Link Salad
Read this now: "Second Earth," from the MIT Technology Review (registration annoyingly required, but it's worth it).  This is the future of our worlds. Bottom line?  The Metaverse is forming *now,* and it's a mashup of 3D web technologies and virtual worlds - and they are *not* the same thing, thankyouverymuch LL!


Go vote in the Metaversed poll - Will You Be Verifying Your Age in Second Life?  At first, voting was running 2 to 1 pro-verification, but the cons have risen to a tie.  Which is actually pretty bizarre, if you stop to think about it - I'd have expected that cons would be more likely to find the poll early and to express an opinion, but no -


Terra Nova is an occasionally interesting, if *very* academic, blog on virtual worlds.  A few days ago they finally discovered the Wall Street Journal article we discussed here a couple weeks ago - and of everything that might be interesting about that, they seized on the statistic of active users being in world 20-40 hours a week or more.  The discussion evolved into addressing a fundamental issue - LL doesn't know whether they're a creative virtual world or the platform for The 3D Web. 



Warren Ellis, Reuters' SL correspondent, asks: Is it possible that steampunk is making a comeback as acquiescence to the notion that our more recent apparently plausible models of the future will never come to reality?   The discussion is *seriously* over my head, but I'm hoping Centrasian and galatea_gynoid and the rest of you will digest it and its implications for the appeal of a clean retro-tech future owing more to the 1960s than the 1860s...