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The Library Gallery opens with “Blurred Realities” October 7th!

A new gallery opens on Info Island on October 7th! The
initial show is entitled “Blurred Realities”, which explores
the zoom blur photography technique of Bucky Barkley. Bucky
explains: “A Zoom Blur is a bit like an impressionistic painting,
done completely in-camera in a half second. It’s also a wonderful
way to wear out a lens!”. Come see the photos, the 3 story space,
see old friends, and make new ones. Opening event is on
Saturday, October 7th - 6-8 pm SL time. The gallery is located
at Info Island (24, 125, 33).

A meeting for planning the new Science Center headed up by Hayduke Ebisu was held on Info Island II Thursday night and attended by 8 people. If you would like to participate and join the Science Center group, contact Hayduke Ebisu.

Info Island I will be decorating the libraries for Halloween during the next few weeks. One of the exhibits is Halloween Haven of Horror: Stephen Kind Reads Here.” If you are looking for good scary horror books, this is the place to go - to our mausoleum of good scary reads.

Stop by Info island to play a game of giant checkers created by Librarian Eiseldora Reisman.

Chris Reitveld has build a Victorian bookshop which is on Info Island II for Halloween and Christmas.

This Tuesday at 6 PM PST the Second Life Future Salon will meet with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett on the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower on Sheep Island [<–SLURL, click to launch Second Life]. More details here. The meeting will be conducted in voice over Skype and made available as a podcast thanks to Johnny Ming of Secondcast and Metaverse Sessions.

The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of
transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of
personal information. As prep reading, viewing, and listening, here are a few timely links on the topics of transparency and privacy on the web:

•Justin Hall’s short video about passively multi-player online gaming (PMOGs)

•Onlife, a program Justin Hall mentions in this MP3 of his keynote at the Mobile Games Conference:

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every
interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a
personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read,
documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of
your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions
between you and your favorite apps over time.

•Mark Barrett inverviewed on Secondcast, responding to criticism over SLStats.com originally being opt-out, not opt-in for avatar tracking, as in the Second Life Herald article Is Big Brother Watch-ing?– that, I might add, starts by calling out my avatar, SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, for not having any SLStats friends, ha!

•Podcast of futurist Jamais Cascio on Personal Memory Assitants and the Participatory Panopticon from Accelerating Change 2005. From the abstract:

The value of mobile camera phones as a means to capture events in one’s
life will only be further enhanced as these devices become more
powerful, their cameras improve, their capabilities increase, and the
speed of connectivity continues to grow. There will be an opportunity
to view and save everything we do. This is monitoring on a huge scale
but we will do it willingly. Moreover, the sheer size of the numbers of
people involved will overwhelm any attempts to use this monitoring in a
‘Big Brother’ way.

•danah Boyd writes about backlash within the Facebook community over news feeds that let you easilly follow every little change your friends make to their pages: Facebook’s "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. She lists her main takeaways:

• Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
• The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
• We’ve experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot.  When are we going to learn?
• Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
• Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
• Facebook lost its innocence this week.

•
MoBuzz YouTube video on the Facebook feeds. I like this analysis.

• A New York Times article on a woman identified by piecing together her AOL search queries that were made public along with thousands of others: A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. From the article:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period
on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that
urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click,
the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There
are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the
last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett
county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow
that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in
Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and
loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a
reporter read part of the list to her.

•Links to David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, on privacy and surveillance

Join the SL Future Salon group in Second Life  for inworld announcements and reminders and I hope to see you on Tuesday!

Info Island/Second Life Library is pleased to be working in collaboration with the New Media Consortium on library services and resources for their beautiful library. Watch this column and the NMC Campus Observer for updates. The libraries will work together to provide a variety of services, events, training and resources for students and residents of Second Life.

Approximately 20 people attended an excellent program given by author Greyfox Book (Jon Klements in real life) about his writings on superheroes.

“The Early Years of Elizabeth I” will be presented at the Second Life Library open air auditorium on Wednesday September 27 at 5 pm sl. The young Elizabeth I herself will visit Info Island to share the story of her early years before taking the throne of England at age 25, Elizabeth I is thought to be one of the greatest monarchs of English history. Come and hear her story and ask her questions.

Reference librarians on Info island are staffing the welcome/reference desk several hours per day to help visitors and answer reference questions. Terminals have benn placed around the island so visitors can ask questions via email or text chat with a librarian via Question Point software. Soon, we hope to place these in other educational locations. If you have informational questions, visit Info island for help from librarians.

There is a new exhibits building built by Shadow Fugazi on Info Island II. It currently displays the Library of Congress Declaration of Independence and will feature new displays from Library of Congress and other places every few months.

Info Island II has a new movie theater and events area called the SL Pantheon Picture House. The building was constructed by Nubian Bliss. Old movies and other types of entertainment will be offered here. Watch the Second Life events calendar! The building was purchased with funds from the second prize in the Talis Library Mashup contest.

Hayduke Ebisu is Founder of a Science Center which is being built on Info Island II. If you are interested in science, and would like to become involved, please contact Hayduke Ebisu.

Experience the magic and mystery of Xibalba inside and outside. Usu Ventura has just finished building the first stage of Xibalba, an evocation of the Maya Otherworld. It features a Second Life version of
the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque, Mexico. Inside the temple
is a gallery of Maya art and architecture. Donations will benefit the
Hospitalito in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, which is rebuilding after
a mudslide destroyed it in 2005. You can visit at Info island II
41,217, 24. For more information, contact Usu Ventura.

October is Charles Dickens month at the Caledon branch library. On October 19, there will be a discussion of Dicken’s novel “Hard Times” and on Halloween, Dickens’ ghost stores will be shared. For more information on the Caledon branch, contact JJ Drinkwater, Head of the Caledon branch.

The grand opening for the Alliance Second Life Library/Info Island is scheduled for October 13 and 14. On Friday, the 13th, Mystery Manor will show horror films at the new theater and host a costume ball with prizes for the best costumes. On October 14, a variety of fun activities and tours of the library will be available. More details will be provided closer to that time. Put the date on your calendars!

If you have ideas for programs, training , or materials you would like to see offered by Second Life Library, please contact Lorelei Junot or Abbey Zenith. If you have a class or a group that would like a tour, do not hesitate to contact us.

Abstract:

The clothing templates are in Adobe Photoshop (PSD) format - however, all recent versions of Paint Shop Pro can open the files with no problem.

To open the file, go to File–>Open and select Files of Type: PSD Photoshop (*.psd) from the file type drop down and find the template file. Paint Shop Pro will open the file with all the layers intact.

The Second Life Future Salon continues on Tuesday, September 26th at 6 PM PST with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett. We’ll be talking on Skype and streaming live into the Sheep Tower 5th floor conference room [<–SLURL] on Sheep Island. The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information.

Justin Hall has been working on a framework for what he calls passively multi-player online gaming or PMOGing. See his short video presentation here for a succinct introduction, and an MP3 of his inspired keynote at the Mobile Games Conference for more. PMOGing asks that you make your online activity transparent to others in order to turn the web itself into an MMO of sorts, one that we play simply by behaving and performing for the networked public eye. From PassivelyMultiplayer.com:

Description

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing
play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their
unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they
interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles,
contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents,
digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual
fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous
people, gangsters, soldiers.

Summary:

A system for using user data and device-use history to generate avatars and/or game moves in an online multiuser environment.

Mark Barrett came on the Second Life scene relatively recently and made waves with his site SLStats.com which tracks how much time you’ve spent inworld, where, and with who. After initial controversy over people’s SL information being posted to the web without their explicitly opting into the SLStats system, Mark quickly modified to the service to only track those who’ve signed up themselves. Mark is also the creator of SLBuzz and SLTags. From SLStats.com:

Second Life Stats allows you to see how much time you spend playing
Second Life, and can even keep statistics on other interesting things,
such as tracking your whereabouts. It does this using a small
attachment that your avatar can wear.

SLStats is completely passive, and doesn’t require you to do
anything besides wearing the SLStats attachment. You can browse
statistics of other Second Life residents using SLStats, rate them, and
also write blog entries straight from within Second Life.

I also find myself now working on an SL side project that juggles opt-in etiquette, transparency and privacy. What is it? Well, I kid you not, it’s a kind of mix between the old SLTV, Subservient Chicken, and "Someone keeps stealing my letters…" (a kind of massively multi-player alphabet sandbox). More on that soon, and at the salon.

And so the three of us will discuss our projects and visions, issues and expectations around privacy and transparency, and work with saloners on defining some groundrules for lifelogging etiquette on the web and in virtual worlds. There’s been a lot about this in the news recently. More background posts coming soon.

Abstract: A flash video tutorial on adding tags is available here:

http://www.sluniverse.com/video/tag/tag%20demo%20video.html

Please note: you must be a registered user to be able to tag your images.