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In December 2006, while conducting an interview for CNET with Daniel Terdiman on her economic assets, the virtual studio in which the interview took place was bombarded by flying animated penises and copies of a photo of Graef modified to show her holding a giant penis in her arms. The griefers managed to disrupt the interview sufficiently that Chung was forced to move to another location and ultimately crashed the simulator entirely.[18] Video and images of the incident were posted to the "Second Life Safari" section of Something Awful, and the incident received international notice via blogs including Boing Boing and the online edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. Two weeks later, Anshe's husband, Guntram Graef, issued takedown notices under the DMCA, demanding that newspapers and websites remove photos and videos of the incident and claiming that they violated Graef's copyright in her avatar and other virtual creations. YouTube pulled the videos of the incident as a DMCA violation and banned the account of Second Life Safari, bringing objections from legal experts who considered the work "fair use".[19] A Linden Labs spokesperson suggested that the taking of videos and photos in Second Life should be governed by the same rules as in real life,[20] and an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation compared it "to Armani attempting to restrict news photos of a car crash where one of the drivers was wearing an Armani suit."[21] After news of these events and the legal objections spread across a number of sites including Slashdot, YouTube changed its rationale for removing copies of the video to terms of use violation, and in an interview Guntram Graef said that issuing the takedown notices had been a mistake. He referred to the images as 'pornographic material' and said The video and pictures are clearly defaming and constitute a sexual assault. He stated that he had originally tried to have the videos removed as a personal attack and infringement on rights,

Voki is an animation website . It is “ a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profiles and in email messages”. This web2.0 tool is very important in education as It enables teachers and students to express themselves on the web in their own voice , using a talking character.

Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen.Coming of Age in Second Lifeis the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Lifeshows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.

Researchers at Japan's Keio University have created an experimental headset designed to monitor brain waves that allowed a man who had been paralyzed for more than 30 years to control a Second Life avatar using only his thoughts.

19 minutes - avatar of speaker 21:47 - description of demographics of 2nd life 25 minutes - good blurb about "human experience moving onto the internet" as horrifying and response to it. "being present in a virtual world… and having a good life there is a challenge… we must be better than ourselves… be more tolerant, be smarter, be more adaptable"

The concept of anonymous originate in 90s. Japan was relatively late embracing IT. ISDN was just about to be introduced and the whole internet was largely of underground phenomenon especially in early 90s. Many information/data posted in internet involved hacking, warez, copyrighted material, pornography including child pornography, snuff, drugs, bombs, etc as well as no-hold-barred discussion which was also common sight in USENET in English Due to lax data protection law as well as the fact that most community generated site were owned by an individual, people were still reluctant to even create avatar account. More importantly, many of these site start as a secret retreat from the owner's real life, where s/he can be away from his job, his social standing, obligation, etc. Consequently, the owner of site often remained anonymous but with a designated nickname such as Kanrinin-san (Mr/Mrs Admin). Consequently, forum which requires registration never really took off in Japan. Later, these anonymous message board including USENET, which preceded it, came to be know collectively as "Nanashi Warudo" (The World of Anonymous, Nanashi=NoName=Anonymous), which in turn was mock of "Ayashii Warudo" "The World of Suspicious/Dubious". The armature anonymous message board had number limitation, most notably the limitation of server capacity. Due to higher cost of bandwidth in 90s, dominant form of community site was text based and did not allow transfer of image. Secondly, only form fund to run the site was from the owner's day job and meagre earning from (often pornographic) banner ad. Moreover, free and open nature of anonymous nature of the posting made any community message board prone to sudden increase in traffic which result in frequent shut down of any popular message board. Moreover, the simple queing of thread in the board made it difficult to find a target thread among the crowd of thread in the board. These restriction limited the appeal of the message board to te