The Machinima panel at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) concluded this year with a feedback session and inspired what some might call a machine animation Linden renaissance. As such, we have created the Machinimatographers of Second Life mailing list and have setup the Machinima portal on the Second Life wiki. From the Main Page of the Second Life wiki, click on the Creation portal (under Create!), which will direct you not only to valuable Machinima information, but will also link you to the Music portal, Video Tutorial portal, Feature portal, and more!

The Machinimatographers of Second Life mailing list is open to anyone interested in sharing their ideas with Lindens and with each other about how to better support the Second Life Machinima community. What are some best practices that are currently working well for Machinimatographers? What are the biggest challenges? What would you like to see Linden Lab provide to better support this community? These are the types of discussions we’d love to see as your ideas, feedback, and insights are invaluable to us.

To subscribe to the Machinimatographers of Second Life mailing list, click here!

Last month, I blogged about this year’s Burning Life festivities. Today, Burning Life celebrates the launch of its fifth year gracing the Second Life community. Below, you’ll find important details on how you can enjoy this year’s celebration of art, music, and culture. And don’t forget to peek at the Burning Life flickr stream and pick up the complete Burning Life Camp Guide in the Burning Life (Rocco) welcome area.

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Have you got the downtime blues? View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out what Sabin Linden says about Het-Grid, get information on SLCC, learn about AjaxLife in our interview with Katharine Berry, read up on Stephany Linden’s voice tips and tricks, check out our view on the new features vs. bug fixes debate … and more!

Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.

[UPDATE] Thank you for your comments. We greatly appreciate your continued patience during downtime. Please note that in the near future, and thanks to Het-Grid, downtime will occur less frequently. Don’t know about Het-Grid? Check out Breaking News in this month’s newsletter.

For the last four years, the Burning Life festival has helped Second Life Residents recognize the true creative potential of our ever-changing and ever-growing world. This year, Second Life’s annual homage to Burning Man is back, bigger and more imaginative than ever!

The Burning Life grounds will appear in the shape of an 18-estate island. The specially created location echoes the spirit of Burning Man’s Black Rock Desert without the blood-boiling Nevada heat and the bitterly cold nights. Burning Life will begin on September 24^th this year in order to provide real life Burning Man attendees with the opportunity to participate. Monday, October 1^st after the Temple burn, will mark the disappearance of Burning Life once again. Objects and land ownership will be wiped, leaving participants and visitors with a lingering suspicion that it was all just a wonderful dream.

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View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out about the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society’s first fundraiser in Second Life, discover JIRA tips and tricks, read our view on voice in As We See It … and more!

Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.

Little did Linden Lab know that Bug Triages would take off the way they did. What’s a triage you ask? Well every week, Benjamin, Bridie, and Rob Linden hold in-world office hours with other Lindens, including Torley, and Residents to discuss Second Life bugs and Resident-created feature suggestions that you generate in public JIRA. During these office hours, bugs and feature suggestions, some with patches created by rock star, Resident, open source stormers and some without patches, are imported into the Linden Lab JIRA so that developers can begin work immediately on what’s important to you. Residents craft agendas for these triages, and we all sit down weekly to discuss and import issues at office hours.

In the month of June, Torley reported that your JIRA bug-reporting helped Linden Lab developers and open source contributors fix 163 bugs out of 480 reported. Those may not seem like impressive numbers to you, but keep in mind that the trend matters. You’re reporting more bugs and together, we’re fixing more bugs. (For tips on bug reporting, see Torley’s post “How to report better bugs.”) The triage enables Lindens and Residents to combine forces in order to fix bugs and think about which features are important to you. Because triages have become so useful, we’ve launched in this month alone a User Interface weekly bug triage and Viewer Crashes weekly bug triage! Now it’s time to welcome Internationalization to the triage family.

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In May, we blogged about Second Life’s upcoming birthday. June 23, 2007, that’s this Saturday, will mark the fourth anniversary of Second Life’s launch. Volunteers have been hard at work planning and building for the event, which will be held in the SL4B sim and surrounding sims and will continue until June 30, 2007. Due to the increasing number of new Residents, volunteers decided to plan this year’s birthday event around Second Life’s history.

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In April, Linden Lab announced the launch of the Second Life Speech Gestures Contest. At the time, the Second Life voice feature was available only on the Beta Grid and so participation in the Speech Gestures Contest was limited. Now that we’ve launched the Voice First Look Viewer (download here), we’re re-launching the contest in the hopes that more Residents will not only be able to access the voice feature, but will also approach the customizable speech gestures that the voice offering provides with renewed interest.

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As a reminder, Second Life will be unavailable this Wednesday, June 13, 2007 from 6am until 12pm PDT. For 1.17.01 release notes, please see Joshua Linden’s previous blog post.

We would like to congratulate the following winners of the Sculpted Prim Contest. Make sure to view not only the winning entries, but also the talented sculpted works of other contestants at Luna (MG) and Coelacanth (TG). If you can’t make it to the Luna and Coelacanth displays, don’t worry. The winning sculpties are coming to your Inventory Library soon!

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