secondlife

MacArthur Series on Philanthropy and Virtual Worlds

chrishambly — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:28:38 -0500

Laura Reeve asked me to publish this for her on my blog.

MacArthur Series on Philanthropy and Virtual Worlds

The USC Institute for Network Culture and Global Kids present a discussion on Virtual Liberties: Do Avatars Dream of Civil Rights?

12:00p.m. PST on Monday, January 28, 2008

Please join the USC Institute for Network Culture and Global Kids for the first event in an upcoming series on philanthropy and virtual worlds.

The event, "Virtual Liberties: Do Avatars Dream of Civil Rights?" will be held on the USC Annenberg Island or on the Global Kids estate on Second Life at 12:00p.m. PST on Monday, January 28, 2008.

Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, will chair a discussion about the avatar civil liberties. Joining him will be Robin Harper, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from Linden Lab, and Jack Balkin, professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.

Prior to their remarks, Douglas Thomas, Professor at USC and Director of the Institute for Network Culture, and Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, will give updates on and announce a dramatic series of programs as part of MacArthur's year exploring philanthropy in virtual worlds. Thomas and Joseph are MacArthur grantees.

What are your thoughts and reflections on Blackboard

chrishambly — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:33:10 -0500

Some of you may recall the black day when the learning management software company Blackboard dot org decided to file for some fairly outrageous patents.

I registered the domain BoycottBlackboard.org on 2006-08-02, in direct response to the issue being raised amongst the members of the SecondLife Educators mailing list, which incidentally as of Oct 2007 had around 3.5K members… We (generally as a group) were horrified with this crass move by Blackboard, the incredulous sweeping manner of their patents, the utter disregard for prior art, the complete ignorant and falsity of their claims, and decided appropriate action was called for.

The petition itself, and the way in which it grew in force, can be seen as a classic example of how social media can move mountains, just looking at all the names and institutions on the petition is proof of that, and do go ahead and look.

Though I’d never claim sole responsibility for helping change their mind, the petition did however get heard, there is no doubt about it Blackboard took note of the academic community and changed their stance on the patents and dreamed up the "The Blackboard Patent Pledge". Of course if your learning management software is not open source, all that has no meaning, tough luck!

In fact they changed many of the ludicrous ideas and released press releases stating so. The boycott blackboard petition has become part of the wiki entry for the history of the company, and I was personally interviewed for numerous educational publications concerning this.

But now some time has passed and I’m curious to know where you stand on this currently in terms of your feeling towards the company, and I’d appreciate it if you would post your comments up here.

Do you have any recent dealings with Blackboard, how do you feel, has it gone away now, has your anger depleted, have you forgotten the crime, are they excused??

MediaCamp BUCKS 07 Logo

chrishambly — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:16:12 -0400

I had an email in my inbox this morning from Eaon Pritchard who has designed an awesome logo for MediaCampBUCKS 07.

Eaon went for a “populist” and “web2.0” look which is perfect for the event, nice one Eaon!

If you have not heard about MediaCamp yet, we (that’s you) are hosting the event at BCUC, just 30 minutes west of London, which is a piece of cake to get to from any direction, on October 20.

MediaCamp is a free un-conference where the whole event is driven by the participants themselves, it is set to be a real mix-up of people too, coming from marketing, academia, b2b, bloggers, sound-designers, networkers, agencies, the whole range of peeps getting together to learn and share.

This MediaCampBUCKS 07 is heavily focussed on new-media tools, and how we can embrace them in our careers, instruction, business etc.

MediaCampBUCKS07

What do you think of the logo yourself?

LinkedIn - Creative Developer for Crayon Marketing

chrishambly — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:46:44 -0400

One of my goals this week is to update my LinkedIn profile to include as much information as possible.

Until now I have used LinkedIn as a fairly “broad stroked brush”, with some very wide summaries, but it seems to me that if I now dig deeper and outline some of my projects more specifically I’ll obtain far more recommendations.

So this is the update I’m adding for the work I carried out with the Crazy Gang at Crayon Marketing, ahh I do love the way those guys work.

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Online Media industry)
January 2007 – July 2007 ( 7 months)

• Worked as part of their Virtual Thirst team to develop a brand presence for The Coca Cola Company in the 3D virtual world of SecondLife.

• Conceptualised and developed a prototype "experience" of the Coca Cola brand in SecondLife.

• Created machinima video footage to aid viral marketing

• Interviewed on podcasts for viral marketing the campaign

• Sat on the advisory panel to judge a winning entry for the campaign

Virtualthirst

Below I’m including the machinima clip I produced as part of this project for those of you who do not use Secondlife, you know it might even tempt you to get your toes a wee bit wet!.

Click To Play

My LinkedIn

How To Stream Music Into SecondLife Using Winamp

chrishambly — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:38:20 -0400

I’ve recently be spending a few moments here and there getting the schedule ready for The Summer Of Love Festival 07 in SecondLife, of course not entirely alone, I must extend gratitude to some wonderful helpers too.

What I have found during these couple of weeks is that there seems to be a number of musicians in need of some help when it comes to streaming music into SecondLife.

I thought that a posted video here on my blog would be the best place for that help, for those people who want a free solution who use the windows operating system.

The set up I use is Windows XP, Winamp and a Shoutcast Plugin, all free of charge, which of course is wonderful!

The concept is surprisingly simple, you simply capture the sound on your machine through Winamp, which sends the data (using the plugin) to a streaming server (you need to borrow one), and then that streaming server information is broadcast into a land parcel in SecondLife – simple eh?

Hope the video helps.