Cloud Party – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

October 22, 2013

TOS Debate – It’s A Cyn

The TOS debate goes on, there’s an epic three hour (TLDL) video of a legal panel meeting inworld, which you can view here: http://youtu.be/jifM2n4ttSE. Now if that’s too daunting for you, Bixyl Shuftan comes to the rescue with a summary of the meeting (although Bixyl does point out that the video really helps to understand the details).

Personally I feel that the TOS oversteps the mark and really, Linden Lab should explain to their users where this is headed because the new TOS makes very uncomfortable reading. However when concerns like this are raised others see opportunities. Kitely have already done this with a blog post explaining their more friendly sounding TOS when it comes to content creators.

Now into the fray comes Cloud Party. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes posts information regarding a blog post from Cloud Party’s Cyn Skyberg. Cyn Skyberg used to go by the name of Cyn Linden and parade around Second Life as a pirate with a peg leg whilst being a fearless leader of the support team, she also had a taste for eels …… oh wait, that was the band, The Eels! I’m not making this up! More of that later, for now, the blog post from Cyn states:

“In short, our TOS states “Cloud Party does not claim any ownership right in any Member content”.

Photos, textures, materials, objects, models, scripts and all other content uploaded to our platform are owned solely by the user. We do reserve the right to use them for shameless promotion of the platform via marketing, but the content you create is, and always will be, yours. In fact, there is a “download original” button for everything you put into the service, so you can grab it whenever you like.”

The devil of course is in the detail and below the cut I’ll go into more detail about the detail, unless you’re already below the cut, then the detail will be right below this sentence!

Continue reading “TOS Debate – It’s A Cyn”

December 28, 2012

Giulio Prisco Won’t Avoid The Immersion vs. Augmentation Issues In New Virtual Worlds

I was reading the Second Life Forums when I saw a post from Mecha Innis entitled Giulio Prisco of the IEET Declares Second Life Dead. “Here we go again” I thought and went to read the article itself: Snow Crash(ed) in Second Life (end 2012).

The article isn’t as ignorant as some articles on the death of Second Life, it’s clear that Giulio was a big fan and there are areas where I’m in agreement with him. However there are also areas where it seems clear that Giulio isn’t happy because people didn’t want Second Life to be as he wanted it to be, and that’s something I always find disappointing because the beauty of Second Life is that it can be what you want it to be.

The article is interesting because it brings up the old debate of Immersion vs Augmentation and has links to some interesting old articles:

“Many early users of SL were very jealous and protective of the early SL culture, strongly centered on pseudonymity and non-disclosure of real life information, and vocally resisted all technical innovations that could facilitate the intrusion of reality into their “magic circle” (see for example the very heated debates that followed the introduction of voice in SL in 2007). Most of them were “immersionists,” mainly interested in SL as “another world” where they could live “another life” entirely separated from their “first life” (FL) and strongly resisted the “invasion” of “augmentationists” interested in SL as a communication tool for telepresence applications related to FL. I think the tension between these two communities played a significant role in the demise of SL. Henrik Bennetsen’s essay on the subject is not available anymore at its original URL but a backup is still on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.”

The thing I find odd about Giulio’s comment here is that in the first linked article, of which he is the author, he wrote: “I support that idea that everyone should be free to live her Second Life, AND her Real Life, as she wants to live it. So, though I use voice in SL routinely, I do not have anything against immersionists refusing to use it and support their freedom of choice. At the same time, of course I protect _my_ freedom of choice and resist immersionists trying to tell _me_ how I should live _my_ SL (or RL). The point is, I _am_ into making my SL a reflection of my RL – and want the freedom to use all options that permit doing so.” Continue reading “Giulio Prisco Won’t Avoid The Immersion vs. Augmentation Issues In New Virtual Worlds”

December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fifth in a series of annual posts, the other four look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab not being as active in their blog as they once were. This was also a very difficult year for me personally which meant I took a large break from regular blogging between April and September, with only sporadic posts appearing, so I’ll have to delve elsewhere for some information for the year, fortunately there are plenty of resources such as Inara Pey, Nalates Urriah, Tateru Nino and New World Notes amongst others, as well of course as Linden Lab’s underused blog, it still has some useful posts. Also a special mention for Tyche Shepherd and her awesome surveying which provides so much useful information.

I’m also doing things a bit differently this year as these posts are getting pretty epic. This is the full post but as it’s pretty TLDR, I’ve also broken the post down into four quarterly posts elsewhere, the information will be the same other than this initial commentary, but it may be easier on the eye to read in smaller chunks. To read the quarterly reviews go here.

2012 brought us viewer improvements, Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Direct Delivery and a lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects. Some of the issues can be summed up in the following photo:

However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty”