Second Life Round Up

Politics
"Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said on Friday.

“We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden,” Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Wästberg told AFP... While there were individuals in Second Life calling themselves the “Canadian Ambassador” and “The United States Embassy to Second Life”, the Swedish initiative would however be the first officially sanctioned embassy in Second Life." /radiowood.com/


Business and Marketing
"More than 65 companies have already launched their Second Life presence, turning out to be more interested into Second Life than actual users... The virtual world currently has a total of 2,965,539 residents, but only 1,037,804 of these have logged-in in the last 60 days. When writing this article, only 25,845 of them are online this minute."

"Nissan (is) offering Second Life residents free test drives of the virtual copies of their real life models...

Free items that duplicate the real products might be a good start, allowing the residents to have a full demo of the product before buying it in the real world, as Nissan is doing, but even more towards enriching the user experience by adding new functionality (such as) Nike giving you running shoes that increase your gamespeed. Or Sears giving you a free internal decorator... Or universities offering in-game courses on how to improve your gameplay. For example Harward offering a free course on making money in the game, and then hoping to enroll these students later on. The opportunities seem quite endless." /ssdiary.marketingstudies.net/


Entertainment
"Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture was simultaneously premiering live at Sundance (in a dark, somewhat institutional room dubbed the Microcinema) and in an invite-only screening at a theater on Second Life... I just figured it would be a cool movie and a cool scene, and it was." /wired.com/


Marriage Counseling
"Arianna Huffington, blog mistress of the Huffington Post, revealed her opinions on blogging, the 2008 presidential race, covering her midriff and Second Life as marriage therapy: 'A lot of people who want to explore different possibilities, they can now do it in Second Life instead of, say, leaving their wife — fulfilling some other fantasy. Why not experiment? I think Second Life will save marriages.'" /wired.com/


The Moon?
The International Spaceflight Museum for hosted a Q&A event about the "missing moonlanding tapes," which ran in Wired Magazine's January issue. /flickr.com/


The Truth about SecondLife?
Clay Shirky: "I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable (an argument I made in the Meganiche article), but they won’t, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.

"The logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life don’t like it." /many2many/