by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs Desk

Allison Fass reports that the metaverse can be a “can be a weird, chancy place for real-life brands” in a story for the July 2 issue of Forbes, and notes that avatars enjoy having sex and playing pranks instead of getting warm fuzzy feelings about real life brands. What on earth are those avatars thinking of - don't they understand they are meant to be compliant RL marketing hype recipients?

Still, this is good information to know - and may explain why the Linden fanboy network recently upgraded the bad press threat level to Orange. Look for all remaining fanboys to spread out across the blog-o-sphere to defend the Lab from criticism, and teams of canine furries to patrol SL looking for unattended suspicious packages, bottles of liquid over 3 ounces in size, and outspoken critics.

I do have to wonder how effective the fanboys will be. Ms. Fass quotes Lenovo computer’s Web-marketing vice president David Churbuck as saying, “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid". While I respect Lenovo, I can’t really completely agree here - you can also play house, play store, play war, and ban people from your land while trying to get laid.

READ IT ALL HERE:
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/....

By Jimmy guterman

Today we're publishing the new issue of Release 2.0. What follows is drawn from my editor's letter in this issue.

If you read anything this month other than this issue of Release 2.0, make it Jonathan Zittrain’s Saving the Internet in the June Harvard Business Review. (Disclosure: I do some work for HBR’s parent company.) So lively you might be surprised it was written by a law professor, the article is wildly ambitious, ranging from Wile E. Coyote metaphors to a meditation on the nature of Netizenship. Zittrain’s main argument is that “generativity,” our ability to create via the Net, is the most exciting—and worrisome—aspect of the Net. Indeed, what makes the Net great is also precisely what makes it so dangerous. And, despite the libertarian perspective of many prominent Netizens, many thinkers believe that the virtual world is becoming increasingly similar to the real one in that appropriate laws, or at least agreed-upon rules, are necessary for the Net to survive in its open form. If the Internet can be ruined (by everything from criminals to overzealous politicians responding to those criminals), then how can it be saved from that ruin? We have arrived at what Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks, refers to as “a moment of opportunity and challenge.”

READ IT ALL HERE:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives...