Share Your Favourite Virtual Cities With The Guardian

The Guardian is so famous for it’s typos that it has a nickname of The Grauniad, so much so that http://www.grauniad.co.uk redirects to The Guardian website. However, despite their support for The Liberal Democrats it remains a decent newspaper, more so probably for the left leaning types, but it’s a decent newspaper.

They have also long had an interest in technology and that has included Second Life. Back in 2006 Suart Jefferies and Victor Keegan were talking about their Second Life experiences. Victor Keegan’s experience would later turn a little sour as he got involved in a trademark case regarding use of “SLART” over Second Life art galleries.

However The Guardian has boldly continued to cover all sorts of virtual world issues and has now issued the following call :

we want to hear your favourite virtual places – from a beautiful view in GTA to that 20-million-strong SimCity megalopolis you’ve been building (or possibly destroying). What are the best game cities to live in? The worst? Perhaps you’ve designed one you think would be better than your own city?

Second Life users were quickly on the case using Guardian witness, which revolves around user generated content. 1920’s Berlin, New Babbage and Philomenaville have all made an appearance as favourite virtual cities.

Linden Lab have been tipped off about this by 1920’s Berlin owner Jo Yardley. Linden Lab have blogged about The Guardian call and in doing so, exemplified a degree of spotting a good marketing opportunity when they see one :

This is a great chance to share some amazing Second Life locations with The Guardian’s readers. Whether it’s a place you created personally, discovered (maybe through the Destination Guide?) and love, or just a spot you always find yourself returning to, the Second Life locations that ‘wow’ you are great ones to share to help show off Second Life to the uninitiated.

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Seanchai To Open New Storytelling Chapter In Kitely

The Seanchai library team have been telling stories in Second Life for over six years, but like all good story tellers they have decided it’s time for their stories to reach further shores and this has resulted in Seanchai Library announcing that their first storytelling session in Kitely will be on May 2nd.

The initial event will include an Estate Tour at 6:30pm ~ Ghost Stories at the Firecircle at 7:00pm (All times Pacific Time).

Location : hop://osgrid.kitely.com:8002/Seanchai/144/129/29 or IM Shandon or Caledonia once you arrive.

Another way of getting there if you have a Kitely account is to go to the Kitely page : http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Shandon-Loring/Seanchai-2

Seanchai In Kitely

When you arrive there you find yourself at the central hub and from there you can teleport to twelve Storytelling venues or one of eight additional themed worlds. The blog post informs us that :

Each Venue provides an immersive environment for the story-listening audience, and each is parceled to be capable of supporting simultaneous events concurrent with events at the other Venues.

Small skyboxes at Seanchai are connected to the Storylink Radio Channel providing recorded stories from our Storytellers 24 hours a day.

So it’s clear to see the potential in this venture for plenty of storytelling locations and venues. When you click the main board you’re teleported straight away to a different location. When you walk through the portals there may be a short delay whilst the world is brought online and then you are teleported to a different region.

There’s potential to break these additional worlds down even further and parcel them so that even more stories can be told at one time.

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Kitely Market Hypergrid Delivery Enters Closed Beta

News reaches me that Kitely and their Kitely Market are moving closer to being able to deliver goods to other grids. This move will mean that merchants who list their items on the Kitely Market will be able to make their merchandise available to other Hypergrid enabled grids.

However, the system is currently in closed beta and this means that things may change before the system is officially unleashed.

Therefore if you are a hypergrid user this feature may be coming to a grid near you soon but please bear in mind if you see any discussion regarding this that this is an early beta system. Features you may hear about now, may not be in the final product, indeed much of what is in early beta could change.

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Kitely’s New Pricing Structure Closes Some Doors And Opens Many Others

On January 1st Kitely finalised their new pricing structure. This provided new fixed price options, but worryingly took away the two free hours a month from free accounts. New accounts will get six hours of free time, which once used up, means they will need to buy Kitely Credits to visit their own metered world, those six hours don’t need to be used up in one month. However on the plus side free accounts no longer have to buy minutes to continue exploring. I have some concerns about how this will pan out and things didn’t start well when I tried to login.

Image of Kitely message
Not allowed to login

That was due to trying to login to the last world I visited. This world must have set their world to not allow free accounts anymore. So I decided to head home ….

Kitely image should be here
My Home Suspended!

So now I can’t visit my own free world anymore! This took me a little by surprise, I thought they may have allowed people a month with a little free time at least. However as there’s pretty much nothing on my own world, this is no great loss. So what next? I decided to explore and this is where the new pricing structure could well work well because now I can explore without worrying about being charged Kitely Credits for doing so.

Dragon's Teeth In Kitely

Dragon’s Teeth

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2013 Reviewed

The challenge with a review of the year is to try and make it worth reading. There’s a balance between including information and including too much information. This year’s review is largely based on Second Life and my own posts, so there’s plenty of information that I will be missing. For those who want a more in depth review, Inara Pey has been reviewing 2013 too.

For me personally it was a difficult year, Reed, Dee, Izzy and TJ Linden all gave me wonderful support, even when I myself was more than a tad grouchy with them but I do appreciate the efforts they made to accommodate me.

This post is not as long as it looks, if you skip the pictures, links and embedded videos it won’t take as long to read as you may think at first glance. I did consider breaking this down in to different posts, as I did last year. However at the end of the day it is what it is, so it looks like it’s epic in length but it’s really not. However to aid people I’ve decided to go back to HTML school and create a table of contents! Hurrah.

Contents

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