I want that emoticon wand!

Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life , was a lecture and discussion with Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, two of the creators of Second Life. They discussed the basics of SL, mostly concentrating on the different aspects of how it is fully user-created. I'm not sure if I really learned anything completely new from this video, although it was interesting to watch, but mostly it seemed like just a clearer, more straightforward account of things I've heard in bits before.

One of the more important ideas discussed was about how the possibilities for a new consumer financial market are both very real and rapidly expanding. The ability to combine single prims to create whole complex structures eliminates the creative difficulties of the ideas such as C++ and other Visual Basics languages and allows for a creative form to be more readily accessible to people without specific computer programming training. The intellectual property concepts within Second Life have a possibility to redefine the creative marketplace and further affect the real world intellectual marketplace.

Another topic discussed was the system of full server-side storage that allows for great protection from outside intrusion that other massive online communities often lack. Meanwhile, within the community, there is promotion of the feelings of "brotherhood" in allowing either copying or manipulation of most of the produced goods while still granting the original creator technical intellectual property rights to their creation. Also with in the topic of security, he talked of their form of "parental control" which is a policy that separates those users who self-admit to being 13-17 years of age into a separate area and then encourages them to report anyone who seems to be an "adult" and vice-versa in the main world. Anyone reported for violations is required to submit valid form of ID, such as faxing in a drivers licence