Lojak Taliaferro
It's pronounced 'Tolliver'. Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait

In a sad bit of news, Radar Masukami has decided to suspend production of SL Under the Radar, which IMHO is the best SL-related podcast available. I’m sad to see it go but I understand and appreciate his reasoning. Better to quit while it’s still good than drag it out for another 2 seasons (are you listening TV execs?). If your heart’s not in it anymore, you have to let it go. Thanks for the memories, Radar!

He says he’s going to take the site down in a couple of months so you should go grab all the episodes now.

According to an article in PC Authority, Sony and Microsoft both announced Second Life style VWs at the Tokyo Games Show on October 10th. Sony’s “Home” is supposed to be released for PS3 on November 19th but doesn’t appear to include user created content.

The Microsoft entry into the field is on the Xbox360 and titled, cleverly, New Xbox Experience. Microsoft’s John Schappert said, “Our goal is to make the Xbox experience more visual, easier to use, more fun to use and more social…We focused a lot on friends and other experiences outside just playing games.” Which is Microsoft-speak for we don’t know what the fuck this is all about but we’re going to throw money at it until it’s obvious we can’t do it right and then we’ll buy Linden Labs and pretend we invented VWs.

What neither of them appear to understand is that the failure of all the VWs before SL IMO was the result of a lack of user created content. What makes SL unique and special is that anybody– free users or premium users– can come into SL and start building as soon as they find a sandbox. And they can keep it up forever that way if they want to. I’m sure that there is a segment of the populace that doesn’t want to do that…. they play WoW and it’s not a dynamic VW. My guess is that neither Sony nor MS really want to get into the VW arena anyway because that’s not how they normally roll.

There’s a post on TechCrunch about IBM and the China’s Palace Museum collaborating on a VW that duplicates all 178 acres of the Forbidden City. It’s built on the gaming engine, Torque from Garage Games instead of OpenSim. Seems counterproductive to me to base a VW on a proprietary gaming platform when there’s a perfectly good Open Source VW platform available. As near as I can tell from the article though, this isn’t really a VW with user created content but a FPS without any shooting.

There’s nothing here yet. WTF are you looking at?