A while back I had seen the Electric Sheep Media Island before it was branded to any particular media. It was at the time a huge build and one I often showed people to understand the scale and potential of SL.
Now it is the Sony BMG island, and there is a lot of content to see and experience. They have come up with some very nice ideas too.
A loft apartment and Club area

A Fan shop with tshirts, and singles to buy

A legacy area, which one of my favourite all time artists, the late great SRV, appeared as the first picture in the legacy building.

They have also created some very engaging artists rooms. From a single atrium you enter themed rooms for each of the very diverse performers. You get to listen to the track and/or sit and watch the video. It felt very good, Dna Prototype happened to be there at the time too, and it was great to be able to congratulate the crew on the build.


AudioSlave

Ben Folds

Christina

and Cheyenne Kimball all under one roof.
Having popped into the night club and loft I also bumped into Ben Folds


Once its fully open I suggest you go and take a look.

Well done everyone and good luck with the event thats about to start.

I am sitting here waiting for the 7pm EST US start time for the Ben Folds event that I was lucky enough to get an invite to.

It will be a late one, midnight until 3 am UK time, but it makes it feel more rock and roll.
It is across several sites which is all quite interesting, both the Aloft hotel and the Media Isle by the Electric Sheep

Given Yossarian had his translator featured in wired I thought I should also pop along and see the Wired office in Second Life at the MillionsOf Us island.

Its a suitably unusual build being staged as a printed circuit board and computer components.

Aside from having the obvious but fantastic content, with a rich source of Wired covers to choose from this office appeared to have an old style projector screen. A nice little change from our flat screen TV’s


The millionsofus island also had once of those quirky Toyota Scions. I have not got mine yet, but feel I need one.

A magic number has been reached on Second Life
Philip Linden has written a nice thankyou to us all on the official blog.
There are some more stats around this on New World Notes too.
Whilst people can argue over the statistics, there has been a massive growth in people and companies exploring this instance of a metaverse.
Milestones like this are something we all can feel part of, and that is why some many of us are being productive in this environment, a feeling of belonging, whilst at the same time being out there a little bit.

Last night Yossarian Seattle and I went along to the Globe Theatre build by MillionsofUs for a very interesting event.
MillionsOf Us are doing a lot of interesting things as you will have seen.
The event was an interview by Wagner Au with LongtailChris Anderson.
The pre-event gathering and chatting outside the globe was great and the audience was a veritable whos who of Second Lifers interested in this side of Second Life.
We all chatted before the event, everyone saying hi as one by one people teleported in. As I have written before these pre and post event gatherings are as important as the actual event.

We had all gathered about 30 mins before the event so there was a great deal of chatter.
We then all were ushered into the lovely build that is the globe theatre. Wagner and LongtailChris walked up and took their seat on the stage.

One of the nice things is whilst you take your seat you can still dash around moving the camera and taking snaps without distrubing the flow of the event.
Rodica Millionsofus was there to take and schedule the questions from the audience.
Wagner started the interview and Longtailchris did the elevator pitch for the concept of the long tail.
I had to laugh when Spin Martin said “So if the long tail book stays at the top of the charts for too long does the world implode” that was worth a L$25 positive rating point.
I also liked Spin’s group tag ‘Eric Rice aka’ Spin Martin.
Many of us ended up holding a virtual copy of the book by Falk Bergman. This book is cleverly able to be signed by the author as well as adding to the atmosphere of the event.
Several of us on the front row looked like right swots with our books out. As you can see with Yossarian here, its an effective look with a book.

Once again I need to restate the point that the interactivity and the sense of being there generated by this sort of event is really engaging.
With the interviewer, interviewee and audience all aware of one another just like theatre.

Anyway, we tended to sit and listen and then let Rodica introduce our questions for us. Marshalling a crowd like this is an art form in itself, and we behaved well in general.
Given the timing of this in the UK it was toddler bathtime at about 7:30pm. So as the event wrapped up I was getting RL calls to come and help.
Its a bit strange shouting, hang on I am just going to get my book signed by Longtailchris.

However, given my wife is an economist, when she realized who it was and what the event was she was very interested and supportive, and I guess the PR and marketing works as she needs to read the book now. So its not just me who is susceptable to adverts in Second Life
Anway a great event, great to see everyone there, see you at the next one.
I am sorry I could not hang around and maybe go and see Versu in Second Life. It is a pity this real life shop window build was not a few weeks ago as I would have certainly made it along to there given I was in New York.

I have known Turner Boehm in RL for a long while, so I was more than happy to see he enter Second Life with eightbar. He was straight in modelling and scripting as I would have expected. We had the dematerializing tardis a little while back, but now he has got serious as I indicated he would, not that Dr Who does not count as serious!
Anyway, he has built an modeller in Second Life that, driven by external complex system information ,produces a self organizing atomic looking structure showing how (as in this case) multiple software systems could be interconnected.
In full mode the model is able to be manipulated in realtime. I had seen the original as was impressed but after this SL update I popped to North East Hursley island and had a chat with Turner whilst sitting on this fabulous dynamically built structure.
The elements and linkages have text associated with them to indicate the nodes and links in the model.
The whole thing is very scaleable, imagine a whole sim full of 15000 nodes and links.
For the techies and architects among you I think you will get where he is coming from.
Everyone else, it looks cool too I think.

Before todays Second Life downtime for maintenance, I thought I should have my more casual look upgraded with the uber cool custom Reeboks (just search on Reebok in places)
You buy blank white shoes and then approach a booth where you custom up the colours and they are sent to the shoes you are wearing. They are a good price too.
Very nice work by Rivers Run Red

They look great, and they are certainly sweeping across SL. They will be hard to not wear even at low prim events!

So there is the non “predator” me. I do need to redo my jacket as it is getting famous too but it was a 5 minute go at clothing way back all those years I mean months ago!
There were a fair few trainers and neat shoes at the CNET follow up conference with Chris Melissinos from Sun as well. There were a lot of us from Eightbar there, and a veritable whos who of the metaverse today. So these events always serve to strengthen those social networks even if I was sitting at home trying to eat my tea without dropping pasta sauce on my keyboard.

It was nice that lots of us knew and some of us had recently met in real life.
As you may have seen some of the guys running the GreaterIBM initiative are having a get together in SL tomorrow, I get a real kick out of seeing the spread of interest and the gathering pace of change that we all seem to be part of.
So good luck to all the guys running it. Events in themselves are a valuable experience to run in this environment.