Content Transfer and OpenGrid, Concerns

Do you know about the InterGrid discussions? InterGrid has been talked about a little bit here. Basically what Linden Labs (maker's of Second Life) are trying to do is make a standard for interoperability of virtual worlds. Kind of like webhosts work now. If I send you to Tatuero Nino's post, (read now) even though it's on some other server somewhere there is no interupption or anything else that makes it look like you went to another computer. InterGrid is going to be the same thing for virtual worlds. I host my sim on mycomputer and you can walk to it from Second Life with no interruption. But....

As Tatuero (who is a brilliant thinker and one of my normal reads) points out, even if this happens, what do we do about content. If on my server the TOS say that I can take everything you make and you bring something that Joe Blow made and rez it, according to the TOS of my server I'm within my rights to take it. This can and will get very very sticky.
The reason that I'm in Second Life as a content creator is because I own my creations. As an artist, programmer, and business owner this is extremely important. Somebody rips off my work and I have the right to go after them. This process may be a pain in the (pick a body part) but it is available to me. It'll still be available if it get's stolen by people on other servers, but it will be a pain to police if there is some kind of item transfer when moving to a new grid.

Tatuero Nino dosen't see a solution. I don't see one that isn't clunky. However, there are some things that should be in place for Intellectual Property Owners to feel more secure.

1. There needs to be a flag for Content Creators that says you can or cannot transfer with the object - freebies and such where people don't care, fine, although the education needs to happen so that people know they may have those things ripped and sold. (See how sticky this gets?)
2. There needs to be a automatic review of TOS and notification of changes when crossing to hosts that are not the same. Usually there is a line that says, "We can change these TOS anytime we want without notification." and that's fine, but if you come back to a sim and they have changed their TOS they should be required, and the software should automatically, give you the TOS to review.
3. I've not decided yet if there needs to be some form of communication to the content creator as well, your email or IM or something should be inter-grid so when an object goes to a new InterGrid region the content creator gets a chance to review the TOS and decide if that item is allowed to cross. This is honestly too clunky and obtrusive to work. If millions of items of mine cross everyday I'm not going to be able to click a button each time. It may work based on asset code, so that if I click the DarkRayne is allowed then it will always remember that for every Avatar going to that region, but still, this will be too much paperwork to make sense.

So how will this work? How will we be able to spread our content to these exciting new regions? Here's how. If you find that you start hanging out at an InterGrid region alot and you miss your castle, (or anything else I built) let me know where it is, where I can find the TOS and decide if they are going to respect my rights. If they are, I personally will figure out a way to get you your dream castle in that region. If not, you're out of luck, but I think you should also be very careful about playing in a region that won't. After all, if they won't respect the people who create content, what are they going to do with it and why should you support them?

Just my initial thoughts.

Damian Carbenell - Live Music next Weekend at Natalis!

Damian Carbenell is playing a one hour set monthly for us and it's this next weekend on Sunday July 6th at 7pm! Please come hear this talented singer songwriter and support his continued success. Encourage him to make us a weekly event!

Guitarist/vocalist Damian Carbenell picked up the guitar at age ten and added the keyboards soon after. He began to write his own music at age 15 and now has an extensive collection of originals and cover songs under his belt. A typical Damian performance might include the Eagles, Green Day, Jack Johnson , Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Rob Thomas, or even Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. His wide variety in music style is sure to please everyone. His MySpace page is here.

Am I online.... don't look here.

Do you see the gadget over there? The one that tells you if I'm online in SL or not? It's also in my sidebar.

It only works sometimes. The reason it only works sometimes is because it is tied to an object I wear in SL on my left eyeball. It's worth getting if you run a blog or wish to let people on external pages see your status. But it's not truly a reliable indicator of my total time in SL or whether or not I'm online. I spend between 4 and 8 hours a day in SL and I've been around over 4 years. You do the math. *grin*

Link Love from NWN!

The venerable New World Notes has linked to my article about my new toy, and though I wish it was a link to an article about my own builds, I'll take any link love I can get. If you're joining me because you've clicked the link over there, Welcome! This blog is primarily about building but like most blogs I do occasionally divert. I hope you become one of my smart, beautiful, loyal readers!

New World Notes has been around since the beginning and was started by an Linden Labs 'embedded' journalist. I've mentioned them before and the book that James has written is an amazing read. You can read the article they wrote about my article here. And you can order James book on the right there or below.

Random Video Link Love!

First up a well done music video that makes fun of new avatars - but is strangely empowering all the same. I happen to think that new people are lovely additions. Yes they can be frustrating but we were all there and I welcome the chance to help anyone who's interested in building. (No I won't give you money.)

Second up another video, this one maybe showing a bit more of the people who typically buy my castles. It's possible to be anything you want in SL as long as you can imagine it. Here you see some gothic twists and very atmospheric type camera work.

Finally a video that mixes rl and sl to show the history of space exploration in a very small way. The International Space Museum in SL is one of those must see places and is run by very dedicated people. One of whom needs to blog more. Space is one of my early loves as you can probably tell by my interests and the fact that I built an observatory. It's worth it to explore YouTube for the other videos that show off this special place or to get into SL and see it for yourself.

Toys toys toys.... yes I'm a geek.

OK, so... did you figure it out, of course you did because my dear readers are some of the smartest people ever. I got a TARDIS!

When I was a kid I fell in love with Doctor Who. I remember it was on at Midnight on Sunday nights and I used to sneak downstairs and sit inches from the screen so I could hear the show and not wake my mom. She says she knew, but still... I don't think she knew how often I watched. If you don't know about Doctor Who then I won't attempt to educate you. A dear friend bought this for me because they say I work too hard. This thing is amazingly well scripted and I love it.





Here's the inside. This set is made by Snook Industries and you can see the videos here, here, & here. I did not make these videos but they are great if you're considering buying one.





O, and maybe you can encounter strange life on other planets..... (yes she has on a bikini, it's pink.)





EDIT:: NWN linked to this post, you can see their article here.

My New Toy.... a preview

Click here for an audio clue.

*laughs maniacly*
I'll share tomorrow after I get pics.



By the way, if you want to hear other clues, though it may be cheating, click here.

Meet the Designers - Selena Auer

Fieame Latta does the "Tested by Fire" line for IDG and is the texture queen. She's one of my oldest friends and a lovely, if busy person.
Due to immigration issues she now goes by the avatar of Selena Auer.

Noel: Lol, I can interview you here.
Fieame Latta: okay
Fieame Latta: got a million things going on right now.. but we'll try this
Noel: *turns on the recorder*
Noel: What's your main name in SL?
Fieame Latta: Selena Auer
Noel: Any other names you want to share?
Fieame Latta: I don't have any others at the moment..
Noel: What brought you to SecondLife?
Fieame Latta: I was bored and playing on IMVU and a good friend pointed me to Secondlife and told me it was better than IMVU I downloaded the program and that was it I never went back to IMVU
Noel: What's your favorite thing to do here?
Fieame Latta: Building, and Boxing.
Noel: Boxing? You have any belts?
Fieame Latta: lol no I said I loved it not that I was very good at it
Noel: lol
Fieame Latta: excatly.
Noel: You design for IDG right? What do you typically like to design?
Fieame Latta: ah it all depends on the mood I'm in that day.. I love big buildings. Things that stand out In SL
Noel: What was the most valuable lesson you learned starting out as a designer/builder?
Fieame Latta: To get others opinions; it seems I never know when I'm finished I'm never happy with my work
Noel: You find it helpful to be in a group such as IDG for that purpose?
Fieame Latta: Oh yes, I would be lost without IDG
Fieame Latta: If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have known I was any good at all
Noel: Lol, you're just trying to butter me up now.
Fieame Latta: nope that's the truth
Noel: What frustrated or frustrates you the most thiking back on building and designing specifically?
Fieame Latta: time I never seem to have enough time to build everything I want to build
Fieame Latta: Real life keeps me very busy these days.
Noel: *nod*
Noel: What advice would you give to people trying to start down this road? Building?
Fieame Latta: Never give up find a good group like IDG and keep praticing, the more you build the better you will be, oh and even if you don't like it, it don't mean it's junk, you'ed be suprized how many time I didn't like something and someone offered me lindens for it.
Noel: Anything else you want to say, I'll put in without editing and you can talk about me.
Fieame Latta: LOL Yes, Noel is a good leader and a great friend, he's always there when ya need him and don't let him fool you he's one of the best builders I've ever seen.
Fieame Latta: don't edit that dear
Noel: *blush*
Fieame Latta: lol no reason to blush it's the truth

Codex the third Chapter....

OK, so I'm lame.... I meant to find the example carousel that i used to learn to do rotation and show you how I made my big scope rotate, but I can't find it. It seems to have completely disappeared from my inventory and I have no idea where I got it in the first place. One of the frustrations of being as old as I am in SL.

Anyway, I found and figured out how to get the big scope to rotate and set up a chair to look through the telescope with, made prim buttons to control it all and set that up. After that it was time to figure out how to make things appear and disappear. I got help from a couple scripter friends of mine and we made a script that makes things appear out of thin air. This is how I set up the flames and journal for my circles in the Codex. I also went wild at finding great textures and slowly built the layout which I love. I price it rather high for SL because I want it to be a considered purchase. This build was written up at Second Life Insider as a great build by the well respected Akela Talamasca, and though that site has been rolled into Massively it is one of my great honors that it achieved that status. This is still my favorite build. To date there are a dozen of them in world. If you want lucky number thirteen click here.

Grrrr..... Site down this weekend

OK, so I renewed my registration for my custom domain name, and as a result the site went dark this weekend. The site itself was up but you couldn't get to it using http://ingmanndesign.com. If this every happens again you can always try getting to the site using http://ingmanndesign.blogspot.com. I've fixed it but now it redirects to http://www.ingmanndesign.com. Whatever, it's back up and my frustration is beside the point. Thank you to all my dear readers for continued reading and support.

Your name in lights!

Want your name in lights? Or at least on the blog you're reading? Easiest way to do that is to comment, I've installed a recent comment widget that displays your name and what you want to say over there on the right. So comment often and see your name on every page of this blog!

Statistics again

Interesting statistics concerning this site:

Adsense reports that in the lifetime of the site I've now gotten 5,934 page views.
In April it was around 2500 so that's not bad in two months.
Interesting statistics concerning this site:

Adsense reports that in the lifetime of the site I've gotten 2,574 page views.

Analytics now says instead of 213 of those are since April 7th I have 738 visits and 1238 page views. The most popular page on the site is no longer the search page, yet still nobody has ever clicked on an ad in the search page. The most popular page is now the page describing my first castle, the DarkRayne.

Referring sites in order of referrals, all in single digits:

direct
google search
slexchange.com
blogger.com

As expected, updating the content descriptions in SLX has increased it's rank, unfortunately the page views from my ning pages has falle off. However I'm now getting 339 visits on direct typing of the name and 235 on google searches, so that's encouraging, unless of course they are all me.

Biggest search words that get people to the site have changed slightly:
parcel media command type (From my web on a prim discussions)
things to do at a party
arabian castles

Visiting countries:
United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Netherlands
Czech Republic
Australia
Germany
Italy
France
Spain

States in the US:
Oregon (Where I live so probably me since I check my own site and fiddle often)
California
Virginia (I know who this is)
New Jersey (I know who this is too)
Texas
Florida
Illinois


So there you go, once again just kind of interesting statistics to see where things come from.

Recommended Reading

OK, so I went on vacation recently which means I caught up on my reading, which I am happy about, but it also means I get to once again share with all of you my dear friends, recommended Second Life reading material. I'm not going to say alot about any of these but I have read them all, I personally find them valuable in some way shape or form and if you click the link you help support this site. (Hey, disclosure is not a problem for me.) Aimee Weber and James Hamlet Au are amazing figures in SL and looking up their online writings would be well worth your time as well. Happy perusing.

Vegas Magic

So Vegas...

I have decided I didn't really like it. I had some fun, it was neat to see, but it's not my kind of town. Everything there is expensive as hell. Plus being stuck in the airport for 8 hours wasn't fun. However, bright spots....

I played the nightly poker tournament at the Sahara and made it to 18th out of around 200 people so I'm pretty happy with that. Didn't make any money but at least I know I can play.

Penn and Teller was incredible. I highly recommend their show and if you don't know who they are here are a couple of clips from tricks I loved.

Sin City!

Off for my first time in Vegas. Enjoy the rest of your week everyone, I'll be back late on Saturday. I'll let you all know how Penn & Teller's live show was.

Told you there were more!

Live Music and ahem.... Blackmail.

OK, so here are the first of the many many many shots I took during our 1 year Celebration and Grand Opening.... all errors in appearence are mine, but it was a blast.

Argh!

OK, so something I didn't share but the Friday before the 24 hour party (what was I thinking?) my PC decided to blow a gasket. I lost everything, all my custom textures, all my psd files, all my experiments, everything.

I'm not that upset, I mean, the important stuff was uploaded and productized already, the worst blow has to be my eye templates but... remember, Jesus Saves. This is also why I haven't uploaded pics from the party yet, because I'm still trying to make my new motherboard and OS reload stable. I'll get them posted asap.

Wow, dragging today... but great party yesterday.

OK, so if you go to the Natalis beach today, it probably dosen't look quite up to standards. We had an amazing all day party yesterday and we ended it by reshowing Rocky Horro picture show and floating in innertubes. Amazing firworks by Kelly right before. I'm tired and need to format pics before I post them, but thanks to all who attended. I especially want to thank the Live Musicians for an amazingly good concert. I'll have any of you back any time. Secondly I couldn't have pulled this off without my partner designers and two amazing people.

Neit Tackleberry loves live music and did an amazing job helping me find and convince people to play, she deserves most of the credit for the concert's coming off as well as they did.

Lexie Jansma is an amazingly talented event's organizer and I should have gotten ahold of her earlier rather then later. She provided a ton of assistance filling in gaps in my schedule and finding dj's and event ideas. I highly highly highly recommend her services as that's how she makes money in SL.


Thank again to all of those who came, if you didn't get your free gift IM me in world.

Pics soon!

Creature Feature!

DJ Amalia is still spinning tunes out of her library although she's gone to take a much needed rest. I've started Rocky Horror, but I too am gone back to bed. Come to the Beach if this is your normal time and enjoy the lips!