If you saw my earlier post (reLink), then you’ll know I’ve been following the latest issue concerning the virtual world, Second Life: allegations of child pornography. Actually, more than just following it; I’ve been involved in online discussions regarding the sensitive topic being debated. So much so that one of the individuals voicing their concerns, “bella Ophelia”, implied that I and all others who weren’t prepared to join in the witchhunt were, in fact, the pedophiles about whom she was concerned (I believe that person has since been banned or at least suspended; if it had been more than implied, I’d be contacting a lawyer).

Of additional interest is the fact that this person’s partner, “Levi Glass” (I assume this is also bella’s RL partner based on comments in the forum threads) took over the crusade, but then commented how much he enjoyed pornography (he may be a real life photographer who does pron photography; some of the comments suggested he was). Here are some of his comments:

It is because it is my line of work {pornography} that I have a clear idea where the line must be drawn.
…
Oh, and I’ve never paid a model in my life, they either pay me or if it is a mutual project they pose for free.

It’s tough work, but someone has to do it.
Yes, I’m very smooth

Class act. There are some curious people out there.

I guess it’s worth pointing out that at no time was any simulated activity of the kind they were protesting actually seen and/or documented. When pressed, it turned out to be an adult resident using a childlike avatar who was “dancing suggestively” in a “sexually charged dance club” (whatever any of that means). It was clothed and there was nothing else going on.

I think the concerned parties were also alarmed by the avatar’s profile, wherein the person said that they were “available for hire”. I guess the thought that people actually hire themselves out to be virtual children to virtual married couples never occurred to them.

In any event, perhaps due to my early suggestion that they take the matter to the mainstream press, that’s what someone has done. Apparently C|Net is now interested in the story. If you’re interested and have access, you can find plenty of locked threads on the Second Life forum. Or you can read the spillover on C|Net (Link 1, Link 2). I guess we should be on the lookout for an article.

Last week MoCo Loco mentioned (Link) the “Handshake” lamp by Paris-based designer, Arik Levy. Most of us who’ve been watching the development of RP as a fabrication option (especially in Europe) are familiar with his work.

Today I notice that Core77 has linked to a BusinessWeek article (Link) that gathers more information and images and packages it for easier consumption. I guess they share the same eyeglasses.

Meanwhile I’m finding other examples of people using rapid-prototyping machines to create products and sculptures (I even mentioned one recently – reLink). There still aren’t many, but I’m guessing that will change quickly. When I do find something interesting, I’ll definitely be posting something here.

In the meantime, if you’ve not noticed the Time Compression links on my blogroll, you might find them interesting. If you dig a little bit, you can find some informative rapid-prototyping/manufacturing articles on both.

{Image Copyright © 2005 L Design}

A little over six years ago when I moved to the East Coast, I made a decision to start eliminating stuff from my life. The relatively little I had was still too much for me.

I was aware that the future job market probably meant I (and others) would need to be more mobile; able to pull up stakes and relocate on short notice. So downgrading made good sense to me. Years earlier I’d made some major changes in my life (like becoming pesce-vegetarian) so to me it seemed like a continuation of some unfinished business.

With that in mind, the first thing I did was get rid of my furniture. To this day I have nothing more than a desk, a chair, a drawing table, and a simple wire shelf unit for an old television. That’s it.

Similarly, I’ve gone through most of my belongings, eliminating that which is unnecessary or of no significant sentimental value. I’m not yet finished. The amount of junk collected over a lifetime is truly amazing; and I’m far from what anyone would call a packrat. Hopefully I’ll have reached a satisfactory level of non-ownership this year.

So it’s with interest that I caught a post over on Brand Noise (Link) pointing out an apparent trend(?) similar to my own behavior. I have to admit though, what’s being reported is pretty lame imo. A pact to not buy anything for only six months? Piece a cake.

Why blog about this? Simple. Just because I want to eliminate the anchors in my life doesn’t mean I don’t like nice things. Far from it. I just value my freedom more. I simply want physical objects that are truly important and worth the hassle of ownership. The rest can exist in a virtual space as far as I’m concerned. If I get really attached to it, I’ll have it fabbed.

I previously indicated I intend to shut off the feed from this blog. That will happen at the end of this month – that timing is because I’m curious to see what happens to traffic. I’ve given my reasons, but there’s another good reason: the coming glut of advertising to your RSS feed. Here’s an excerpt (Link) from one excited member of the marketing community looking to use syndication technology to advertise:

New techniques are being unveiled that allow marketers to leverage the appeal and growing adoption of RSS without sacrificing their hard work of the last decade to achieve measurability, targetability and flexibility.
…
With these next-generation solutions, each recipient gets his or her own unique feed, enabling marketers to understand exactly how many and which recipients are picking up their messages. And because each feed is unique to the individual recipient, marketers can track and measure subscriber actions all the way down to an individual, facilitating the same behavioral targeting and testing possible in other personalized media. Moreover, marketers can actually create a unique message for each user based upon demographic or behavioral data.

Now I know what the argument is going to be: you don’t have to subscribe to the feed if it’s full of ads. That’s right. Only I’ve been watching as some of my favorite blogs slowly morph into advertising whores. Some barely even load anymore they’re so full of code delivering dynamic, trackable, analyzable content. All that AdSense crap is becoming nonsense. I barely visit the MIT Advertising blog anymore, it loads so slowly. And the BusinessWeek blogs have been running some horrendous Land Rover ad that drops the site loading to a crawl (you’ll notice I’ve dumped BusinessWeek and Nussbaum from my blogroll). And if you’ve visited Bruce Sterling’s blog in the past few days, you’ve noticed a change over there as well. It’s off the blogroll too.

Of course, people will make their own choices. Some sites will doubtlessly strike a balance that makes RSS subscribers happy. In the meantime, on someone’s reader, my content is going to be (and likely already is) sandwiched between two RSS ads. By virtue of that aggregation, my content has, by default, become part of someone else’s advertising campaign. This juxtaposition won’t happen all the time, I know. And again, with all the feed reading options out there, for some people it won’t happen at all. But I don’t want it happening, period.

There’s been some buzz around Phillip Torrone’s Make: blog entry (Link) pointing out that virtual worlds and MMORPG’s should be developing their own credit cards and reward systems. I’m not sure why there’s any buzz, to be honest. While it’s a nice idea, anyone involved in virtual worlds should be at the point where anything crossing over from the real world shouldn’t be a surprise.

Besides, Second Life, which he uses as an example, already depends on users to have a credit card; you need one to sign up – even for the free service (it prevents people from signing up numerous accounts, among other things). And as noted earlier (reLink), the trade in virtual goods is sufficient to have Sony considering giving up their subscription models and replacing that (substantial) revenue with fees from player-to-player transactions. Let me quote the important part of SOE Smedley’s comment:

Smedley said Thursday that Station Exchange is paying off. “It’s a real business,” he said. “It has a very meaningful revenue stream, and it’s growing.”

This all does have me wondering though: at what point will people finally grok that immaterial boundaries have simply fallen, and the material boundaries are crumbling fast? Where are we on the technology adoption curve?