2. Linden Lab and John Lester (Pathfinder Linden) have parted ways – with lots of discussion ensuing on whether it’s part of a change in tack by Linden Lab in regards to dedicated resources for educators. In less reported news, Linden Lab’s General Manager Enterprise and expat Aussie Chris Collins finished up in February.

3. Got an iPhone or iPod Touch and haven’t noticed our bombardment of info on our new application? Read all about it here.

4. The US Army has announced the finalists in its virtual worlds challenge. It’s another example of the US Government’s fairly hefty commitment to exploring opportunities in virtual environments.

5. Pooky Amsterdam has a more extended machinima or her in-world interview with Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr. The three-plus minute intro could have been cut in half but this is a very interesting piece. A warning: it does contain graphic images of the Holocaust.

You can download it here for free.

What is it?

It’s essentially an RSS reader with two sections. The first is our own RSS feed . The Second is a ‘Wider Metaverse’ section, which features a range of virtual worlds related feeds from around the world.

There’s only a handful at this stage but we’ll certainly be adding more – there’s been some issues with non RSS 2.0 feeds on some sites, which we’re working with the owners to rectify.

The ‘Submit a Story’ section is purely a contact form if you want to make contact.

Why wouldn’t I just use my RSS Reader?

For some, a broader RSS reader may indeed be preferable. However, we’ve had a lot of feedback that people like a quicker option of a handful of feeds easily accessed. The Metaverse Reader is exactly that. And at under 200KB in size, it’s also doesn’t take up much room.

Can I suggest a feed to add?

Absolutely – just contact us with the details.

Where do I get support for this app?

Right here.

Are there plans to expand the app?

Version 2 is already underway – if you have suggestions for improvement, we’d love to hear from you.

What does the app cost?

Nothing

Who developed the application?

I do need to give a huge plug to the developer who created the application from the specification provided. Phillip Street is an Australian iPhone developer and contributing writer who happens to live pretty close to me. I couldn’t be happier with his responsiveness and price competitiveness and I’ve already contracted him to work on the next version.

So if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or have managed to be one of the world’s first iPad users, give the Metaverse Reader a whirl and critique away!

For what it’s worth, I’ve found Viewer 2.0 has been a huge step forward, making me happier to log in each time. I’m not 100% sold on the new camera controls but that’s more an adjustment issue. Ron Blechner has a great summary of perceived improvements with his post 21 Reasons the New Second Life Viewer 2.0 is a Huge Improvement. Veteran SL resident Gwyneth Llewelyn has a brilliant tutorial for Mac users on optimising their Viewer 2.0 experience.

I’ve certainly been critical of Linden Lab over the years over updates that haven’t delivered or decisions that appeared short-sighted. With Viewer 2.0, it appears a more methodical approach to software development has paid off. It’s far from certain, and I’d suggest unlikely that Viewer 2.0 will drive more widespread adoption, but whether it does or not, it certainly appears to have made the majority of current users happier.

Over to you: do I have the rose-coloured glasses on or would you agree things have improved? I’d also love to hear from SL musicians who believe the search functionality has impeded their performance work.

Photo courtesy: Fleep Tuque

2. CNET (USA) – Real-world woes shuttering virtual world There. “The pioneering virtual world There.com will shut down on March 9, a victim of the recession and the pinch on brand spending that had kept it going long past earlier troubles. The news was announced by CEO Mike Wilson on Tuesday.
The service, which launched in the fall of 2003, was a fully 3D social environment with a sophisticated economy, wonderful vehicles like hoverboard and hoverboats and, eventually, a wide variety of community-created content.”

3. Everything PR (Germany) – Real Baby Dies as Parents Raise Virtual Daughter. “When does virtual game play go to far? The parents of a starved baby may have found out, when their three-month old infant died of malnutrition. The South Korean couple left their baby to starve to death at home, while playing an internet game. The disturbing irony of it all? The web-based game they were playing involved the rearing of a virtual child.”

4. Radio National Future Tense (Australia) – Money – Part Two. “In part two of this series we look at the changing nature of currency. Is traditional state-issued tender now losing its monopoly? And how widespread is the use of alternative currencies – be they digital or virtual, or both?”

5. ZDNet (USA) – Earn 100 points – read: The reverse virutal reality world of the future. “Kevin Kelly, writing on his Technium blog points out a fascinating talk by Jesse Schell, a games designer. In “Design outside the box” Mr Schell starts by explaining out how much money is made by very simple games, such as Farmville and Club Penguin. But its the latter part of his talk that is even more interesting, when he predicts how games will be embedded into our reality through the use of cheap wireless sensors.”

6. Montreal Gazette (Canada) – ‘Avatars’ inspire us to be better people: study. “F ascination with the blockbuster 3-D film Avatar has fans tuning into real-world research indicating that virtual selves can inspire people to lead better lives. Since the release of the film, interest has surged in a Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab study showing that avatars, animated versions of people, act as powerful role models. “It is getting so hot right now,” study author Jesse Fox told AFP on Thursday. “James Camerons’s Avatar movie is out so our website hits have just spiked.”

7. IT PRO (UK) – The chief executive of Second Life thinks virtual worlds will be the future of work. “Second Life is often assumed to be a place to go and kill a lot of time, where your alien-looking avatar wanders the landscape looking for virtual sex. The virtual world is much, much more than that, argues chief executive Mark Kingdon, who believes that people thought the internet was “weird” when it first started, too. At the CeBIT conference in Hanover this week, Kingdon told IT PRO that more business functions would move to worlds like Second Life, for meetings, simulations and more – especially after the launch of more user-friendly systems, like the beta of its new viewer, which allows document sharing.”

8. People Management Magazine (UK) – BP executives graduate on Second Life. “Thirty BP executives are to undergo a graduation ceremony on computer game and virtual network Second Life, after completing a programme at Manchester Business School (MBS). The Managing Projects programme will culminate in the executives using avatars to receive their awards on the business school’s “island” inside the virtual world on Thursday this week. Since those who completed the course are based as far afield as Canada, Angola, Indonesia and Russia, the online event is the best way of allowing them to celebrate their achievement together.”

9. Michigan Radio (USA) – “Inch-vesting” In Detroit: A Virtual Realty. “Jerry Paffendorf is not your typical real estate developer. But then, the people lining up to buy into his project are not your typical investors. He calls them “inchvestors.” Paffendorf’s project is called Loveland. And it’s a hybrid: part virtual and part physical. “What we want to do is we want to build this wild social network of people that’s literally built out of the dirt and the ground,” Paffendorf says.”

10. mad.co.uk (UK) – Social Gaming. “Social gaming is growing fast and brands are eyeing it with increasing interest. But how can they integrate themselves into gameplaying in a way that looks natural to users? With Zynga’s FarmVille now exceeding 76m monthly active users on Facebook and Playfish’s Pet Society exceeding 1m, growth in social gaming has well and truly taken off, a boom further illustrated by gaming giant Electronic Arts’ (EA) recent acquisition of Playfish in a deal potentially worth $400m (£268m). Zynga CEO Mark Pincus predicts that by 2012 there’ll be 500m people involved in social games, which means the opportunities for brands to get involved and reach this rapidly growing audience are also increasing.”

It’s coming up to a year since we interviewed DeeAnna Nagel and Kate Anthony and discussed counselling in online environments broadly and in virtual environments more specifically. Over that time, the Online Therapy Institute has continued to grow. One example of this is the announcement of a five-hour course on online supervision.

Anyone who works in a counselling role will understand the importance of supervision as both a development and protective mechanism for a practitioner, let alone one working in an online environment. Additionally, a key plank of more widespread acceptance of online therapy is formalised governance mechanisms that provide peace of mind in regards to quality. Small steps like the ones taken here are helping to achieve just that.

The wider challenge is establishing e-health standards that ensure confidentiality, the ability to confirm practitioner credentials and good service navigation for face-to-face intervention when required. That sort of integration is potentially years off, but in the meantime counselling professionals are doing a great job of filling in the gaps.

If you’re involved in counselling in a virtual world environment, I’d love to hear from you to find out more about your work.

Update: an interview with the Online Therapy Institute in Second Life is now available:

1. There.com has announced its imminent closure due to funding issues. It’s always sad to see a growing virtual world cease operation, particularly one that offered at least some level of content creation.

Frenzoo are offering lifetime VIP accounts to content creators on There.com. All the details here.

2. Two OpenSim grids have started using a virtual currency: the Open Metaverse Currency. More on that in coming days.

3. We still need more people to ask questions of our agony aunt, Second Lie. Here’s a sample of the life-threatening conundrums he’s solved to date.

4. Are you part of a couple or close friendship in a virtual world? Why not be the next subject of our V2 profiles? Just drop us a line if you’re interested. Here’s the first one published back in 2008.

5. The latest issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is now out. Guest editors are Australia’s own Mandy Salomon from Smart Services CRC, and France’s Serge Soudoplatoff from ESCP-EAP. The theme is Virtual Economies, Virtual Goods and Service Delivery in Virtual Worlds.

6. Twitter is getting further integration with Second Life. Linden Lab are also looking for people willing to have their RL and SL faces plastered on advertising.

The premise of the book is the potential for games to become central in the workplace. It sounds a far-fetched premise initially, but that’s the power of the discussion put forward by the authors: they provide cogent, well-informed examples of how gaming within business could work. The focus is primarily MMOs, for a number of reasons, including:

1. They contain “the most counterstereotypical roster of players”, hence being the most worthwhile population from which to apply findings.

2. MMO players tend to have a higher level of engagement with their game and spend on average much more time per week than a solo gamer.

3. The dynamics of raids, quests etc tend to provide situations where teamwork and leadership can come to the fore.

After establishing its premise, the book goes on to provide some fascinating examples of work problems a gaming framework could solve, as well as some fairly detailed discussion around virtual teams, virtual leadership, virtual money and the link between play and work. There’s a useful summary at the end and a handful of tactics to actually start implementing some of the examples given. As the authors themselves say, one of the best tactics for any business is to harness the knowledge of the gamers in its midst.

Overall, this is a very engaging read with realistic, well thought out examples. For anyone interested in the applicability of virtual environments to the workplace, it’s a must-read. For the dedicated gamer who also happens to work for a large organisation, there’s also plenty of information to get you thinking about advocating for change.

The final world goes to one of the authors. Here’s a presentation from Byron Reeves on the topic of the book:

Byron Reeves – fbFund REV, 7/31/09 – Part 1 of 2 (Version 2), “Work Sucks – Games are great” from fbFund REV on Vimeo.

You can buy Total Engagement from our own bookshop, Amazon direct or a local online bookshop like Dymocks.