For the last couple of years, I’ve been involved in the virtual world of Second Life. For the most part, this has been a rewarding experience. Although I have over time become more aware of some of the flaws. It’s been a disheartening thing, seeing a platform that I believe has real potential being held back by these flaws. Happily, the creators of Second Life under the guidance of Rod Humble are working to make the technology more accessible and easier to use, which is excellent news, and have plans to drive the world forward.

I see Second Life being used by numerous artists and other creatives. People the world over are able to tour art galleries and view works of sculpture. Further to this, Second Life makes art exhibits happen that are just not possible anywhere else. Concerts can be held and DJs can play virtual sets. I’ve listened to artists from across the world performing live from their own homes, so I know first hand that there is a live music scene in Second Life. All of this is available to you, as long as you have an internet connection. Remote location, or physical disability need present no obstacle to fulfilling Second Life.

Of course, my more usual field of comment is agnosticism, religion and spirituality. This area is most certainly catered for in Second Life. In my early days, I found a region called “Bodhi” which was well constructed and hid snippets of Dharma in gems around the landscape. Bodhi is now gone, to the best of my knowledge, but there are plenty of other places. The Skeptical Buddhists Sangha and Kannonji are just two such places with discussion and talks. Consulting the inworld search yields many more.  The odds are, if you enter your faith or lack thereof into Second Life search, it will be there.

In addition to this, there are many centres of learning, not just focussing on inworld skills but things of use outside of Second Life. You can also find support groups inworld for any number of things, and I find myself reflecting that if Second Life saves even one person through these groups. Or when it enables people to grow and reach nearer their potential through these classes, then it’s all been well worth it

Well, this has been an interesting year, in some senses I’m glad it’s over.  I also feel a sense of some foreboding about next year.  Maybe it’s the darkening nights, the shadows lengthen and grow…

This year saw us take another hit in the financial system, in truth the problems never went away, just glossed over with loads of printed money.  Of course, you can’t keep doing that; as a very wise man said “Ye cannae change the laws of physics!”  How very true, we are about to find this out.

We’ve seen the whole software patents story take turn after turn.  Apple vs Samsung, then Apple vs HTC.  I can’t shake the feeling that Apple might just have entered an arse kicking contest with a Centipede here, but time will tell.  But the interesting one could be Barnes and Noble vs Microsoft, this seems to be a far more interesting story as B&N take aim not at the patents but at the strategy of using them.  Clever, and also something that could be very disruptive.  We have the SOPA act still being fought in the US, this could easily wreck the Internet as we know it and the potential effect of freedom of speech and fair use is chilling.  A short video here explains things.

Finally, the Occupy movement.  This has been fascinating to watch, and eye opening.  In fact, just as bemusingly, the suicidegirls.com twitter feed turned out to have better US coverage than the mainstream media!  Outdone by a software porn site, hang your heads sirs, hang your heads. I except Al Jazeera and Russia Today from this, I consistently find some very good stuff on both those sites  Occupy has started to show the hypocrisy at the heart of some quarters of the Western establishment, tactics were used on American and UK citizens that were not in keeping with anyone’s idea of the response of a democracy.  Though the fact that it had to come to this speaks volumes.

For 2012?  Well, I’m not much with the old crystal ball.  But, I’ll give it a whirl.  I see us living more within our means, this won’t be such a bad thing as the alternative simply stores up more trouble.  Better to start now.  I can see the software patent system coming into disrepute very quickly, and I suspect that the tech landscape could look a bit different this time next year.  The patent war is to the death, and I wonder about how the current hegemonies will hold up.  For freedom of speech and SOPA, I recommend paying the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or EFF) a visit and doing some reading to see what can be done.  The internet is not taking this lying down however, and I think that the industry lobbyists and their pet politicians are going have more of a fight on their hands than they realise.

Occupy.. I can see more trouble on the horizon. Especially in the USA, the controversial Detainee Bill promises more grief for the occupiers.  I honestly can’t understand how Barack Obama let this one past him, I can only hope someone comes to their senses while there are still any freedoms left worth defending in America.

I’ve been watching the Wikileaks releases with some interest.  They seem to largely prove that the people who run this planet are every bit as human as we thought they were.  There are few (if any) great leaders and there seems to be a lot of underhand dealing going on.  Not much of this is really a surprise.

The fallout around the documents is far more instructive than the content of the documents themselves.  We are seeing how little regard anyone in power has for any notion of freedom of speech, or for any idea that they should be accountable to their people for anything.  I understand that there are situations in which things have to be kept quiet, but there seems to be a little rebalancing needed here.

Part of the fallout has been regarding the Amazon EC2 Cloud, and this is of interest to me as a self confessed geek.  You see, I’ve never completely trusted the idea of the cloud.  While many people seemed to think it was the best thing since sliced bread, I counted myself among those who looked on with a degree of reservation.  As you may know Wikileaks moved it’s service to the EC2 cloud to help it to stay online.  According to the news coverage, Amazon promptly dropped the service to Wikileaks after receiving phone calls from certain US senators.  This, of course, raises serious questions regarding freedom of speech; questions that are quite rightly being pursued.  But it also confirms my fears about this ‘wonderful’ idea of cloud computing.

You see, I have to make the point that your access to the services and data on the cloud (your data, by the way) is only there on the sufferance of the service provider.  At which point it’s no longer really your data, and no longer your server (it never was).  This means that you’d better have access to local copies of the data and local facilities.

Of course, the above is equally true of any failure in the hosting service or your internet connection.  Let’s face it, if you need to maintain local copies of the servers and data in order to keep things running, then the argument for cloud computing doesn’t hold.  This is part of my reservation about Facebook, it’s a walled garden and I have no easy way of exporting my data out of there.  If my account is closed, or inaccessible then it really becomes Facebook’s data, not mine.  So, by extension any intellectual property I have with a cloud company is no longer in my control?  That’s worrying.

I suppose the cloud doesn’t have such a silver lining after all.

I happened across this video, courtesy of TED.  It’s a headset that work by reading your brainwaves and at this stage looks like an idea that is coming along very, very nicely.

I’ll only say that I would love one of these for Second Life, but I imagine it’s a few years off a consumer release as yet!

The is the full video and comment page at TED.

I tweeted earlier today that Tameside Council in the UK is closing their Second Life island.   I can understand this, especially given the dire state of our public finances.  When you consider the reality, SL is probably not the most effective way for a regional council to talk to its citizens.

This brings me to a point I’ve been pondering, it’s not just councils.  Why do real life (RL) companies often fail in Second Life ( SL)?

Firstly, I think that a company can fail by not becoming part of the community.  SL is not something that can be run in the same way as a corporate website, it requires an engagement with the community, especially if you plan on running a successful business presence.

Secondly, the kinds of products that are successful in SL are not the same as in RL.  Yes, Coca Cola and various other companies jumped inworld.  But let’s be honest, anybody who wants to drink Coke probably already does.  If they don’t then a virtual world is possibly not going to convince them.  A car company can offer virtual, drivable versions of its products, which may help RL sales, but whether it will be worth the trouble is questionable at best.  IBM seem to be doing quite well in there, but then they are a different kind of company to Coca Cola or a large auto maker.

Thirdly, there are a lot of residents who can and will be very well positioned to compete with RL companies.  These residents already have their own established brands, do the job at least as well and tick the community box already.

As a closing remark, I will observe that the companies that prosper bring something to the mix.  SL is not just a billboard, not a static website.  It’s a dynamic and vibrant virtual ecosystem and economy, thinking you can just walk in and posture is (in this writer’s view) a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Well, I had an interesting experience in Secondlife last night, at a sim called “The Buddha Center” they showed a BBC video on the life of the Buddha.  As aide from the odd technical hiccup it was an enjoyable experience and when I found the video on YouTube, I thought I’d share it with everybody!

It’s 50 minutes in length, so be sure you have a cup of Tea when you click play, and the DVD purchase notice will vanish after the first 30 seconds or so. 

If you read me regularly, you’ll know I’m a Secondlifer.  I’m happy being involved in the Metaverse, and I think it can make positive changes in the way we communicate and interact.

What interests me recently, is the amount of people who absolutely seperate “Second Life” (SL) from “Real Life” (RL).  In short, the total denial of the outside world.

I think that we can, due to this seperation, risk losing sight of our ethics in SL.  That’s a thought, does the Dharma go with us into the virtual?  In my mind the answer is a firm yes, as even though you have a virtual representation (an “Avatar”) it’s the same mind doing the piloting, you’re still you.  Regardless of whether behaviour is virtual or not, it can still be unskillful in the Buddhist sense.

SL is a very complex, flexible, powerful platform.  There’s a lot of potential for both good and bad in there.    It’s easy to get lost and to deny the outside world, but also to start neglecting our real needs and those of our nearest and dearest.  It’s also possible to hurt them very deeply, romantic affairs in SL do happen and there have been some that have hit the media when they ended in divorces.

I think that other worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) are like application software, but SL is like an operating system, you can build worlds and applications within it.  I’ve explored virtual landscapes and cities and seen entire imaginary worlds inside SL, I’ve attended meetings of more than one virtual Buddhist group.  I’ve also created things in there, I have an idea of what it could do and that’s far more than any mere game.

It’s very important that we approach this whole thing carefully, this virtual universe is not seperate, wishful thinking won’t change that and using it to “escape” our real world issues is very ill advised.  I know that SL can be used to raise awareness of world issues and I do believe that SL is at it’s best when used to enhance our Real World communication ability especially in Education.

But to simply use it as a fantasist escape and to try to enforce some sort of schizophrenic seperation from reality?  I think that misses out a huge amount of it’s potential and opens some very dangerous doors indeed.

I came across this Youtube video over the weekend.  It’s just under an hour long and is a very interesting and worthwhile lecture on the spread of Buddhism.

For me, questioning is a large part of spirituality, I feel that an unexamined belief is not worth holding.  That’s a large part of what I like about Buddhism, that spirit of enquiry and examination, in fact I was pleasantly surprised to find a virtual Sangha in Second Life which feels exactly the same way.

The Skeptical Buddhists Sangha is a place for Buddhists (and anyone else who wants to drop in and talk on the subject) to meet in Second Life.   I have to say it’s very useful to have them there, I’m finding that Second Life is a very useful tool for allowing communities to form and interact in a new way that I’ve not quite seen anywhere else.  I’ve been involved in some truly stimulating discussion meetings in the Sangha and have to say it’s certainly helped me along the path.

As an aside, I’m finding Second Life to be more useful when viewed as an enhancement to my Real Life and given a balance with that as appropriate.  I try not to spend more time there than I feel appropriate and always try to bear in mind my reasons for being there.

I was reading an interesting article by Cory Doctorow and as I know a few folks on Facebook and other such sites, I thought I’d link to the article here.

It’s an interesting read and I have to say I can certainly see his point, though he doesn’t cover the use of Facebook and other social sites for spamming.  I know I had to deal with spam friend requests on MySpace, and I expect to have to do the same with Facebook in the fullness of time.

It makes you question, as I have been, the exact amount of quality Facebook adds to a persons experience in cyberspace.