Open sourcing Second Life

The panic that broke out in Second Life last month over a copybot raised many questions about the security of property in the virtual universe.

Unlike most massively multiplayer games (if you can even call Second Life that), Second Life “residents” are allowed to actually own the stuff they create. So if you could copy endlessly, in what sense could you actually own anything?

The CopyBot itself may not have been quite dangerous enough to justify all the fuss it caused – but it highlights an interesting crossroads in Second Life’s development. It had its origins in a project called libsecondlife, which is working on a project (informally endorsed by Linden Lab) to open source the Second Life game engine.

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Blogging and the Art of Interviewing

The prevalence of user-generated content — both on the Internet and in corporate intranets — has created a virtual community of wannabe journalists. Major news events are increasingly being covered by both established members of the blogosphere as well as traditional media. Good bloggers (the key word being “good”) are gaining respect and have evolved from hobby writers to trusted citizen journalists.

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New UBL 2.0 Gets Oasis Standard Status

If you ever wanted to create a catalog request, write a certificate of origin or issue a self-billed invoice, but were totally lost as to how to go about it, great news: you are saved.

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Google upgrades Blogger - for some

Google Inc. is offering some users of its Blogger Web site access to a new version of the blog hosting service allowing user-definable templates, tagging of posts, multiple authors, and faster publication of new posts, the company announced on its own blog. It will also integrate use of the blogging service more closely with other services through changes to the account log-in process.

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Surge in Web 2.0 Apps Expected in 2007

“Businesses should be applauded for their appetite for Web 2.0-type technology but there is also very much a need for companies to focus on the basic experience they provide and making sure there’s a consistency across different channels,” argued E-consultancy analyst Linus Gregoriadis.

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Mozilla issues security updates

The Mozilla Foundation has issued “critical” security updates to vulnerabilities discovered in the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and SeaMonkey application suite.

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Survey: Typical SOA Development Takes 3-6 Months

According to a recent survey by Evans Data, more than 40 percent of developers polled who said they were working on service-oriented architectures also said they can finish a typical SOA development in three months.

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W3C Rings-in 10 Years of Style, Launches CSS Gallery

Its hard to believe, but it was 10 years ago, on the 17th of December 1996, that the W3C published the first standard for style on the Web: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), level 1.

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Facial recognition software makes finding Web photos easier

Swedish start-up Polar Rose AB plans to offer software to make it easy to find photos of familiar faces online, the company said yesterday, solving difficult Web search issues while potentially raising new privacy concerns.

Polar Rose said it plans to offer free software to make photos searchable on both personal computers and across the Web by analyzing the contents of pictures with pattern recognition technology to locate specific faces within them.

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Enterprise social software

Enterprise social software refers to social software used in enterprise business contexts. Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Web 2.0[1] are terms derived from Web 2.0 that are sometimes used to cover the introduction and implementation of such software, and the social and organizational changes related to its use.

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