Scan-N-Land

Everybody is doing it

Reuters reporter Adam Pasick does it. CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman does it. Journalist James Wagner Au does it. Even Marco Cadioli, a photographer and college lecturer from Milan, Italy, does it.

It seems everyone does it.

What is it? "Second Life," the online virtual universe (or "metaverse") program. While one of our classmates is the perpetual pooh-pooher of Second Life, some pretty important people are taking note according this Feb. 13 "Shop Talk" column in Editor & Publisher.

About once a week, Terdiman's avatar GreeterDan Godel hosts interviews in CNET's virtual theater with prominent people from both the real world and within the program. Subjects have included Philip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden Lab, the program developer, and DigiBarn's Bruce Damer, who is a historian of virtual worlds. A recent interview featured the chief gaming officer of Fortune 500 company Sun Microsystems.

Legions of blogs and websites devoted to the metaverse have sprung up, including the leading blog New World Notes. The site is run by Au. He had spent three years serving as Linden's official "embedded" journalist within Second Life, but his site is now affiliated with Federated Media Publishing, which runs the popular site Boing Boing.

The program also has its own newspaper, The Second Life Herald. Within Second Life, users can click on a kiosk to bring up the publication's website, which is funded by advertising just like most other content websites. A would-be rival, The Democrat, which sought to provide in-world content through the program's "notecard" feature, folded in early November after a four-month run.

So like it or not, we may all be pulled into 3D journalism someday.

posted by Mark H. @ 2/14/2007 12:44:00 PM