.
It didn’t help that we had a web disaster over the weekend too. The Web2.0 facility called Afeeda went out of business at the end of last week. This company had been handling the aggregation of all my feeds for Second Life and despite the fact it was getting spammed a lot, was an invaluable resource. I am now working overtime to locate all the individual feeds again and add them separately to my bloglines interface. Only when this is done will I attempt to create a new aggregated system to replace the published instances of the previous Afeeda stream.
All this of course gets filtered by hand with the best links going up to my "Twitter" feed at http://twitter.com/malburns where I quite literally broadcast throughout the day. I gather from my subscribers that this onslaught dominates their readers, but it seems more people value it than the other way round. Which is a relief! The new office also displays the constant twitter feed as a newscreen inworld - although as of the time of writing, that has been another casualty of the aforementioned assault. Let’s hope we get everything restored soon.
In other developments I started an inworld group last week. Although based at the new office it is really a separate idea. Media is exploding in Second Life. Also, any notions of the world as a counterculure can rapidly be laid to rest as Second Life prepares for a massive influx of new residents together with increased compatibility with parts of the web and other metaverses. Hopefully the changes won’t happen too rapidly for proper assimilation, but we can expect to see much greater partitioning of activities inworld, together with a greater volume of information flying around.
My thought was to provide a group for selected avatars in the forefront of information processing where high level events and developments could be discussed, exchanged and be re-distributed by the individual members - thereby filtering down the line into more specialised areas of the creative arts, industry and general commerce. Not a press club (there already is one) nor an elitist cliche of "movers and shakers" - but something more akin to a manageable-sized forum for the various hubs that already exist in a rapidly evolving new society.
So a busy and frantic time all round. Plus doing a bit of promotion for an incredible RL performer called Leslee McCarey who has just made her highly successful inworld debut. Her next gig is at the Woodstock Sim at 11am SLT next Sunday and is well worth your attention. She is also joining Juel Resistance for a smaller event tomorrow at Juel’s own place. You might even get into that.
Without the music in Second Life I would probably be growing frantic in the face of onstacles we seem to encounter every day. Not just the performaces, but the club with streams and the amazing use of ambiant sounds that help create realism inworld. Good reason to check out what Chris Hambly (audio Zenith) is doing at the Audio Sim and Dizzy Banjo is doing with his new inworld group, Metamusic. We live in exciting times - that is for sure.
So intil I feel like another rabbit …
AFK!
