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Latest blog posts from Terra Nova

Whither MMO economies?
CBBC, one of our longtime commentators, asked a question by email which seemed worth asking here: My question -- and do forward it along -- is: What now for virtual economies? What happens to Eve now that Iceland's economy is collapsing? Long ago, I asked in a Terra Nova link-mail, what... Read more...
Published 2 days ago

Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: The Home Version!
You can access the archive of last week's symposium, "Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online," here.  Plus, you can see Robert Bloomfield and yours truly do a little postmortem of the conference on Metanomics, here.  Additional must-see-videofeed: Ted Castronova showed... Read more...
Published 5 days ago

Professionals See Their Future in Second Life
Following up on the great survey work by Dmitri Williams and others, posted recently on Terra Nova, I have just posted some results from a survey in Second Life.  Social Research Foundation, a non-profit organization, conducted the study, and my analysis is now available at Metanomics. This is... Read more...
Published a week ago

Mundie on Skinnable World
Ian Lamont, who was kind enough to guest-author here a while back, alerts us to some recent comments of Craig Mundie from Microsoft.  Mundie is apparently a bit under-enthused about virtual worlds as separate spaces.  But, on the other hand, he is excited about virtual worlds as augmented... Read more...
Published 2 weeks ago

Parsing Philip Rosedale
I had a chance to interview Philip Rosedale earlier this month, leading to a broad set of posts by bloggers who follow virtual worlds (and Second Life) pretty closely.  You can see the whole thing here (with links to the analysis by Christian Renaud, Nic Mitham, Wagner James Au, Ben Duranske,... Read more...
Published 2 weeks ago

Special IT Journal Issue on Virtual Worlds
San Murugesan recently e-mailed to let me know that the Cutter IT Journal has a special issue on the subject of virtual worlds.  His introduction to that issue is here.  A PDF of the entire issue can be acquired for free (with registration) here.  It is an interesting mix of articles.  It... Read more...
Published 3 weeks ago

Escort derails coverage of science museums in 'Second Life'
First, the disclaimer: I work for Village Voice Media.  Village Voice Media runs the Westword.  The Westword ran this story on science museums in Second Life.  Yes, I'm practicing both partiality and blatant (semi)self-promotion.  Now that that's out of the way... As I reported over on... Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago

Won't Get Spooked Again
Via Wired comes this bit of news about the Pentagon's fears that WoW (specifically) could be used to organize a terrorist attack. This isn't the first time intelligence agencies have considered what implications virtual worlds have for terrorism, and noting this ongoing interest on their part is... Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago