Linden Labs have now hit the magically 2 million with Second Life. To think it was only about 9o,000 at the start of the year.
As we move towards our opening up of the more official IBM complex(more soon form us on that though you will seem some press such as greeterdans’ piece here) we have got nearly 1,000 IBMers in Second Life.
As I am very keen to point out many of those are out there in various groups working with the community as residents.
This is a very exciting time for this industry and and amazing social experience.
We really do seem to be putting the people back in the technology.

Roo and I, at a recent press event, recorded some podcast interviews with Peder Bjerge from Danish Computerworld.
So in order for us to get over the shock of our real voices (I am glad Second Life is text based) you can listen to Roo here and if really ready for a shock me here.

Over on the new Primdig Electric Sheep Blog is a good description of how to edit the terrain file for a private island. With lots more people getting these its handy for people to know the quick way to terraform.
My original attempt on Hursley island , way back in April, led to a massive earthquake and lots of objects getting returned.
The reason, well I got my Raw file, edited it, then when I went to save it Photoshop asked – “Interleaved order or non-interleaved order”, I thought I was being clever and changed from the default of interleaved. This meant all the mapping of the Raw channels was basically corrupted. As it applied the raw file I got some very very high mountains and very very low valleys. The high ones pushed objects up, out of range and returned them to the users.
Luckily we had only just got started, but I still shudder when I attempt a terrain file change on a live island. I am sure we still have some buried treasure on Hursley becuase of this too.

This evening Yossarian, Jessica and I had a bit of a relax shooting the breeze and solving the worlds problems. We decided to hang out back on the plot in Austin that I rent from Jessica.
Whilst we were just gathering Timeless Prototype sent me a camp fire version of his multi gadget chairs. This fitted very nicely with the organic look I have going on Austin and added to the ambience.

Picture from Snapzilla – that I notice now is also able to push to Flickr too which is great.
Whilst we were chatting I had the TV on, and BBC 1’s imagine (arts programme) with Alan Yentob started to go down the web 2.0 root. Blogs, wikis, myspace, youtube etc.
It then finished on, the obvious one for us all now, Second Life. It looked like the Alan Yentob AV was flying around millionsofus. Its certainly getting more mainstream when it features in an arts show like this. It was odd to be in Second Life, shooting the breeze and also explaining the program as it happened to Jessica.
The whole session, and interlinking of so many threads should have been confusing, but somehow it all made perfect sense.

Our friends over in the Alliance Navy have had a great idea of doing flyovers of public areas delivering presents to people. It is written up very well over here at the Second Life times.
I really love the idea that you can fly a large ship over areas and give something back.
Some members of eightbar are also members of the AN.
This is not a one off event, so keep an eye out for the anti-griefers delivering goodies in your local sandbox.
This is a mini photo cube of the drop ship and some happy residents from snapzilla

The alliance navy were there for our 3d Jam way back in September as this picture from Judge Hocho on snapzilla shows

I managed to turn up late to Adam Reuters interview with Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime today. There was a good crowd when I got there and a few of us who sat not having pressed play on the audio feed. I feel such a Noob!
So I was not surprised I did not get my question in, which equally for Nintendo of America may not have been relevant. I managed to miss the 7 minute window on Amazon in the UK that took the preorders for a Nintendo Wii. This was a bit dissapointing, but I was on the page from 9am but had to do some work and managed to miss the 7 minutes that the console was available.
The Wii is yet another console powered by an IBM processor, like the 360 and the PS3, so I should have viewed getting one as work, but Second Life got on the way.
I also wanted to ask if Nintendo will mind seeing Avatars that look like the Wii Mii that people will be able to create on the Wii. Large bobble headed manga style AV’s


All pictures from Snapzilla
At the event I bumped into Moo Money who asked me if I had received her IM. It is slightly unfortunate that my two islands tend to notify my of things not being able to be dynamically created because they are so full with my fellow eightbar members builds. This in turn caps my IM message delivery and so I tend to loose a lot of IM’s. Now my home email gets them, but as I have been busy inviting the now 600th eightbar member my mail tends to fill with “has accepted inventory offer” combined with “object x has exceeded parcel limit”. So in the middle of all that and the other spam I tend to miss some requests from people. I apologize and will get on top of that!