Infopirate.org

Hate virtual worlds but want to increase your interactivity? Enter Lively by Google, a new social networking application and 3-D chat platform designed to integrate easily into websites, web browsers and blogs --and then some. With Lively even novice users can create virtual worlds or join another's habitat in the form of an avatar. Like most Google technology, Lively is relatively easy to learn and more powerful than it appears at first blush. Further, in this staycation economy, what better time for a little exploration of the new Google Lively virtual world?

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/867353/live... 

The NBA can only hope that playing “Horse” at the league’s new Second Life island is as fun as watching the anchors at CNBC try to wrap their minds around the concept of a virtual world.

It amuses me, this week, to do a photojournal. This is a quick tour of my weekly haunts in Second Life: the virtual world the way I habitually see it.

Raph Koster on IBM’s virtual world mainframe: “Does anyone really think the future of online worlds is in Big Iron?”Mark Wallace at 3pointD has an interview with the IBM executive heading up the project.

Gartner, of the famous Hype Cycle, released news out of their Gartner Symposium/ITExpo:2007 going on through tomorrow, that they are predicting 80% of active Internet uses will have some kind of a second life in a virtual world by 2011....

Tech consultancy Gartner, whose “Hype Cycle” has been used to gauge Second Life adoption, thinks that 80 percent of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011 — a huge increase from current levels.

Brazil's main opposition party, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), is taking the country's often acrimonious politics into the virtual world even though there may still be few Brazilian Second Life residents.

Finally! Second Life is perfect for this sort of thing, and this is the first time I have seen it, Mazda Motor Europe presents a concept car in the virtual world of Second Life, the Mazda Hakaze. You can find it at secondlife://Nagare Island/185/114/38.

Everyone needs to be the first one for something in Second Life these days. So what can a band better do than actually tour as first via this virtual world? UK act Redzone has culivated an alter-ego in the online virtual world known as Second Life and later this week, they will be the first band to do a tour in Second Life.

Last November in Beijing, IBM gathered 2,000 employees, with 5,000 more watching on the web, to unveil a series of global initiatives on digital storage, branchless banking, and the like. During the presentation, CEO Sam Palmisano walked up to an onstage PC, logged onto the online three-dimensional virtual world called Second Life, and took command