This report is long in coming: shoe manufacturer Adidas Reebok has decided to give the Second Life virtual world a try. This one is bittersweet because as some of you know, last year I was talking with some of my contacts at Nike about doing this very same thing. I got so far as to receive an .stl mesh file of one of their products to generate textures for use in SL, but that’s all she wrote. You can bet I’ll be passing a link to the post over on 3pointD (Link) reporting this. And while I’m at it, I should send along another link to the Mass Customization blog which gets into the trends and opportunities of customizing shoes (Link). It doesn’t discuss transreality product, which has been on my mind since the first time I saw Quake back in the mid 90’s, but it doesn’t need to. The Nike iD-NBA 2k6 connection says it all afaic.

Wired has a couple of articles about Pirate Bay (Link 1, Link 2), the popular Swedish website (among other things) that promotes filesharing and piracy. They’re worth reading. If you’re one of the people who think it’s kewl and worship people who recklessly endorse that behavior, no sense in reading further. If you’re an artist, designer, or perhaps wondering if there’s a catch, you might want to continue.

For starters, here are some things I wonder about when I try to figure these people out:

And those are just from reading the first installment. When they get into politics in the second installment, this part just cracks me up:

“We have a lot in common with the environmental movement,” he says. Where environmentalists see destruction of natural resources, the pirates see culture at risk. “(We) saw a lot of hidden costs to society in the way companies maximize their copyright.”

Right. A bunch of geeks sitting around protecting destroying Swedish culture by allowing American media to saturate theirs is like biological geneticists telling people that creating mutant species will protect native species. You get a sense of how clueless they are from this bit:

When asked about compensation for artists, both men reject the language itself. No artist sits down to “create content,” Fleischer says.

Hate to burst your bubble Fleischer ol’ boy, but most artists do, in fact, sit down to create content. It’s how they survive and make a living in a world that doesn’t really give a damn about Art. Great way to help the Culture: take away opportunities for Artists to create Content in areas that use their skillsets and instead force them into other meaningful work… like flipping burgers. But what do you expect after reading this:

It’s not the problem of the pirates, he tells me later, to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system — someone else will figure that out. Their job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.

Funny how it’s people who don’t create anything that consider it their duty to tear something down with little regard for the broader impact. Makes me think these guys support the American invasion of Iraq. Considering how much they apparently like having their own culture wiped out, I guess that makes sense.

Caught an update of sorts yesterday over on ProgrammableWeb.com (Link) to work being done by some Amazon.com programmers busy linking that service to Second Life. From the post:

In that virtual store you can search the Amazon catalog, discover items, add them to your cart, click the ‘Checkout’ button, and you’re taken straight to the regular Amazon checkout page.

Here’s some additional information on that store: Continue reading →

It seems a topic about which I wrote some months back has resurfaced: Virtual Age Play. To get up to speed it’s probably worth reading my original post and the comments on it (reLink – and I’d like to add that since that post, someone who disagrees with my opinion has obviously submitted my email to some unpleasant pornographic websites with which they were apparently familiar and which then started flooding my account; thankfully, Yahoo does an amazingly excellent job of filtering that crap). There were unsurprisingly few bloggers willing to touch on the subject, and while it wasn’t the first time the topic had been raised in Second Life, it was the beginning of more serious MSM interest.

Apparently another blogger, and Second Life resident, has recently raised the virtual age play issue again (Link) and that post was flagged by the Boing Boing megasite (Link). Given the current headlines Continue reading →

Treehugger posted (Link) about an interesting little business called Unto This Last (Link) which takes orders on their flatpack furniture and fabricates them on demand (they use a CNC). There are some interesting pieces on their website, including the above table. I usually think about fab-on-demand only in terms of additive processes like metal sintered parts (maybe because I’m so familiar with subtractive processes – like sanding foam), but I should give regular CNC more credit. To that end, considering all the models I’ve made for CNC’ing, I should design something, have it made and get it shipped to me. Have to give it some thought.

{Image Copyright © Unto This Last}