We had many great submissions to participate in the Third Annual Second Life Winter Festival (read the initial announcement). We’ve chosen the participants for the event and created a set of Tour HUDS with the locations/events inside. Visit Chalet Linden in Wengen to pick up both Winter Festival Tour HUDs and your free official Second Life Winter Festival 2006 T-shirt!

There are two different HUDS, one for the first half of the event and one for the second. (Big thanks to Forseti Svarog for volunteering to set up the HUD system.) The folder also includes a copy of the HUD kiosk in case you want to place one on your own land. When you click the kiosk, a folder named  “Winter Festival 2006 HUD & Tshirt” will appear in your Inventory. Right click on either of the HUDs and it will appear in the top right of your screen. Then click on any of the pictures to read more. Once you find what you want to visit, click the right hand button for the landmark.

Remember: The Winter Festival begins today - Friday, December 15 - and runs until December 22!

Keep reading for the full schedule of events…

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PR is kinda crazy sometimes. This week I’ve gotten a boatload of requests for the most particular things…

For instance, a reporter in St. Louis, Missouri would like to speak with a local Second Life resident who is also a musician in-world.

A newspaper in Annapolis, MD would like to talk with a local resident!

Does anyone from Switzerland want to be on TV?

ABC News would like to speak with a SL resident from the Chicago area who is also a musician

And, ABC in Los Angeles has a big wishlist:
1. Is there someone in the LA area who could come to their offices and demo SL?
2. Would someone like to talk about how their Second Life relationship moved to real life?
3. Is there anyone who would like to talk about their business in Second Life?

If you’re interested in participating in any of those stories, please get in touch with me directly at catherine@lindenlab.com. Include your rl name, sl name, rl location, phone number and which story you’d like to talk about it. I’ll want to meet you in-world or talk via phone to learn more about your Second Life experience and your background as it pertains to the news story.

Full disclosure: Oftentimes, reporters will want to know some real life information so keep that in mind when you respond. The ABC and Swiss stories are on-camera so you should be prepared to be filmed.

I’ve recently fallen in love with last.fm, a web 2.0 app which uploads the names of the tracks you’re listening to in iTunes and uses the information to generate a personalised radio stream based on the music you listen to. It didn’t take long before I started wondering whether I could use last.fm as a robot DJ in Second Life. last.fm publishes a number of web services which Eightbar used to display their last played track in Second Life and streams their radio in MP3 format, but unfortunately doesn’t make the URL of the MP3 streams easily accessible. Luckily, Vadar Madsen has built lastfmproxy, an open source proxy server for the last.fm radio streams. By remixing Vadar’s code in LSL I was able to mashup Second Life and last.fm to build the Last Sound System, which allows you to listen to last.fm radio stations in Second Life, change stations, skip tracks and mark a track as loved. The biggest limitation is that I don’t think multiple avatars can listen to the stream concurrently. It may be possible be work around this using an MP3 stream relay server, but it would be much better if last.fm allowed people to share radio sessions for robot DJed parties in Second Life. The open source Last Sound System is freely available in Second Life here.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk about Second Life with some of Ed Felten’s students at Princeton.  A year ago, a friend at Microsoft Research had explained that their favorite school to recruit from was Princeton.  I hadn’t really believed this, since with Linden Lab’s development team heavily seeded with Berkeley grads, I’m fairly biased.  However, after meeting a string of incredibly intelligent professors and students, I came away very impressed.

However, nothing blew me away as much as Ge Wang’s demo of ChucK, their very cool music scripting language.  ChucK is a per channel language with an excellent time and concurrency model that allows you to do all sorts of great synthesis on the card.  The magic is the management of time across all of the threads that takes away a lot of the headaches.  I immediately thought about how cool it would be to have the ChucK VM built into the SL client which would allow LSL to generate ChucK script (like using PHP or Ruby to generate Javascript) in order to create real-time audio on client machines.  Finally, you could create audio in as collaborative a way as you currently build.

Moreover, the really crazy thought was that if ChucK’s performance was sufficient — and they had some help to beat on the security issues — was that a time-focused scripting language would work really well as a UI scripting language on the client.  So, go download ChucK and start playing with it.  Then get on the developer mailing list and help make it better!

How did I end up in a club dancing like a nutter, waving a glow stick and wearing a rave mask emblazoned with the copyleft symbol?

It’s a long story.

On Monday, Jerry Paffendorf of the Acceleration Studies Foundation announced that Dr Richard Bartle would be coming to Second Life for a special Future Salon Q&A session.

He also cheekily suggested that someone should write a hardcore techno dance track sampling Richard saying "If anyone samples this for a hardcore techno dance track I shall expect a royalty."

I’d been meaning to make some music for a while, so I spent a couple of hours on Monday night throwing together a hard drum n bass amen mash-up featuring Richard’s sample.

On Thursday Greg Lastowka mentioned the track on Terra Nova talked a bit about whether Richard’s claim to intellectual property rights was legal while Komuso Tokugawa quoted William Gibson saying, "Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us."

At that point I decided it would even better to include Richard’s IPR demands in an open source hardcore techno dance track.

I’d been wondering whether it would be possible to make a good hip hop or dance track using only open source samples for a while, so on Friday night I went to creativecommons.org and from there to ccmixter.org to download some legal drum loops.

The ccmixter site is a really great idea. It only hosts tracks which can be sampled and builds a family tree of tracks which sample each other which is very cool. The biggest problem for me was that ccmixter.org didn’t exist in the 1970s when it could have open sourced some Clyde Stubblefield samples to rival breaks like The Winstons “Amen Brother�? or The Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache�?. Unfortunately, not only does he have the best tunes, the devil has the best samples.

Nevertheless, a few hours later I had a completely legal version of “Hardcore�? uploaded on to ccmixter.org and linked to the tracks it samples. Have a listen and if you decide to remix the track, let me know.

So, now I had a URL for my completely legal track that I could stream from a plot of land in Second Life, but I wanted to wear my new open source credentials with pride so I downloaded the copyleft symbol from Wikipedia and spent a couple of hours this morning building a rave mask which makes your avatar dance when you wear it and optionally starts streaming “Hardcore�? from ccmixter.org in to Second Life. Combined with Kit Proudfoot’s glow sticks it makes a great outfit to wear while listening to hardcore techno dance tracks.

Naturally, it’s freely modable and copyable, so feel free to remix the mask as well as the track. You could turn it in to an open source jukebox, fill it full of open source dance animations or maybe just turn it in to a lamp shade.

It will be interesting to see where ccmixter, creative commons and media rights go from here and how they affect Second Life. At the moment though I just hope we can get a few dozen masked ravers dancing like nutters at the next Second Life Future Salon.