Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Monday Memory
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First published in 2008, "The Husband That Eshi Made" is an essential New World Notes story of how the virtual world can connect us with people in the material realm, even long after they're gone: [M]emories of her late husband] wracked her in the grocery store, on the second anniversary of Glenn’s passing. Since then,…
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With a certain tech billionaire currently railing against companies including Apple withdrawing their ads from Twitter, it's a good time to remember a fairly related story from 2007-2008 — when Linden Lab began to pivot away from its libertarian approach to governing Second Life content: In 2006, for example, Philip Rosedale refused to intercede against Ginko,…
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I recently mentioned how IBM's presence in Second Life led to an unexpected backlash, so here's a classic example of metaverse-based marketing done right — "Greenies", an SL sim rendered in a giant-sized apartment users could explore like tiny ants: [Greenies is] from a small British development company called Rezzable, which plans to use it…
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I recently chatted with Samantha Cole of Vice for her article "The Corporate Metaverse Can’t Compete" and am kicking myself for forgetting to mention the wackiest example of emergent social behavior in a corporate-sponsored metaverse experience — that time IBM's official campus in Second Life was flooded with labor protesters from IBM's Italian branch, including…
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When Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic asked how much Taylor Swift is like the Metaverse, the question seemed pretty bizarre at first — but then got us talking about Suzanne Vega performing in Second Life, the first platinum-selling artist to do so in any metaverse platform. While's Vega's appearance did help inspire a rush…
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Left to right: Linden Lab's Robin Harper and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, along with the CEOs of MySpace and LinkedIn (Commonwealth Club, 2006) Good point from reader Martin K, adding to Cory Ondrejka's analysis of why Second Life hit a growth plateau during the peak of media attention between 2006-2008: The other trend that SecondLife was…
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One of the highlights in the Wall Street Journal's new podcast series on the founding of Second Life is when the reporter visits Steller Sunshine's beanstalk, the oldest user-made object in Second Life. And you can still visit and try to claim it yourself: [Click here to teleport] Created on March 13, 2002, over a…
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Latest addition to my New World Notes Classics archive (bottom right column) is my interview in 2007 with Tasrill Sieyes, who tells me about turning Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase into a Second Life avatar: I was showing someone my abstract avatars that I have made, and they mentioned that making a 3D form of…
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With the Second Life community and the wider industry still processing the passing of Ebbe Altberg, I went back to read my first interview with him in 2014, shortly after he became Linden Lab's CEO. It's particularly moving how he discovered the virtual world through his son: Though he is Linden Lab’s new CEO now,…
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All the recent hype over NFT-based virtual art* speculation reminded me that Second Life, as usual, anticipated that trend well over a decade ago — for instance, this dress by acclaimed designer Eshi Otawara which was sold in 2008 at auction for L$460,000, roughly $1700 in USD, with all proceeds going to benefit the annual…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 