The Drax Files Radio Hour – Page 2

August 1, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Show 29 – Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

Draxtor Despres is on holiday, a very busy holiday by the looks of it. However he’s been involved in a documentary for SPIEGEL TV regarding Second Life that will air later in the year, Madpea Games and Frau Yardley may be in it too.

As well as this, Draxtor has added show 30 of The Drax Files Radio Hour and a new Drax Files World Makers : Editorial Clarity. I’ll hopefully get to both of them during the next week! However I’m going to talk about last week’s Drax Files Radio Hour – Show 29 : terms, terms, terms AGAIN [rerun]. This is a repeat …. ok ok international audience, I’ll call it a bloody rerun, this is a rerun of part of show #13: terms, terms, terms…., it’s a very relevant part, it’s the interview with Richard A Goldberg who has a long history of experience when it comes to TOS for content creators. Richard is also a creator for Madpea games.

This is the show that Ebbe Altberg and the people drawing up Linden Lab’s controversial and still extremely disappointing TOS, should listen to, this way they may get a far better understanding of just why the TOS remains a major disappointment.

Richard starts off in positive fashion : “The old terms of service was a very reasonable document for content creators.” This is very true, the old terms of service gave Linden Lab the rights to run and promote the Second Life service and that was pretty much it. In all reality, that’s all they should really need.

Richard points out that the terms Linden Lab have unveiled are not unique to Linden Lab, he points out that these terms are more and more common and are beneficial to companies like Linden Lab. However they are not good for freelance creators. Richard does not believe that Linden Lab want to sell his content, and this is something I also agree with. I do not believe that Linden Lab want to sell anyone’s content. However, like Richard, I also agree that in the future if Linden Lab is sold, the new company may decide it’s a great opportunity to sell that content. This may be a far fetched scenario, but the new TOS allows for that scenario and that’s why some of us remain unhappy.

I still believe that part of the problem here is that Linden Lab want a one size fits all TOS and that by claiming as many rights as they can, it reduces the prospect of problems for Linden Lab. However this is a somewhat lazy approach and is unfriendly to content creators.

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July 18, 2014

Why The TOS Remains Problematic

Episode 13 of The Drax Files Radio Hour featured an excellent interview with Richard A. Goldberg. I covered it here : Second Life TOS – Why Bergs Should Collide. I’m not going to go over it all again but Richard made some excellent points on why the TOS was problematic, why Linden Lab should not need all the terms they require, why there should be limitations and he did all this in a very calm and rational manner. Ebbe Altberg should at least listen to what Richard A. Goldberg had to say and then he may understand more of what the issue is.

The Linden Lab blog post on the updated terms of service states :

As part of an update to our Terms of Service today, we have made a modification to further clarify Section 2.3. The updated section still provides Linden Lab with the rights that we need in order to operate and promote Second Life, so you will see that we have retained much of the language as the previous version. However, the updated section now also includes limits that better match our intended meaning, and we hope will assuage some of the concerns we heard about the previous version.

Now the problem arises with the words that have been left in. First of all let’s rewind a little and give Linden Lab some credit for the change they did make, but also let’s rewind further and see what the controversial section said before the changes of last August, a time when it wasn’t remotely controversial :

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers, Websites, or other areas of the Service, you hereby automatically grant Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the Service.

I’m struggling to understand why that is no longer suitable, it’s clear, it’s to the point and there’s no ambiguity as to whether it refers to the Second Life service or not. However let’s move on to the controversial TOS and break this down, again, first of all this part :

Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and sell, re-sell or sublicense (through multiple levels)(with respect to Second Life, Inworld or otherwise on the Service as permitted by you through your interactions with the Service)

Now that’s better than before because of the part about being with respect to Second Life, inworld or otherwise. That’s the big plus point from the change, the problem is with the next part of the TOS, which makes absolutely no reference to this limitation.

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July 4, 2014July 4, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 26 – Tony Parisi Virtually Anywhere

“We will see a 3D web in the next five years, there’s no doubt in my mind about that, Drax listeners you heard it hear first” – Tony Parisi on The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 26.

So opens the July 4th edition of The Drax Files Radio Hour. I should note at this point that Tony Parisi, like a lot of 3D web enthusiasts, always predicts that the 3D web will be here in five years time but you have to admire his enthusiasm. I should also note that this show was produced and published before Germany beat France in the World Cup quarter finals, so Draxtor had not been near any Paulaner at this stage, whether that’s still the case I cannot verify.

Tony Parisi is a co-creator of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) and has also penned books on WebGL as well as being a founder of Vivaty, more on that later. The interview itself is yet another excellent production from Draxtor Despres, coming in at around 42 minutes it packs a lot in. The core of the interview centres around the concepts raised in a blog post from Tony Parisi back in June : Virtually Anywhere. This post argues that VR applications using devices such as Oculus Rift should not be looking to be part of downloads and walled gardens, they should be integrated within the web using technologies such as WebGL, CSS3 and HTML5. The blog post is well worth reading.

However let’s rewind a little, Tony talks of his early work with VRML and also points out the reasons why he feels that it didn’t quite take off. VRML came at a time when the web was in its infancy in terms of mainstream acceptance. VRML was powerful, possibly a little too powerful because to use it to its full potential back then would have required decent bandwidth and decent computing power. Now at this point you may think “Patience young Padawan, Patience“. However the computing world isn’t known for its patience and at a time when the 2D web was exploding, people didn’t quite have the patience to wait for the VRML revolution. Indeed plenty of people were happily trying to creating garish Geocities sites for the 2D web, 3D web concepts were a long way off widespread acceptance.

The part of the interview where Tony talks of Vivaty is interesting in many ways and it really resonated with me. There were arguments at Vivaty as to whether they should try and appeal to Second Life users, those who created content and spent a lot of time in Second Life spending money in particular. However others thought this market was, to paraphrase, a little weird. Tony does not say this, but that’s what it seemed to amount to. Those people felt there was larger mainstream market to attract that would prefer not to be associated with Second Life style users. Now before we all turn our noses up, let’s remember that this came in the period around and after Second Life was at the top of the hype cycle, Anshe Chung was on the cover of Newsweek and virtual worlds seemed to be the place to be. We should also remember that Linden Lab themselves seemed to be having exactly the same debate. Philip Rosedale had been quoted as saying : “Bad weather, oppressive regimes, poor economic conditions — that’s what makes an SL user” as well as saying “I estimate we’re at 1 percent of total use in 5-10 years“, suggesting a more mainstream market was there for the taking.

Mitch Kapor rubbed Second Life users up the wrong way with his SL5B speech when he said : “The pioneer era in Second Life is beginning to draw to a close. It has been five years and we are at the beginning of a transition and I think it is an irrevocable transition“. Some users, quite possibly incorrectly, felt that this was a statement that Linden Lab did not want their current users, that they were chasing that elusive mainstream audience.

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June 26, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour – Immersive Journalism

Last week’s Drax Files Radio Hour has been put on the back burner because of the news of Linden Lab’s proposed new virtual world and SL11B. This is a bit of a shame because not only does Drax have a fantastic interview about immersive journalism with Nonny de la Pena, but the interview also touches upon some of the pros and cons of Second Life. This is actually extremely relevant when you consider the news about Linden Lab’s new virtual world.

Nonny de la Pena is a journalist and documentary maker who moved from traditional media such as Newsweek to creating immersive spaces in virtual and digital environments to tell news stories, amongst other things. The subject matter is often controversial and political, for example in association with Peggy Weil she built Virtual Guantanamo in Second Life. I’ll embed a 2007 youTube video by Draxtor Despres about that at the end of the post.

Nonny speaks about how the idea was to bring an experience such as virtual Guantanamo to a virtual world environment such as Second Life to bring the news and issues to a more immersive environment. The idea being that this was a different means of raising awareness about such issues. Actually it’s probably better if I quote Nonny’s website about section in part :

The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the participant to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The participant will be typically represented in the form of a digital avatar – an animated 3D digital representation of the participant, and see the world from the first-person perspective of that avatar.

This is further expanded upon :

Immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative.

There’s a far more in depth explanation in the link above but the basic idea is to tell a news story in a different environment. Nonny felt that one of the advantages of Second Life was being able to talk and collaborate with people all over the world in a virtual environment as well as being able to bring the news story to people all over the world too. Nonny also feels that in some ways Second Life was ahead of its time.

However there was a downside and that’s in relation to an old bugbear of mine. Virtual Guantanamo is no longer in Second Life and one of the main reasons for that is because …. The Tier Is Too Damn High! I’m not making this up. The expense of land in Second Life stifles development of projects such as this. However Nonny wasn’t put off from using virtual worlds by this and moved on to Unity to build immersive journalism and in doing so highlighted another issue regarding Second Life. Via Unity people can enter the immersive environment without downloading a client, they can enter via the web. This has long been considered a weakness of Second Life, although personally I don’t think it’s a major one, it is an issue that means that people who just want to casually pop in to view something are thwarted somewhat.

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April 25, 2014April 25, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 16 – Drax Meets The Lindens

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 16 : lindens are people too! [part 1] is another superb production from Draxtor Despres and Jo Yardley. A wide variety of topics are covered and as usual, I won’t go too deeply into them because the true richness comes from listening to the show!

However they cover education in Second Life and OpenSim. In terms of Second Life they talk of the recent Introduction to Second Life for Educators – a Course in Spanish, which Linden Lab blogged about. I must admit I got this a bit arse about face when I read the blog title because I thought it was teaching Spanish in Second Life, whereas it’s teaching Second Life to Spanish speakers.

In terms of OpenSim there’s an excellent feature on a school in Ireland using OpenSim and Oculus Rift to teach history by allowing the kids to experience historical settings in a virtual world. Virtual worlds do have a place within education but I feel the problem with virtual worlds and education remains the baggage with a one size fits all solution to delivery in terms of Second Life, indeed this is where OpenSim does have an advantage.

Now if Linden Lab were to make Second Life technology available to schools to host their own Second Life technology grid, away from the main grid, I feel real progress could be made there. Say for example if JANET in the UK hosted a grid powered by Second Life technology that educators could build on and collaborate with other institutions, there would be potential there. I thought this was where they were heading with SLEnterprise until I saw the pricing. However in this day and age when the public sector is still being squeezed, a presence on the Second Life main grid and all the associated baggage (much of which is overblown but still exists) is a difficult proposition for educators to sell as a business planning need.

I do believe Linden Lab need to consider such a setup because if they don’t deliver it, High Fidelity is likely to look very appealing to educators due to the nature of how that looks like it will allow people to create their own grids.

However back to the show, there are lots of features, lots worth listening to but the big news is that Draxtor has been out to Santa Cruz, where he was probably initiated into the FIC hall of fame as he fraternised with Ebbe Altberg and The Lindens … to those unfamiliar with Second Life, that is not the name of a rock band.

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Tag: The Drax Files Radio Hour

The Drax Files Radio Hour Show 29 – Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

Why The TOS Remains Problematic

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 26 – Tony Parisi Virtually Anywhere

The Drax Files Radio Hour – Immersive Journalism

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 16 – Drax Meets The Lindens

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