Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

Carl Linnaeus is a personal hero of mine (and probably every other biologist in the world). He's responsible for developing the structures of taxonomy in biology, the thing that makes humans Homo sapiens sapiens, and the MRSA a multi-drug resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus.
The Swedish Embassy in SL is expanding its presence and activities with a permanent exhibition about this famous citizen, which will be inaugurated with an event on Friday (November 2nd) with a couple of competitions (best 18th Century costume, build a plant) with cash prizes as well as information books in a variety of languages. Read more about it on their website.

(Thanks to Stefan Geens for the head's up.)

Hamlet Au is running a poll over on New World Notes. He's asking Second Life users to rate the quality of Linden-to-resident communications in recent months about updates, downtime, policy and so forth.

Think they're doing well, or doing poorly? Go and register your vote. We'll all be watching the results.

Linden Lab has responded to our request for comment about the Wonderland scandal with a statement. The statement was issued just minutes ago by Lewis PR, Linden Lab's external public relations handler. Lewis PR provides public relations support for a wide variety of companies and organizations.

"At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel."

Linden Lab therefore has not acted on reports about the site from Second Life users and from Second Life's child avatar community (we are told that reports have been being filed since July) because they have not been able to find any wrongdoing.

Linden Lab's full statement follows, after the jump.

News of the Wonderland scandal is spreading through the UK press. Channel 5 News led with the piece - it's all over Sky News. Some of the UK's largest tabloids are picking it up - outlets with millions of readers. UK business magazine, The Business, has just taken up the story.

"users feel the virtual community is unsafe and uncensored; they're also deterred by the huge amount of sexually orientated activity which takes place in the world."

The Business magazine slams Linden Lab for their "unshakeable libertarian positions", and says "This will be a huge set back for Linden Labs [sic]".

Expect to be reading and hearing a lot more about this in the news in the coming days.

Of course, this activity directly contravenes Linden Lab policy - so, why didn't they act days or weeks ago, when this activity was reported to them?

We have been promised an official comment or statement from Linden Lab "shortly". That was nine hours ago.

[Update: 10PM SLT (US Pacific) - Linden Lab has just issued a formal response]

Sloog, you may remember, is a HUD that lets you tag places and people and search for them both inworld and via the web. MERLOT is a tool for indexing, and a database of, online learning and educational materials. SaLamander is a system to tie them together, led by Wainbrave Bernal, aka Jonathon Richter of the University of Oregon, in partnership with Sloog.org and yours truly.

What does it all mean? Well, anyone is welcome to go and pick up a Salamander HUD from the Centre for Advanced Technology in Education and when you find somewhere educational in SL, click the button, follow the instructions and register the site. The UOregon people will sift feeds and transfer them over to the wiki, and we will gradually acquire a register of folksonomy tags for education in SL.

Back when I was a wee newblet (the second time around), Secondcast was the Second Life podcast to listen to. Since that time, almost two years ago, they've recorded 63 total episodes, of which only about 13 of them were in the last nine months. One fifth of the cast, Lordfly Digeridoo, recently pronounced Secondcast dead, after months of inactivity.

While I can't speak for them, I can speak as someone who has been on the show four or five times, with the latest being an episode that never aired in July. I heard the tone of the program change before me. What was once a fun project ended up taking a backseat to their own personal projects. Walker Spaight wrote a book, Johnny Ming and Torrid Midnight went to work for the Electric Sheep Company, Lordfly Digeridoo for Millions of Us, among others, and Cristiano Midnight busy as ever with SL Universe.

Instead of focusing on the fact that it's gone, though, I'd rather relate a happy memory I have from the show. After having been on a couple of times, Johnny asked me to make an episode into a Machinima. It turned into a total disaster. The rest of the cast was really bored and did not hide that fact. They goofed off when I needed screenshots, then got cranky before they were to watch all the Machinima.

Read on for the rest of the story ...

According to MEDIAWEEK, during the week of November 5th, CNN will be putting a new spin on an old idea. Instead of embedding a reporter in Second Life, they will be having the residents do all of the work. However, instead of submitting tips to existing blogs, the news will actually come from the residents.

In order to prepare our fair citizens for their duties, they will be handing out kits, allowing them to send stories and photos. In addition, they will be offering weekly "news meetings" and training sessions, led by CNN.com staffs, and even Larry King himself! Furthermore, you'll be able to read the news on kiosks throughout the grid.

I wonder if it will consist more of real life or Second Life news? I guess we'll find out next week!

UPDATE: I just spoke with a Director of Public Relations at CNN Worldwide and she clarified some things for me. While it's a possibility that Larry King and other on-air personalities will be in SL, plans have not been finalized in this matter. She also stated that the reports will be 100% user-generated in-world i-Reports.

I've posted several pieces about the magic of presence in SL. Today, in my daily trawl through news related to SL, I came across this gem from Gavin Keeley, General Manager of Solutions at Suncorp Metway. The basic thesis: whilst meetings have their official uses, and video conferencing serves them, a lot of the real value of a meeting is the informal chatting before and after the meeting - something video conferencing doesn't encourage whilst meeting in SL enables it just like IRL.

Whilst it's a fascinating thought about the value of meetings, it's a fairly insightful piece about one benefit of meeting of meeting in SL. But what do you think? Just Askin'

(Original piece by Simon Sharwood)

Six of Second Life's top brands Eros Designs, RH Designs, Le Cadre Network, Nomine, PixelDolls and DE Designs are filing suit against Thomas Simon (known as avatar Rase Kenzo), and ten other as yet unidentified avatars. The suit was filed in Brooklyn, New York by attorney Frank Taney, a partner with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney who is representing Eros Designs against Volkov Catteneo, for similar copyright violation.

As long-time SLI readers are doubtless aware, there is no technological means that exists to guarantee prevention against copyright violation. Indeed, most such measures are usually bypassed or broken before they are even released into the wild. That leaves one forum for copyright violation - the same one that has always been there. The RL courts and the legal system.

Assuming CSI:NY had not aired their program featuring Second Life on Wednesday this week, projected signups for Wednesday and Thursday were expected to total 47,434. Actual signups for Wednesday and Thursday this week exceeded that projection by 74,412 signups, with 122,846 new registrations taking place in that 48 hour period.

The incident was marred, however, by the failure of the webservers for the CSI event, preventing many from registering via the CSI registration portal or downloading the OnRez viewer, both provided by the Electric Sheep Company.

Popular CBS crime-based science-fiction series, CSI:NY aired last night across North America, featuring Second Life as a major feature of a two-part story, the second part of which is due to air in February 2008.

I hate spoilers, so we'll skip talking about the story. Second Life, as it is portrayed, is given a pretty reasonable treatment - the skepticism of many of the core characters is not unusual - however, this is not the Second Life you know, just as CSI is not the forensics department you'll find if you go downtown.

I know that this is Second Life Insider, but I just can't wait to show you a preview of the game that I think will replace Second Life. It's called Real Life. Supposedly you're able to do almost as much as you can do in SL, except maybe fly.

In all seriousness, I think "Log off now!" is a catchphrase that's here to stay for a long time. While I thought that CSI:NY and Electric Sheep Company did a great job with the episode, it was hard to resist mocking them in a fun way. Just remember that if SL becomes too much for you, you can always give RL a go!

I'm quite a fan of 2 of the 3 CSI shows, and the games offered here (there should be more to come) work quite nicely. You do have to wonder if the shows would be as compelling if all the clues were highlighted when you arrived though. For those of us outside the US, the fact that one of the mysteries ties in directly to tonight's show might be a bit tricky unless we manage to download a copy of it from somewhere. Is CBS sure that's what it wants?

The game play uses video streaming to relay information about the clues and interviews with the suspects, but there is a text sidebar too for those, like me, that struggle to hear what's going on. The text is rather slow to load though, sadly.

It was a fun way to spend 20 minutes. I guess it will take longer than that for the expected hordes of newbie CSI fans though, as they also try to get used to moving around in SL. It will be interesting to see how many convert to long term users after this, but they will use a fair amount of SL skills, so they might.

I've never been to New York, but exploring New York virtually on this scale was fun!

Oh, if you use their viewer, you can't right click the CSI toolbar - but you can in a normal viewer. This is to stop newbies getting lost and detaching them by mistake according to one of their greeters, but it's annoying if you're used to SL.

As a former resident of three of the seven counties burning in Southern California, I have been worried sick about my real life friends. Then a disturbing thought crossed my mind. There are Second Lifers in Socal too.

I only know of a few Second Life residents in the area, but I'm sure there are many more than that. Was your area evacuated? Were you allowed to return? More importantly, are you OKAY? Please leave a comment to let your virtual friends and family know that you're alright. I'll bet I'm not the only one worried for your safety.