The Industry Standard visited Linden Lab headquarters and shares these two lengthy interviews with top Lindens, Mark Kingdon and Philip Rosedale.

Rosedale said that Second Life had moved beyond an emerging application for technology-savvy users. “There is a lot more diversity in use, demographics and behavior in Second Life today than there was, say, at the end of 2003,” he said.

Kingdon echoed this assessment. “I think the world has gotten its head around the fact that virtual worlds are here to stay,” Kingdon said. “There is a very compelling set of activities that virtual worlds are incredibly powerful for. They erase geographies, they allow for a type of interaction that you can’t get in the real world and they bring with them really interesting economic and business opportunities for users.”

I found these via Mal Burns’ steady stream of SL related news tweets. He’s a great resource for all sorts of interesting virtual world topics.

I found a trial version of Autodesk Stitcher and spent some time today experimenting with Quicktime VR style panoramic images. Nice piece of software that does a great job of automatically stitching and rendering various panoramic formats. Here’s a nice on of Hoobinoo Valley on my Sunset Myst sim. This one started out as about 100 snapshots taken from the same spot.

Hoobinoo Valley Quicktime VR
( Click and drag to pan around. CTRL or SHIFT to zoom in or out )

Quicktime VR was actually one of the first things that I experimented with on the web. Both were new technologies in the early 90s and I used them for several projects while I was in art school. Virtual gallery tours featuring recreations of historic sculptures and paintings. Tiny, postage stamp sized gallery tours, anyways. :)

Here’s a spherical pano rendering of the same scene. Love the way this distorts and stretches the shapes.

I’ll be making a few more of these over the next few days. Any suggestions for spots that I should capture?

I spent several hours this morning making some changes and adjustments to this site. Snipped a few bits here, added some doodads there. :)

• Added a button after each post that makes it easy to share it or save it.
• Switched from using categories for each post to a more flexible Tagging system. If you look over on the left sidebar and down a bit you should see a clickable list of all the Tags I’ve assigned to the content on the site.
• Added a Twitter thingamajig to the sidebar that shows my latest Tweets and makes it easy for you to Follow me on Twitter. BTW- I used a free service called Sprout to make that widget. It’s an easy way to make interactive Flash based content.
• When you make a comment on a post, you now have the option to subscribe and you’ll be notified when someone else comment on the same post. Should be a great way to keep track of conversations.
• And one more…Couldn’t resist this Snazzy Archive setup, even though it is just a bit overboard. :)

Hmmm, guess that’s it. I tried out several other watchacallits and plugins but rejected them for one reason or another. As always I’d be happy to hear your comments and suggestions about Shiny Life. DId I break somethin’? Is the site easy to read? Easy to navigate? Too cluttered or plain? Let me know!

I’ve finally given in against the rising tide of Twitter and am trying it out. :) When Twitter first came online I was very skeptical. Why would I want to know about every little event in a person’s life? As the service has matured it seems to have morphed into something much more useful and interesting – a sort of living news source and social aggregate.

So, what the heck. I’m VladBjornson on Twitter. Follow me for news and tidibts about SL that don’t make it to this blog, as well as updates about the software and websites that I use on a daily basis. Heck, I might even through in an opinion or two. :)

Snowy’s awesome build at my Sunset Myst sim is showcased on the ‘SL Things to Do’ site – a great blog that lists all sorts of cool places to visit in SL. Lovely photos by Lainy Voom and a nice write up about the sim, too.  Thanks, Jenn!