more Second Life, plus South Park

Or should I say, Second Life 2.0?

Networman - Great Northern Way Campus & Second Life - October 31, 2006

Netwoman - New Masters of Digital Media Program - November 24, 2006

I just wanted to pass on some information about a new Master's program - one of the many hats I wear is that of a Virtual Research Consultant for the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. On Saturday, November 25th, 2006 the Masters of Digital Media (MDM) program at the Great Northern Way Campus will host an Open House for prospective students from around the globe in the online metaverse Second Life™, where a Virtual Centre for Digital Media building is currently under construction. This event will be held in conjunction with a Real Life Open House taking place simultaneously at Vancouver's Great Northern Way Campus. At both events, potential students will learn about an innovative graduate program in digital media planned to launch in September 2007.

More information can be found online here:

http://www.gnwc.ca/mdm/
http://www.mastersofdigitalmedia.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnwc

Incidentally, the campus is at Erie (136, 32, 25).  (In Second Life, a location is a placename + X, Y, Z coordinates.)  Here's a SLurl for the location - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Erie/136/32/25/

Le marketing à l'écoute - Novembre 2006: Faire des profits tangibles dans l’univers virtuel, est-ce réel? (podcast)

Michel Leblanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique - Archives pour Second Life

Michel Leblanc - Edgar Bronfman interviewé dans Second Life - December 4, 2006

L’un des plus célèbres Montréalais, Edgar Bronfman Jr., de la célèbre famille du même nom et maintenant P.D.G. de Warner Music, est interviewé dans Second Life par le journaliste de Reuters Adam Reuter.

and for no particular reason, here's some info on the South Park "World of Warcraft" episode...
Ok, ok, um, "in order to better understand the Gaming Generation, I present this insightful examination of using machinima to produce television".

South Park recently aired an episode involving World of Warcraft in which half of the show featured custom machinima footage.
...

Q: How were the custom animations created? How were they used inside of World of Warcraft - were they imported back into the game? What hardware/software did you use?

JJ: When Trey started thinking about how he wanted to start off the current run of episodes, he really wanted to do something big, and new. So, the idea of the "video game show" as we were calling it, resurfaced. We had a production meeting at Trey's house on Friday, Sept. 1st, and went over all the experiments and design work we had done to date. Once again, the idea was brought up of using WoW to shoot the in-game footage, with the added possibility of re-creating the characters in Maya, the 3D animation program we use to produce the show, in order to do close ups with full lipsynch and facial expressions. I mentioned that Blizzard had been very eager to help us when we ran our initial tests, so perhaps they'd be willing to let us use their own character models as well, which would save us a great deal of time and effort. All we would have to do then is re-rig the faces so we could animate them to the degree needed.

Eventually, it was decided that we would push forward in both directions, starting to model our own characters as well as contacting Blizzard and seeing how interested they would be in participating. We met with several people from Blizzard on Thursday, the 7th of Sept. and it became obvious that they were extremely eager to make this happen, and seemed willing to do whatever they could to make sure it did. Luckily, they also use Maya to do their in-game character animation, which meant we would be able to just grab their files and go, in theory. So, we asked them for a couple of their Maya character rigs to test with. Less then 7 hours later, we had male and female models for every race in the game, all fully rigged with every single animation cycle already assigned. It was exactly what we needed to get started.

from Machinima.com