"Japanese aren't going to take to the culture of Second Life"

A G-rated virtual tokyo? What do you think? I'd be very interested in to here from Tokyo based SL users.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/28/virtual.tokyo.ap/index.html

Is Google Launching a Virtual World?

Here are a few interesting links on the buzz. Could be very interesting if Google gets into the virtual world fray with a strong business user focus. Thanks to Bieneff Bruder for a heads up on this.

Google's Virtual World Could Be Business Answer To Second Life

The Future of Virtual Worlds

Google Testing My World For Launch Later This Year

Arts in SL - Top 10 Installations

This is a bit of old news, but if you are following my blog and looking for the latest on great art installations in SL, here is a great post.

Launch Party in Menorca

What a great experience last Saturday! We held two launch parties for the book one in prime time EMEA the other prim time US. It was attended by over 110 avatars and several noteables from SL press.



My thanks to all of the contributors and supporters who showed up to celebrate. It was a lot of fun! JueL Resistance who is featured in the book played and DJ Doubledown Tandino was fantastic. Really nice to meet him and listen to his grooves.



This party came about for several reasons. First, I was insistent with my publisher Que that we needed to hold an in-world launch party. Lisa (my PR person, of which I did not have for my previous book) took a bet and hired an in-world PR firm metaversatility headed by Adri Saarinen. She worked with Iris Ophelia who arranged the venue at Slimmie's (an in-world club owned by Slim Warrior).



Blog posts and invites went out to the usual suspects including New World notes and others.

Now if you disregard the names, this may sound a lot like a RL launch party and so it seems as complicated to pull off in SL as in RL.

The big question on my mind is will this sell more books? I'm not sure, but certainly it gave more broad exposure to the fact the book exists and at the party we gave out a ThinC book which contains the entire first chapter.

Here is a picture of me and one of my technical editors Kymber Schnook.

Second Life Economics

There is a page that everyone in Second Life should know about. It is the Second Life Economic Statistics page. If you're an economist, this is an astoundingly fun page just to wonder at the existence of such a virtual economy.

This page includes stats on population, land and land sales, Linden $ supply, number of in-world business owners with positive L$ cash flow, monthly spend by resident, and sources and sinks of L$.

The main reason most everyone needs to know about this page is average L$ paid per sq meter or land. While the old adage is true "location, location, location", it is often useful to see what the price you may pay for a piece of land looks like as compared to the average. Is your land not selling? Maybe you are asking to much.

What's probably one of the most interesting statistics is the estimated number of residents making > $5000 USD. Starting in April 2007 this number has not moved a whole lot relative to the explosion in population and even the upward trend of unique users who have positive cash flow.

April 139
May 129
June 132
July 145
August 129

Even though the number of individuals at this range are small, if these estimates are right, than <200 people are making between $645,000-$725,000USD a month on this virtual economy.

Pretty impressive for these early days.