Bulk Upload

Last November, I set off on my own in the land of Blog.  Now my solitude is at an end, tomorrow, we will be launching a uber-mega-super Linden Blog, and Bulk Upload is being swallowed up, all my posts are already imported, and someone let me be an admin (muahahaha).  I'm looking forward to having more readers, but I hope my posts won't be overshadowed by some of the new talent this blog is attracting.  Anyways, if you are looking for me, you might find me at http://blog.secondlife.com, and thanks to everyone who came out of the way to read my thoughts. 

ben

A Pattern of Ugly

Robyn Miller, who co-designed the game Myst and several of it's children wrote a couple of posts about Second Life a few months ago.   Those posts penetrated the Linden mindshare, but the topics were nothing we haven't talked about quite a bit already.  (In fact, when I started at LL, A Pattern Language was recommended reading, along with Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.)

Today, one of our fair residents passed along a link to Ze Frank's "The Show" - a podcast I knew about but hadn't gotten a chance to peruse as it deserves.  Today's episode reminded me of the discussions of design and aesthetics in Second Life.  You might have seen some press lately where SL is called a "3D MySpace" - well Ze Frank is hosting a contest to create the ugliest MySpace page.  While he does this to mock MySpace, he is also celebrating the freedom it gives to make an ugly page. 

Watch It.

So why did Linden Lab so thoroughly ignore the centuries of Urban Planning and Architectural wisdom that Christopher Alexander had crammed into his patterns, and condemned the world to become "an endless trash heap of a city?"