Many people are exploring virtual worlds such as Second Life as well as the growing constellation of Opensim-based worlds.
Here’s a neat device that can help you communicate between them all.
It’s called RADIONNE.
What’s cooler than robots?
Giant robots, of course.
For today’s meeting, we visited FrancoGrid to explore a junkyard complete with a derelict giant robot, a toxic lake, and a submarine.
On January 23rd 2011, I was an invited guest on Paisley Beebe’s “Tonight Live” show in Second Life. Thank you again to everyone on the Tonight Live and Treet.tv team for working so hard to put on such a professional show and the opportunity for me to participate. I had a fun time, and thank you to everyone who attended as well.
I shared some of my thoughts about my time working at Linden Lab, some simple advice for Linden Lab’s new CEO, my new gig with Reaction Grid, the state of education in virtual worlds, and the future of interconnected virtual worlds in general.
I hope I was entertaining. If anyone would like me to expand on anything I said in the interview, please leave a blog comment and I’ll happily reply.
Here’s a recording of my interview.
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
I’m often impressed by the things we discover in our club’s travels across the Hypergrid.
Opensim is a pioneering platform where everyone is building anew, and that pioneering spirit brings out an amazing level of creativity.
But on this particular tour, we discovered something that completely blew me away. We found a cityscape spanning 16 regions. A Tolkien-themed area called “Romenna,” created by a single artist named Nick Lassard.
For this Sunday meeting, we made a couple very special excursions on the Hypergrid.
Instead of discovering strange new worlds and interesting new creations, we found an empty and vacant place.
So we left a message in a bottle.
At this meeting visited the region Wizzy on ReactionGrid. At this location, Wizard Gynoid has created a giant model of the E8 Polytope, one of the most complex and elegantly beautiful geometric objects known to mathematicians.
Read on for a full transcript and photos of our adventure.
I’ll be offline for a week starting Jan 12. So I won’t be around to host the next four meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club.
But the show must go on!
Vanish Seriath frequently attends our club meetings, and he has graciously offered to lead the next three meetings.
Dusan Writer thinks a lot about the business of virtual worlds and, specifically, Second Life.
He recently wrote a very thoughtful and interesting blog post titled “SECOND LIFE NEXT: 2011.”
In my comment on his post, I said the following:
You also talked about how “user generated content is not a business model.” I’m not sure I fully agree with you on that. The bottom line is, if you’re using a service and not paying for it, you’re not a customer. You’re part of the product. At least that’s how all successful businesses see it.
I’d like to expand a bit on what I said in bold. Because, if done right, I think it’s a very good thing both for businesses and customers.
Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club continues to grow. At our last meeting we set a new record by having people from 5 completely different grids attending our club via Hypergrid connections. We typically have about 20 people attending our big Sunday meetings. And we’re even expanding our collaborative efforts to other grids.
In addition to our weekly inworld meetings, we stay in touch with each other via this blog, our #HGAC hashtag on Twitter, and our IRC channel.
It’s always good to have different options for communicating. And it’s especially important to use the right tool for the right job.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to create a Google Groups mailing list for the Club. This will allow us to have more detailed ongoing discussions. I also hope this new list will allow us to talk about broader topics such as education and the exploration of all kinds of different virtual worlds.
I’ve had very good success with mailing lists in the past. They’re a great way to help a growing community evolve.
And boy, we are growing!
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 