Philip Linden on 3D Cameras from =IcaruS= on Vimeo.

IcaruS have posted a handful of short videos featuring some of Phillip Linden’s comments at the recent Train for Success event in SL. He talks about 3D cameras, Interoperability, mobile platforms, and answers other audience questions.

The new official SL blogs are finally up and running. Glad to see this and I hope it means that we’ll hear more stuff from the Lindens. It’s been pretty quiet on their blog for months now. Check em out.

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.

New World Notes reports: “Second Life developer Linden Lab will announce tomorrow that they’ve purchased two e-commerce services which enable the buying and selling of Second Life content via the Web: XstreetSL, formerly owned by Jay Geeseman (Apotheus Silverman in SL), and OnRez, formerly owned by metaverse developer the Electric Sheep Company.”

Read Hamlet’s full report on NWN.

Wow. I’m quite surprised by this announcement, although it seems like a good move once I stop to think about it. SLexchange is THE best way to find and buy stuff in SL, not counting word-of-mouth from in-world friends. OnRez is a similar but underused service. It’d be great if LL could figure out a slick way to integrate these tools into the SL client search tools.

You can also read the official Linden Lab press release. Head on over to the official forum thread to listen to people rant about the change…errr I mean voice your opinion on the matter. :)

Cory Ondrejka, former CTO and co-founder of Linden Lab, has posted his predictions for 2009. Amongst them is a rosy outlook for growth in our virtual world.

“By shockingly good, let’s say 50% growth in concurrency and James’ measure of active users.  Why do I expect SL to rock 2009?  A few reasons.  First, world-wide recession makes SL more valuable as a source of income, cost effective collaboration tool, substitute for expensive travel, and educational resource.  Second, the same recession — combined with Lively’s demise — means competition will remain non-existent.”

Check out the rest of his predictions on his Blog, collapsing geography.