After watching this video from Chris Pirillo, two words sprung to my mind. The words I thought were "Sweeping Statement".
"A sweeping statement is a statement that makes a wide-ranging and complete comment about something, or more often, everything. Unfortunately, it is very common for people to make these sorts of statements when they, in fact, are talking about minor groups rather than "everybody" "
It always disappoints me when I hear people involved in technology and people who I follow just go out and say things like "Second Life is just for porn" and I think it really is just loses the credibility of the person making that statement even futher. The problem is these people also tend to have a bit of authority and people listen to what they say. I myself follow Chris, not as often as I used to because his YouTube stream got a bit to overkill for my taste.
The point I'm trying to make however is that Second Life is not just for Porn or Gambling. Sure those things exist and I'm not going to deny that. But it is a small portion of the whole package. There is so much happening in Second Life that you cannot define it under one swift statement, and I think that is what is hard about the platform.
Examples of thriving communities within Second Life include the Fashion Industry, The Steampunk Community, The Music Community and much much more. There is a commnity being built around almost everything you can think of that happens in these worlds. That is the true appeal of Second Life for me.
The Killer App of Second Life is, and shall always be, COMMUNITY. Isn't that what these so called "Social Media Experts" job, to build communities around a brand.
The government has ruled out scrapping the use of Internet Explorer 6 on department computers, saying it will persevere with the bullet-riddled browser despite its high-profile vulnerabilities.
Responding to an online petition with more than 6,000 signatures urging government departments to upgrade away from IE6, the government said such a move would be "a very large operation" potentially at "significant potential cost to the taxpayer".
"It is therefore more cost-effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware-scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users," reads the statement.
So, when I heard about this decision happening, the first thing I thought was "We're Screwed". Seriously, IE6 is without a shadow of a doubt the most unsecure web browser ever. Sure it may end up being a large operation with a possible significant cost to the taxpayer if they have to hire a bunch of people to upgrade the systems, but the potential cost to the UK if a major incident occurs.
It's just nice to know that we have a government who is knowledgeable about security and the internet.
So It Begins...
WELL you could tell I was excited to go to this conference. I NEVER. EVER. get up early. Never 6AM early. But this day I did. I forgot to set an alarm and everything. So I guess yeah, I was excited.

So the day begins and begins in a big way with Jonathan Hoffman, the CEO of Rezzable who are probably best known for their Greenies sim. So one of the things that Jonathan spoke about during the talk is the progress that Heritage Key was making with their development and how far it has come since it began. If you haven't checked it out then you really should just take a look as it is a fascinating place to explore and its one of the best use cases i can think of for OpenSim. Then we got a demo of the RezViewer that they have been working on, which is based on Unity3D, and it amazed me. I can not think of a time when I saw something like this being done. A way to get OpenSim objects loaded on from what I can tell, a different architecture from Second Life and even better is that it was embedded on a web page. Looking at the news afterwards, I realise that there is something to this whole Unity3D thing. I’ll cover that in a future podcast or blog post I'm sure.
One of the more interesting speeches that happened during day one was one given by the Metaverse Evangelist, Ian Hughes aka. epredator. I think the thing that excited me most about his speech was the possibility of “printing food”. That certainly could make up for the lack of culinary skills I have.
So then we head into the next discussion with Phillip Linden having a discussion with Dousa Dragonash about the new company, if you can call it that, I am still not sure what it really is. As Dousa tried to coax information out of him and as more people tried to figure out what on earth this LoveMachine is...I had a sudden realisation about what Phillip really is. I feel like Phillip is the Virtual Worlds Steve Jobs. They are both amazingly passionate about what they do, Both are captivating speakers and both are visionaries.
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again...
So last Friday I headed to a place that, even though it was relatively close in proximity to where I live, I’d never actually been to before. That place is known as London, the capital city of England. I won’t go into why I've never been because that's relatively boring. But the reason I went was because I heard that there was a meet up being held by Rezzable and I figured I'd go along to it.
For one it was actually cheaper than going to MetaMeets for this event (Dublin is quite expensive when you’re a student…). All in all I think I probably spent a maximum of £40 INCLUDING Travel, which was rather nice for a day out to meet the Metarati (as Ian Hughes calls it).
One thing that I noticed was that in some ways, it kind of felt a little like a MetaMeets reunion, despite there only being a few of us who went to MetaMeets being there. But it was still fun to check out. I also got to meet some new faces and one face who I've seen for years but never actually met in reality until then (that person being Mal Burns).
Highlights of the meet up include being streamed onto the web via Rezzable TV (not sure on the name, sounds a little too similar to Rezzed.TV), Visiting the Rezzable Offices and of course the “networking” which I still insist is code for getting drunk, at least it is in Slim Warrior’s case (joke).
Despite the 3 hours of travelling each way, it was a great day out and I think I will head to London again in the future for these meetups, they are indeed a lot of fun.