Bart in SL

The well known sim Amsterdam has been sold for about 50.000 US$!

Well, the price for sure is real enough when you take in account the work needed to build such a big sim and calculate the prize you would need to pay if you order it at some agency.

But what's to say about it... while the sim itself is nice and well done, I don't like the crowd that's normally populating it so much, I wouldn't have paid so much for it nor felt the need to buy it myself. I wonder in which kind of direction it is going to develop, now, since it's been sold. This has been for sure a good deal for its previous owner.

The nice folks over at IBM Developerworks have started a series about Second Life. The first article of it is about how to compile your own client, the pitfalls and how to achieve the goal, since it's not so trivial to do.

Quite worth a read, better than the wiki page over at Lindenlabs and I am looking forward to the next articles of this series!

There are some newly opened sims on the main grid.

To be exact, these are:

• T-Online Island and T-Online Beach. T-Online is one of the biggest German ISPs, on their island you can find an in world presence of this company open for all, with a modern building, meeting rooms and so on, while T-Online Beach is mostly a beach, open for all.
• Frankfurt am Main has opened an in world presence, too. It's consisting of five sims at the moment, Frankfurt West, Frankfurt City, Frankfurt Nord Ost, Frankfurt Ost and Frankfurt Ostend. Not all of them are already finished, you can see most at Frankfurt West and Frankfurt City so far. The initiative to open such sims was made by some private men. It's basically an in world rebuild of some popular sights of the city. Update: it's the first official presence of a German city in Second Life.
  
• The VHS Goslar has opened an in world presence, too. I wonder where there's the sense of it, though. But then again, why not, enabling new market reach and such, for sure organizations like that can profit from a voice enabled main grid, when it's going to be available.

I've spent today again some time on the voice beta test grid. It has been quite fun and interesting to see how voice is going to change the SL experience.

It's also a good way to see the Lindens live; no wonder, since it's beta and only under 10 regions are online, you can see them there. I saw Pathfinder Linden and another Linden, Monroe Linden, even used voice and talked with us a little! Great!

So, basically when you're going online on the beta grid it's first looking where the crowd is. There are perhaps 30-40 people online the same time, and they use to flock around, well, that's my experience so far.

Today was also interesting since we've seen an avatar from the company that is providing the voice technology, Vivox, Rockin Randall, who talked with us and answered some questions to us. Nice guy and some very interesting insights, for sure this is going to scale at great lengths, if necessary!

Well, here's also a little snapshot to show the speech indicators in action, just click on the thumbnail to see the big picture.