If you wonder how many science places SecondLife contains or just how serious work can be done in a virtual world, be sure to watch this slideshow, and turn on your speakers or headphones for the narration.

I should also mention that Troy has made enormous contributions to the International Spaceflight Museum, where he has been one of the planning group officers and an officer of the nonprofit corporation that supports it. As Kat Lemieux, I am one of the founders of the museum.

Many thanks to ISM Planning Group member Paradox Olbers for the info about and link to Markey’s hearing. Be sure to check out his blog for more details and his followup interview with Markey’s staff.

While their claim to be the only online conference is a bit inaccurate, it still seems like a worthwhile way to spend some time for those of us interested in the development of the metaverse.

The Proceedings of the recent NCOIC Session on Networked Virtual Environments are available at http://semanticommunity.wik.is/Adaptable_Computing_Infrastructure (middle of the page). The talks from IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, NOAA, Forterra and Colorado Technical University provide a broad perspective on the latest developments in Virtual Environment technologies.

Not only have I been aware of NMC in SecondLife since they burst on the scene there, but their CEO, Larry Johnson, is a director of the ISM Corporation, which is the nonprofit that supports the International Spaceflight Museum, which I lead. Small world. Or small worlds. Here’s a video Larry recorded and posted on YouTube about their project:

By the way, Bob Marcus has promised to make the NCOIC conference proceedings available to members of the Serious Second Life Group in Boulder, of which I’m a member. So I may have more to say about this event later, even though I won’t be able to attend since there will not be a SecondLife blended reality event.

In addition to the International Spaceflight Museum, where I’m a director and CEO, at least one other “homegrown” SecondLife island is to be included in this archiving pilot program, Democracy Isle. I think the project may also be including a sim that the Stanford Humanities Lab people have been building as well, the LifeSquared. (There is an intro video to the LifeSquared project online.)

Non-SecondLife subjects include the original text-based computer game, Colossal Cave Adventure, and possibly some aspects of World of Warcraft (WoW), which of course is a wildly popular multiuser online game world.

One aspect I found interesting was that this project seeks to document and perhaps enable recreation of the user experience, not just the sourcecode for the worlds it is archiving. Probably the most important object of the project is to define a methodology for doing this, beyond preserving the specific content from the test subjects. However, as the representative of one of those subjects, I can say we (the guinea pigs) are very grateful to be part of this study, since it will preserve at least a snapshot of our museum that otherwise could well vanish one day if SecondLife or Linden Lab happened to go away. Since a number of us have invested considerable time and even a little money into our virtual museum, to have that happen would be a personal tragedy.

Several months ago, Henrik Bennetsen, research director at Stanford Humanities Lab asked me if the International Spaceflight Museum would agree to participate in the project as one of a few test subjects. Our museum planning group agreed, so here I am.

I won’t be “live blogging” this workshop, since I need to concentrate on what’s being said rather than try to capture the bare events, but I will come back to this blog space to comment on some of the highpoints.

There are several other bloggers who have mentioned their URLs in the SecondLife chat. I’ll pull those out later and add them tonight.

In a posting yesterday I mentioned a blog by Mark Brown in which he said the problem with attending conferences in virtual worlds was the lack of networking opportunities. I took exception to that, and today he has retracted graciously, in his write-up of an interview we did after we met at the conference.

Back to the conference now. Brewster Kahle is speaking and he’s fascinating.