Chaos Magnet

Second Life and Amazon S3

I've been hearing a lot about Second Life lately, and I think this time I'm actually going to check it out. Second Life is and immersive environment a lot like World of Warcraft, or Star Wars Galaxies, except that nobody's trying to kill you. The really cool thing about Second Life is that everything in the world, for the most part, is built by residents, and you can buy and sell these objects using "Linden dollars". What's cool about that? Well, how about the fact that you can buy and sell those Linden dollars using real dollars. Yes, that means that if you make money in second life, you can turn that into cold hard cash. How much cold hard cash? Well, apparently the exchange rate fluctuates, but as far as I can tell, it's about one American dollar to 250 Linden dollars. A lot of businesses are jumping on this bandwagon, but it's hard to tell how much of this is-will go anywhere. Still, it's interesting, and I wonder if there's a living to be made here. I've tried to check it out before, but I've never had the hardware for it. Finally, my laptop has a display it likes, although the environment supposedly is not compatible with a satellite connection. (So far, in the very limited exploring I've done, it's not too much of a problem.)

There is also a lot of talk about the educational component here; today's youth are so focused on videogames, there is a fear he that they would learn better and an immersive and are such as this one. In other words, take for example the Sarbonians, a video game meant to teach economics. Students come from an environment in which there's no scarcity, and in a crash land on an alien world with limited supplies, and they have to make a go of it. Unlike other games with an economic basis (such as Civilization), in this one characters explain why the economic principles are the way they are. Pretty cool idea, if you ask me.

What I also thought was interesting is that Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, is making use of Amazon's new distributed storage solution, Amazon S3. This is an interesting concept in which you upload your content, and they pretty much handling. You only pay for the capacity that you use. They have a compute cloud as well.

Interesting.

Technorati tags: second life | virtual life | economics | sarbonians | education | Amazon | amazon S3 | compute cloud |

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