Luke Walker.org

Check it out! The Non-Profit Commons got “griefed” tonight–big pictures of ninja turtles bouncing around everywhere. it was gone by the time I logged in, but check out Glitteractica Cookie’s blog about it. This is my second experience with griefing–somebody messed around with TIG’s island (SURL) a few weeks ago.

Another NPCer had a chance to talk to tonight’s griefer–apparently it was a mass attack and a bunch of sims were affected, and his reasoning had something to with being sick of SL’s spam (again, check Glitteractica Cookie’s blog). I have no clue what the people who had their fun with TIG’s island were doing… It didn’t seem like as organized a form of protest… more like a random disruption. But as a form of protest, griefing is pretty interesting to me. I definitely couldn’t actually manage it, because my skills are pretty limited when it comes to SL, but I can tell that it definitely involves a lot of work… and only a few minutes to get eliminate. This is one of the many ways Second Life differs dramatically from the real world–when it comes to something you don’t like in your space, you basically just hit delete. Or at least that’s all I had to do. Granted if it’s really offensive or annoying (screeching music, etc), it can be a bit disruptive, maybe scare off some visitors, and it’s a waste of bandwidth, but it’s definitely not permanent… Just annoying and maybe offensive.

It would suck if everyone was doing it, but right now, everyone’s not, and… as we learned today in the office, there are far more problematic things about Second Life…

TakingITGlobal is looking to get involved in Second Life, potentially in a big way. In the last month, we’ve received the donation of an island from Starwood Resorts & Hotels (see the Aloft blog for more information), as well as an office in TechSoup’s Non-Profit Commons.

We (pretty quickly) need a couple of volunteers to help us develop, maintain, and engage users in both these spaces. We want to use them to engage our members in new ways, showcase ours members’ work, and engage whole new audiences. If you’re interested in helping us as we step into Second Life, check out the job description at:

http://about.takingitglobal.org/d/getinvolved?view=201

I love tracking things.

Correction: I love tracking things when it’s easy–countries I’ve visited, books I’ve read, etc, on my TIG profile, for example (made easy by the fact that I work there and sometimes need to procrastinate. But this My iTunes (see below) thing is easy really. It keeps track of all the music I love, so that I can share it with you. That is… as long as I’ve purchased the music legally from iTunes. Which is (for honesty’s sake) a pretty limited subset of my library. But the good news is that all I have to do for the privilege of enabling this fancy widget is give access Apple to my personal info for yet another reason! …