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Second Life continues to expand each and every day. New Residents are joining, artists are creating amazing content, new businesses are springing up, big companies are entering for the first time, educational institutions are building virtual universities… and the list goes on. Everyday I learn of something new, something bold, something you’ve created.

Second Life offers something no ones else does - an astoundingly rich array of user-created content and a large, diverse and ever-expanding virtual economy.

The content and economy reflect the diversity of the Resident population. Your creativity covers 1.5 billion meters of space that’s taken more than 500 million hours over the past five years to assemble. It’s a mammoth undertaking.

Barack Obama’s change.org website is accepting requests for ideas and projects to be implemented during his term. Knowing that he’s all for technological innovation, and that several successful experiments with e-democracy were done inside Second Life®, let’s try to push for even more. Andabata Mandelbrot is proposing that we vote to create an international metaverse - the Internet equivalent of virtual worlds. To get this implemented, we need 400 votes! And the deadline is… today at midnight, so we need to hurry… Voting is simple, you just need to create an account on the change.org account and vote (you can even log in with your Facebook or MySpace account) by clicking on the icon. If you’re willing to promote this idea, you can, of course, do more — add widgets, push it to your social network, and so on. With a surprisingly open-minded approach, voting is not limited to US residents, but it’s totally open to international voters too. The change is for America, but its impact will be global. A nice touch!

IBM decided, deliberately, to have a conference for their Academy of Technology in Second Life. It was a roaring success for all the "soft" reasons we talk about so much - social networking, chat out of sessions, sessions overrunning through interest, impromptu discussions and the like - but IBM also estimate a clear cut ROI of US$320,000

One of the attendees at this conference was so impressed with her first experiences in Second Life for a conference, that she cancelled the upcoming AGM in Florida, and moved it to Second Life. At two weeks notice! They reused the conference spaces - lots of instant savings there - and their estimates are that running their AGM in Second Life cost them about 20% of the costs of a RL meeting, as well as giving all the good soft outcomes once again.

Update 11:11am PST: Lestat figured this out and shared. You just double-click on the seat cushion to sit in the chairs

In its current state, Lively is like IRC in 3D. You can meet your friends in a room and chat with bubbles over your head. I’ve seen many attempts to do this type of thing over the years but the only one that comes to mind as being a big success is Habbo Hotel.

When there is an ability to actually create something original objects (can’t do yet), stream audio and video (can’t do yet), interact with objects (how can you do this?),

Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, agreed educators who spoke during an April 16 webinar on gaming in education.

gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making

repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.

My contention is simple - when we're in Second Life to work, we can use the same techniques we use in first life to focus on the task at hand rather than that gorgeous avatar. If we want, later, to consensually jump that avatar's virtual bones (to be deliberately somewhat crude) and they are interested too, then just like flirting in the office, we can run off together and do this. However, if we're in a space that forbids this - Lively I'm remembering you here, but not only you - there is that allure of the forbidden, the censored, the naughty. People can, and will, work around the limitations in some quite amazingly inventive ways. Knowing it's not forbidden lets us (as a group) apply that energy and creativity to the task at hand when we're working, and apply it to the avatar at hand when we're not - in much the same way we learn how to do as adults.

The obvious corollary to this: if we ban sex from Second Life (which isn't the same as the current proposals about the adult continent) we switch back to a situation more like Lively where the allure of the forbidden becomes stronger. Creativity, learning and the like go down, and how long would it be until Second Life follows Lively into closure?

There are a range of other things too. The sex market in Second Life contains a huge amount of innovation - if people want to do sex, people will find ways to let them and support them. Whilst not every tool to support avatar sex turns into a tool to support education or business in Second Life, quite a lot (not all, but quite a lot) of the tools that you find used in education and business settings in Second Life, have their origins in the sex industry. Even when they're duplicating tools that are used in RL education/business settings, the code in Second Life is often explored and refined in the sex industry in Second Life first.