Some good quotes from the clip:
Susan Tenby (mini-clip): “I’ve submitted my full statement to the committee to be part of the permanent record. And my avatar name is Glitteractica Cookie.”
Jon Stewart (responding to the mini-clip): “All this time I’ve wondered why I had to settle for GlitteracticaCookie-2. DAMN YOU, TENBY!! DAMN you!! But not only was this the first Congressional hearing held about virtual world, it was also the first one held in one. The simulcast live video of the event in a virtual Second Life hearing room. As you can see the distinguished company included a winged goth nympy, a business man with giant lizard hair, and the distinguished Congress woman hooker in a red cocktail dress (D) California.”

Information Source:
[1] ValleyWag: Jon Stewart mocks Congress for discussing Second Life by Jackson West

Philip Rosedale is the creator Second Life and is now the former CEO.  Rosendale will become their chairman of the Board, but will not be responsible for hiring the team to maintain Second Life’s scalability.  This will be the job of the new CEO.

“I bet this will be the most interesting job opening in the technology world,” wrote Rosendale on his blog.

Rosendale will be responsible for the product strategy and become an evangelist about Second Life.  There currently isn’t a timeline for when Second Life plans to bring in a full-time CEO.

On the blog post, one of the funniest comments I saw was by Bobo Decosta, who said “Does this mean anarchy brakes out until a new ruler steps up?”   It’d be funny to see all these virtual avatars start freaking out.  It probably wouldn’t look any different than when Scott Adams decided to make an appearance on Second Life.

The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) is makin’ moves online.  In August 2007, the Mickey Mouse and “It’s a small world” creators acquired Club Penguin, a kid-friendly social network for $350 million.  And now the company announced that they will be creating virtual worlds with online games.  As a matter of fact, they hired a team to focus on these specific jobs.  This new team will be part of the Walt Disney Internet Group and will be called Disney Online Studios.

Disney Online Studios will be managed by Steve Parkis.  Parkis studied at Michigan State and Northwestern and then started his career working at Kimberly-Clark.  AFter that, Parkis became a MD at Windhorst New Technologies.  Today Steve serves as the Vice President of Premium Products for Disney Online.

The new Disney Online Studios team will also include Disney Online’s Virtual Reality Studio, Toontown Online, and Pirates of the Caribbean Online.  Disney is also creating a virtual world where kids can control Disney Fairies and characters from the Disney film, Cars.  Club Penguin will continue to report to the Walt Disney Internet Group.

Disney is taking over the market-share for virtual worlds made for children, a market that Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, could have easily done.  Second Life had about 1.3 million users log in around March 2007 [clickz].  I’m not sure what the current number of users are.

[Information Source:  socalTECH]

Scott Adams, founder of Dilbert decided to use Second Life for a book signing. Adams’ new book is called Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Ignores Helpful Advice. The idea behind the book was that Adams’ frequent blog posts are just as funny as the cartoons that he makes, so it should be made into a book. On Adams’ blog, he wrote that the experience was like:

art imitating life, imitating art beating the crap out of something imitating me. Truly weird. If you know any Dilbert readers, they might enjoy this [Dilbert blog]:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh_28EI4sME[/youtube]

In Second Life, Adams gave away virtual Dilbert posts and one person would win a copy of the book. This is the most interesting idea I’ve heard of on Second Life so far.

Information Source:
[1] ValleyWag: Second Life’s killer app is kicking Dilbert in the crotch by Jordan Golson

I first heard about this on ValleyWag and I had to agree that this belongs under their tag, WTF. “Now avatars can get decked out in Armani duds — horridly pixelated Second Life versions of them, anyway — and if they so desire, connect directly with the online store to spend money on actual goods,” stated ValleyWag writer, Mary Jane Irwin.

I refuse to ever sign up for a Second Life account because I think the whole idea of building relationships between other people on the Internet through the form of avatars is just sickening. Buying stuff with actual money for your avatar is also sickening. I think that its stupider than the idea of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books that were hot in the 90’s. And now Armani is giving us the option to not only buy stuff, but actually buy luxury stuff for virtual reality characters.

My advice to today’s youth or grown-men that find themselves registering characters on Second Life and buying them clothes from Armani’s Second Life store, please look in the mirror and re-examine your life. It is probably best that you reacquaint yourself with nature. Just imagine if you fast-forward 50-75 years from now and you are on your death-bed, but the only thing you remember doing with your life is living the life of a virtual reality character and buying it consumer merchandise–you probably wouldn’t think much of yourself. Get a hobby and socialize with people that you actually know for crying out loud.

Information Sources:
[1] ValleyWag: Armani sets up shop in Second Life
[2] Reuters: Armani opens store in virtual world’s Second Life

Three-dimensional, virtual world application, Second Life has gone open source. Since Second Life opened public in 2003, roughly 2.5 million around the world has jumped on the virtual world band-wagon. Second Life is imagined, created, and owned by the application’s residents. The residents can buy and own land and Linden Dollars. There is also Teen Second Life as well for the under 18 year old users.

Second Life was created by Linden Lab® and now developers can access and manipulate the code. “The move marks Linden Lab’s continued commitment to building the Second Life Grid as an open, extensible platform for development, rather than a closed proprietary system” stated the Linden Lab blog.

“We feel we have a responsibility to improve and to grow Second Life as rapidly as possible,” stated Philip Rosedale, the CEO and founder of Linden Lab. “We were the first virtual world to enable content creators to own the rights to the Intellectual Property they create. That sparked exponential growth in the richness of the Second Life environment. Now we’re placing the Viewer’s development into the hands of Residents and developers as well. This extends the control Residents can have over the Second Life experience and allows a worldwide community to examine, validate and improve the software’s sophistication
and capabilities.”

The source code is available at http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource.  Developers are expected to follow the guidelines of GNU GPL version 2.