Blogger Alja Sulcic pointed me to a wonderful video outlining the merits of the creative commons form of licensing – that is where you elect to share your work freely, while retaining some rights to show that you created it, but are happy to allow others to make non-commercial use/remix/recycling of your work. Enjoy!
Sharon has also found some good stuff on copyright. Here’s one she found explaining copyright with a simple drawing 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
One of the aspects of virtual world SecondLife is the social interaction it enables between people from different real locations. I was curious as to how live music performances worked, and, having joined several live music social groups I quickly found a live performance in progress and teleported to a club lounge, where I found about 15 avatars dancing or standing around, and one with a guitar on stage animated to play the guitar, while the sound was streamed live into the sim.
The lone singer-guitarist seemed bemused that the host had vanished offline (perhaps their computer had crashed) and one of the audience indicated that they had a club and everyone could transfer there.
The new club “Sound Factory” was well set up with a dance floor, and several avatars were already dancing before the music had begun to stream.
Conversations were broadcast across the screen and when the sound came through the performer, Mr Jonze, spoke in response to several of the comments being broadcast. He interacted with the small crowd and conversed between songs, as though there was a small gathering in his lounge-room.
I asked the crowd if there were any tutorials on sound streaming, and got a rather abrupt response from the club owner, Politically Beck to say “it’s so easy even a caveman could do it”. Perhaps its not etiquette to ask tech questions of a probably knowledgeable crowd in a social setting, but I found that a bit unhelpful.
Nonetheless the music was good and the sound quality was surprisingly good lending a good club/restaurant atmosphere to the scene. It differed substantially from any Real life (RL) situation in that you could dance, converse and interact with the performer to a far greater extent than you could in RL. I had a good dance and conversation with Marieke CLoetens and laughed at the antics of Peet the monkey 🙂
And with it being evening in Australia, the performer Mr Jonze had just been up for an hour in the US and others were there in the room from the UK and from NZ – quite a mix that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.
I learnt a lot about the social side of SL, and look forward to checking out a couple more of the music venues.
Cheers
Jerry
Broken Toys blog has an excellent discussion/analysis of SecondLife – one of the best I’ve read that provides a balanced and informative insight into the virtual world phenomenon. The writer takes as a starting point the notion of SL as a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, as a useful analogy with which to unpack SL.
Some key insights:
So blokes, if you are after violence, go to Warcraft, and if you are after porn, check your email spam box. But if you are after a space in which people can share a sense of community and imagine and create, then SL has a whole world to offer.
For me the attraction is meeting people from different parts of the (real) world, and the possibility of finding a different venue for sharing my music performances.
Thanks to Metaverse Territories for pointing to the Broken Toys post.
Cheers
Jerry
My bank did one of its regular mail-outs to advertise its life insurance scheme. As anyone will tell you, if you put text in front of me I’ll read it, so Sharon was startled when I burst out laughing reading an insurance form…
I had gone through all the disclaimers and looked at the form fields, and there it was:
Signature of Principal Life Insured…. followed by
Signature of Second Life Insured ….!!!?? What??
But my avatar can’t write! and does this mean I can insure both my Real Life (RL) as well as my Second Life (SL)? And is my av covered for griefing attacks?
It’s really worth reading spam sometimes 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
Many will have been to the SecondLife in-world 3D sim of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, but Robbie Dingo has taken us a step further into the creative process with a machinima video in which he takes us through the process of building such an environment to good effect. Pity about the overused Don McLean song though.
I particularly liked the re-treatment of the village windows to move from a day to night representation. Interestingly, you won’t find this sim in SL anymore – it was built in a temporary space and has since been deleted, leaving only the movie – a true simulacrum: a representation of a representation when the original has been erased. Thanks to Sharon for the SLURL link to the 3D world version, and to Angela Thomas for the steer to Robbie Dingo’s site 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
