When the night falls and the stars shine up above thoughts of you come into my mind.
I turn my back to the sea and let my eyes get lost in some distant mountain. May be one day I will learn to fly and finally we can be together.
Meanwhile I stay here. Hiding my tears behind the laughter.
I don’t know how I got to meet Bankinha, but she has now become one of my friends and it is the cutest Avi I ever met and another proof that imagination has no limits.
A small girl looking like having came out of a Japanese cartoon, always with a balloon in her hands and followed by a nice dog that used to look like a cat. Always distributing things to everyone, Bankinha is sweet, friendly, generous and with a great sense of humour.
A great builder, always saying that she doesn’t know anything, she is now transforming the cute dolls she makes into avatars together with her RL and SL partner Badpain Tripp. They call them the “Biscuits” and are even developing a whole ”biscuit world”, which I will show to you as soon as everything is ready.
I leave you here some photos of her and her creations and hope that we can see those real soon for sale in some shop. I know I would like to walk around the grid with one of those cute Biscuits and, who knows, maybe do a photo story with them *winks
My friend Gwyneth Lleewlyn posted today a letter to Linden Lab® asking clarification for all Second Life® Bloggers about the recent policy of use of LL trademarks.
I do here the full transcription, which you are also free to copy as stated by the author at the end of the post.
Dear Linden Lab®,
Your recent change of policy regarding the usage of your trademarks — Second Life®, Linden Lab®, and others registered by Linden Research Inc. — will effectively prevent the operation of the very vibrant community of bloggers, forum posters, websites, community portals, and even 3rd party services, that have provided Linden Lab® with links and driving traffic to your blog, and raising brand awareness for free for your product Second Life®.
Probably thousands — if not dozens of thousands — of sites include (now illegitimately) the name “Second Life®” or “SL®” somewhere in their names. From sites like Reuters (which has a Second Life® channel) to whole companies that have a “Second Life® Division” (and promotes your product by the explicit naming of it), a plethora of online communities, products, and services — some free, other commercial, many in the limbo between both extremes — include, in some way, your registered trademarks.
Your previous policy, established in May 2004 (”Second Life® Fansite Tolkit”), and later reinforced with referral programmes like “Viva La Evolution”, positively encouraged the widespread use of your trademarks, so long as it was quite clearly displayed that no infringement was intended. To requote your own terms of agreement for the usage of your trademarks:
“USE OF SECOND LIFE MARKS
While you are in full compliance with the usage guidelines described here, you may use the “Second Life” name on your website, as well as the related logos and graphics available at Toolkit, solely in the form described there. Additionally, you may use screenshots from Second Life to the extent that Linden Lab has the right to authorize use of the content within such screenshot, including screenshots of Linden in-world objects and Linden avatars, subject to these usage guidelines.”
Under those very friendly terms, a plethora of fansites of all sorts popped up, driving traffic to Second Life®’s main website, its blogs, forums, and other related sites — making SL®’s own ranking quite high on Google, Alexa, and other systems — while at the same time, in a period of a little less than four years, allowing the number of registered users to skyrocket from 10,000 to 13 million.
Fansites, blogs, 3rd party sites, Second Life®-related online communities, 3rd party sites that create products and services related to Second Life® are the “off-world” counterpart of the dynamic and enthusiastic community that made Second Life®, as a brand, get world-wide recognition — without the need for Linden Lab® to spend millions in advertising and campaigns on the media. We worked for free on the promotion, brand awareness, and market recognition of your products — while, at the same time, we also worked for free creating the fantastic content of the 3D environment that makes Second Life® a place worth to visit, to enjoy, to chat, to socially connect, to do business, and launch the pillars of the upcoming metaverse — fulfilling Philip ‘Linden®’ Rosedale’s dream of having more users in Second Life® than on the Web.
We’ve been the ones ultimately promoting that vision, spreading it around, and making sure that the world noticed your product and your brand. We were very successful — thanks to your gentle and encouraging former policies.
And for four years, you have been thankful enough to allow us to do that promotion, by establishing very reasonable and clear guidelines of the terms of usage of your trademarks.
Your sudden reversal of position — effectively limiting the display of the name “Second Life®” on most sites, domain names, products, and services, through a mechanism of explicit approval that you fully admit “can take long and might never finish” and will only be available to a very limited number of sites — means that suddenly all the off-world promotion of Second Life® will necessarily have to stop; or face a lawsuit in court; or, at the very least, receive a Cease & Desist letter from your lawyers and be forced to shut down.
The current terms can be aggressively enforced or not. According to your blog, we are supposed to have a 90-day grace period to remove all mentioning of Second Life® and its logo from our fansites, blogs, forums, or 3rd party sites offering products and services related to Second Life®. In fact, what this means is that we are forced not to talk about Second Life® any more — or, if we do, we cannot explicitly name the product at all.
This is, obviously, absurd.
The compromise between Linden Research Inc. (owners of the registered trademarks) and the community of volunteers that have so faithfully promoted your product, Second Life®, was quite clear for the past four years. We had clear guidelines of what we could do and what we couldn’t. Abuses could still be effectively dealt with by your legal department; to the world’s knowledge, these cases were few and scattered, if any. They were not significative to prevent a vast number of dozens of thousands of sites of all sorts to draw traffic to your own site; to reach out the huge audience on the Internet; and to drive new users to register. The numbers fortunately speak for themselves: with almost zero promotional costs, you managed to grow a thousand times in four years, thanks to crowdsourcing the promotion of Second Life®.
The “inSL” programme is definitely interesting, but a small new logo, worthless to an audience of hundreds of millions of users that are familiar with the eye-on-hand logo, without a massive campaign of promotion behind it to reflect the logo change, is not enough. “inSL” doesn’t say much, and it cannot be expanded to talk and promote Second Life® directly. And, anyway, the same restrictions apply to the usage of “inSL” as with all your other trademarks. We appreciate the grant to use that new logo, but we also feel it will be unable to gather the same support and promotional effort as the old logo and the product name did in the past four years.
We would thus kindly request that you clarify your position regarding the usage of the trademarks Second Life® and the logo on all fansites, blogs, forums, or other 3rd party websites offering products and services related to Second Life®. This clarification should be as easy to follow as your previous policies on the usage of those trademarks. They should make clear that all people intending to promote your product and raise your brand awareness are not facing lawsuits because they have faithfully used your trademarks using the old policy, and wish to continue to do so in the future.
We consider that an appropriate response should be forthcoming in the next few days, or we will be forced to shut down our own blogs, websites, forums, community portals, and other 3rd party sites to avoid litigation — and thus deprieving Linden Lab® from the traffic generated by millions of direct links and millions of viewers that learn first about Second Life® through all those sites.
Permission is granted by the author to fully copy & adapt the text above if you wish.
Memories just seem to come back to you for no reason at all. Feelings buried deep down just pop up suddenly brought up by a landscape, a word, a smell and suddenly you find yourself living it all over again.
The longing, the happiness, the sorrow all coming back, leaving you exhausted, drained.
And then you get back to yourself. Take all those feelings, close them in a box and life moves on like nothing has happened.
Just the bitter taste in your mouth remains and the hope that they won’t get back.
My good friend Halden Beaumont is yet in another project and the Second Life Portal for the Portuguese speaking community is already online. Conceived and designed by him this project comes to fill a gap in the Portuguese information about Second Life.
But this post is not about the Portal or Halden. It is about siss.
Halden invited Summer to do a talk show and the first person to be interviewed was our good old friend Ibrahim Bates who is going to launch 2 short stories in Second Life, both in Portuguese and in English, next March 28th, 1:30 PM SLT at the opening of Portucalis bookshop.
The interview was simply great and siss just seems to be born to do that. I must apologise for those who can´t understand Portuguese, but I did have to post about this. I’m so proud of her!!!
Sunflower is one of my friends in world. Having been a human for some time, she got enchanted by the Dragons Realm and soon became a hatchie, nothing better for her, once she likes to play tricks and say jokes – I just wished she could stay still for a minute, ’cause she really gets me dizzy always running around the place hehehe
Anyways, she saw the pics I have been taking and asked me if I could take some of her in her human form and, though I don’t understand a thing about taking pics, I gladly agreed.
Leave you here some of them and you can see the others on my flickr… and tell me guys if it isn’t a waste her having become a dragon? *winks
Another of those quizzes I like and guess what is my theme song? Not just a great song but also from one of my favourite bands 
What’s yours?
Your Theme Song is Beautiful Day by U2 |
 “Sky falls, you feel like It’s a beautiful day Don’t let it get away”You see the beauty in life, especially in ordinary everyday moments. And if you’re feeling down, even that seems a little beautiful too. |
The AC/DC concert we hosted yesterday in Portucalis was simply amazing. With around 70 people permanently at the location, the show of music and special effects made worth the 2 hours we were there.
My sincere congratulations to Bobby Fallon and Ray0 for offering us this breath taking show and I can’t wait till we have Pink FLoyd there next sunday.
Leave with some photos of the event and you can see some more at my Flickr page
Last week I met Uzi Boa. She was introduced to me by my good friend Ibrahim and I showed her around Portucalis. Uzi is Polish and we chatted a bit about the project she’s in: SL’Ang Life, a magazine that is distributed to your RL door by mail.
Usi passed me the information about the project and I share it here with you, cause I really find the idea quite innovative and interesting.
In January 2008 Slang Corp. published the first issue of SL’ang Life magazine. The magazine is in English and delivered to subscribers all over the word by post. It is free of charge and delivery costs! In order to receive a brand new 48-page (A-4 format) issue every month, visit Sl’ang Life’s virtual island and subscribe by filling in a form on www.slanglife.com.
Sl’ang Life publishers compare the magazine to Newsweek, so it aspires to be opinion shaping press. Its main frame consists of four major sections: SL life, SL culture and style, SL economy and SL entertainment. There you will find interviews with personalities of the month, current affairs and descriptions of important events and places in SL connected with culture, business and politics as well as music, fashion and travel corners, technical advice, novel in episodes and many other trivia. As Macciej Schumann (CEO) said during the opening ceremony – the aim is to present opinions and comments expressed by avatars and journalists, both from SL and RL, in a wide international perspective.
Check also their blog here and if you have time take a look at the SL’Ang Island and enjoy yourselves.
