My dad just called me to let me know that Julian Dibbell was on NPR’s Fresh Air program talking about Exploring the Online Gaming World. I haven’t listened to it yet, but hey, when this stuff reaches my dad, you know it’s seeping into the mass consciousness. I guess all those Second Life articles are having an effect. 😉
It certainly seems like everyone is talking about this issue. Both Cory and Robin have had their say, Second Lifers are organizing boycotts and ‘legislation’, and the original authors of the code that led to CopyBot seem slightly flummoxed by the whole thing.
In short, what’s happening is a small-scale social crisis that brings into sharp relief the split between the hacker-ethic-libertarian-info-must-be-free ethos that underpins much of the technology of virtual worlds, and the rampant commercialism that has actually enabled its embodiment. What we have here is a case of bone fighting blood.
Growing number of educators explore ‘Second Life’ online – CNN.com. It appears to be presented as part of the Welcome to the Future special CNN is doing.
Misleading stat watch:
Now some 1.3 million people around the world log on to live out their second lives.
There’s definitely a little bit of an SL backlash building up among the MMO folks at this point, in part because of perceived overhype and in part because of the use of the registered users metric… a bit of a shame that we can get distracted from SL’s very real achievements because of the surrounding stuff — some of which, no doubt is a bit of jealousy.
We’ve done a little bit of work to try getting the RSS feeds working properly. It would, however, be helpful to have more data. We have resynced, we have repinged it from Feedburner, and we fixed a warning that showed up on the feed validator (turns out that WP2.0 comes out of the box with an out of date bit of markup: wfw:commentRSS should be wfw:commentRss, and you fix it in wp-rss2.php).
If you got this post via RSS, what feed were you using? Atom, RSS 1, RSS 2, via Feedburner’s link or direct, and with what reader?
If you didn’t get this post via RSS and should have, same questions!
Edit: Well, for whatever reason, the URLs www.raphkoster.com/feed, /feed/atom, /feed/rss, and /feed/rss2 were non-functional, redirected to the front page. So readers of course saw that as malformed RSS. A bit of .htaccess voodoo seems to have fixed it, but I still don’t know why those URLs didn’t work by default, given that www.raphkoster.com/wp-rss.php and /wp-atom.php and /wp-rss2.php worked fine.
Anyway, all of those now redirect to FeedBurner as well, so everything should (cross your fingers) be working right.
We’ll see whether this post goes out on the apparently damaged RSS feed!
There are a few posts around the web reacting to or riffing on or vastly extending some of the discussion in my Influences talk from Project Horseshoe.
