iKOZ

I just read about an expo billed as a ‘Virtual International Podcasting Expo’. The details are here.

When I read this, I thought ‘ooo, in Second Life?’ – but apparently not. The site seems extremely vague about the hows and whatnot of this ‘3-D Virtual Expo’ but looking at one of the pages here, it looks like a web-based habbo hotel-type thing.

They appear to have a pretty good (and long!) lineup of speakers. It will be interesting to see what happens and how it all works.

There could be all sorts of reasons why they do not choose Second Life to do this, but I think they could do it there too, to an extent. I get the feeling it’s jumping on the bandwagon a bit, but if it’s good for podcasting and it helps people learn, then that’s good enough for me.

Dory Devlin, Yahoo! Tech’s ‘The Mom’ has a post here about Second Life, since hearing of ‘Adam Reuters’ (Adam Pasick) being ‘embedded’ as a journalist in Second Life for Reuters – they have a dedicated site at http://secondlife.reuters.com. There’s a hearty discussion thread building on Dory’s post! Lots of ‘I don’t get it’ posts and lots of ‘I make money!’ posts.

Recently, Adam posted a story that the US Congress are launching a probe into the virtual economy that exists within Second Life (and a follow-up here). Many people make quite alot of money in this virtual world. Some even more than the employees of Linden Lab, the creators and curators of this new ‘metanation’ which I inhabit.

It’s an interesting discussion – and one which will have to be addressed soon, whether we like it or not. I heard about a year or so ago of someone who was trying to go through his taxes and wanted to deal with the money he was being paid to look after someone’s character in a different game. His accountant and the taxman had no idea what to do, so shrugged and ignored it.

I think it’s bound to change. But I wonder how the various global tax offices decide to deal with it. There will probably be virtual tax havens you could log in from, to avoid paying. We’ll see. What about if Linden move all their servers offshore? How about Sealand? That’s a ‘very Second Life’ place
In the next week or so, we’ll hit the 1 million users mark in Second Life. (Currently stands at 983,621) That will be a big day which will no doubt garner headlines all over the world – then more users will come – and more money will be exchanged – etc, etc…

Doctoe Schnook and I (Koz Farina) hope to start a podcast purely about Second Life soon. Stay tuned!

You can now find an OPML file containing all the urls to blogHUD user homepages, places visited by blogHUD users and all the RSS feeds associated with each of those.

An OPML file is a simple data format which many news feed readers can import as a directory or folder to keep subscriptions and feeds organised. It is commonly used to import and export lists of RSS feeds.

Here is the url to the OPML : http://bloghud.com/opml/

You will see in the data that there are two folders. blogHUD people and blogHUD places. These contain entries for each with an htmlUrl attribute and an xmlUrl attribute. These are the urls to the website link and the RSS feed link respectively.

I know some people are probably reading this thinking ‘wha….???’ – but I know that some people will read this and go ‘YAY!’

See ya later aggregator! Koz
posted by Koz Farina on Hwaegi using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]