Linden Lab is pleased to host the 3rd Annual Second Life Winter Holiday Celebration. The festivities, spread all across the grid, will culminate in a Linden vs. Resident snowball fight. We’re looking for volunteers to host and organize events. Be sure to keep tuned into the official Linden blog http://blog.secondlife.com for more information!

Campus Visit

A Visit to Campus: Teen Second Life Tiplife Eggplant and Hector Something are the staff for a Real Life educational non-profit based in Los Angeles called EdBoost. EdBoost is the first group to participate in the fall session of the Campus: TSL program. Campus: TSL gives K-12 educators an opportunity to "test their wings." EdBoost was selected for the Campus program after Tiplife and Hector delivered an incredible proposal for how they intended to use TSL to teach programming skills to teens in their after-school learning center. Read more.

Teaching Others

Trinity Koken shared her thoughts with us on one of the most helpful Residents she’s ever met – Aura Lily! While exploring Second Life during one of her initial visits, Trinity met Aura in Hypatia. Aura took her on a tour of her Egyptian-themed decorations and helped Trinity learn to navigate within the world and even gave her a beautiful gift vase! Big thanks to Aura for helping to make Second Life be a better space!

Christine Dale nominated fellow Resident and friend Pantera Asturias for his many helpful ways. Christine says, “he's not only helped me but many other Second Life members with skins, clothes, hair, and even holds classes to help those who don’t understand Second Life!” Big Kudos to Pantera for helping teach the Second Life way!

Infinite Expression

The interactive marketing agency Infinite Vision Media specializes in 3D web spaces. Once part of the original team that created the lovely Dublin region, IVM now uses its deep real-world experience in advertising, branding, architecture, and programming to create immersive experiences for Second Life Residents… Read more.

Bigger and Better

We're growing! It's a big, new world out there, with a lot of unique and varied people in it. We have a population of more than 1.5 million and are regularly seeing concurrency of 15,000 Residents online. The people coming to Second Life are becoming increasingly diverse--more than half come from outside the United States--and their interests and goals are as varied as those of any metropolitan populace.

Civic Center replaces the section formerly known as the Police Blotter, which had become too provincial for the needs of this expanding, changing world…Read more.

Torley's Video Tips - Take Two

Bounce along with Torley Linden as she explores some of the lesser known Second Life features including how to use the movement keys, how the space bar can stop your fall, the wonders of FollowCam and other tasty tips…Read more.

Diversity and an Open Community

With the recent surge in population growth in Second Life paralleling issues of database load, there have been some crying for an end to open registration. The theory is that free accounts are using resources without contributing to Second Life. It's an interesting theory, but not one that holds up under scrutiny.

Not everyone is a landowner or a creator, and not every basic account holder is a griefer or a freeloader. Many people with unverified basic accounts are international Residents without access to the payment systems we currently offer. Beyond that we see exciting contributions to the economy coming from basic accounts who are themselves customers inside of Second Life. The growth in both the housing and shop rental markets coincides with growth in Resident-to-Resident transactions. View Graph

At the same time the number of people upgrading to premium accounts outstrips those who are downgrading, suggesting that many basic account holders are finding their place within Second Life and settling in. View Graph

When we opened registration it was because we believed that the ultimate contribution of many people to Second Life would be diversity and economic strength. What we've seen over the past few months is a surge of new and exciting people and projects coming to Second Life from all over the real world. Many of these new Residents simply could not have accessed our world before we changed the registration and billing structure.

Agree? Disagree? Let us know - send us your Letter to the Editor - with your Second Life username - and we will publish a representative set in the next edition of The Second Opinion.

We received several thoughtful responses to our opinion piece: Serendipity in Disaster. Below is a sample of the replies. Thank you for your responses!

Adventures in Creativity

With all the challenges and pit falls that can arise from such a unique environment I have to applaud everyone at Linden labs and your many helpful volunteers in Second Life that are always helpful and courteous. I have been jumping from Virtual Realities online for many years now and when I did another search for something new... landing in Second Life was the best thing I have ever experienced. (keep reading) - Redemption Summers

Group Orientation

I have a suggestion regarding the growing pains on the Orientation Islands - I would offer a guided tour, or group-guided tour, and have the group travel as one, so that you can streamline the amount of content, and stream it out to multiple clients at once. (keep reading) - Garfield Gelfand