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Back when the new in-world, Google-appliance-powered search for Second Life was put together, it had one glaring absence. While the search was entirely Web-based, there was no actual form on the Web. Recently that's changed, with Linden Lab quietly replacing the search field on most of their Web pages with an interface to search.secondlife.com in a recent update.

While there's no front page for the site, it's certainly trivial enough to locate the search forms intended for Web use. Essentially, it's Second Life's internal search bundled up for browsers, even the classified advertising down the right hand side of the results -- though unless you're willing to launch the Second Life viewer for each classified advert, they're not very usable.

All in all, however, it's a tremendous convenience if you can't run the Second Life viewer right away, but still want to dig for something or someone on the Second Life Agni grid, or if you want to look up the UUID for a user (yourself or someone else).

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Jack Linden has dropped the next shoe on mainland policy changes in Second Life, while we're expecting plenty more shoes, this one at least seems to have been widely welcomed, increasing the overall crack-down on what are known colloquially as ad-farms.

The short form is 'Network advertising (Ad Farming) will no longer be permitted on the Linden Mainland unless you have a written agreement with Linden Lab (essentially meaning a license to advertise)', writes Jack. There's additional explanations and caveats to that, though. The last policy post on ad-farms was certainly considerably deficient and seemed to cause more problems than it solved.

Users who are are operating advertising networks that are infringing this policy have until 1 October 2008 to obtain a license and comply with the terms of that license, or to remove their content. Jack does not say what will occur otherwise, but content-removal and account-sanctions are the safe bet.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

In a lot of ways, we've got a bit of a traditional streak here at Massively. We like the good, solid, family values like "Kill a monster. Steal it's treasure". One tradition that we hold particularly dear is "Announce the software and then make it available". Yes, we know that makes us awfully old-fashioned in the modern, cool, vaporware world of the kids these days.

In the wake of our announcement and hands-on piece with the new Second Life SLim VoIP/IM client, Linden Lab has in turn announced it, stamped it "coming soon" and yanked the availability of the web-page and associated setup process. This all seems a bit backwards, to be honest.

Granted, the software doesn't actually work very well at all, and appears to be little more than a stripped down copy of Vivox Connector with most of the features removed (we think that it is exactly that, in fact), but still, it is supposed to be a Beta.

Perhaps it's the little details like the fact that Lindens can't hide their online status from it that have caused it to be pulled, rather than any other inherent kind of breakage. Since Linden Lab's PR people won't answer any queries about the product, all we can do is speculate.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Linden Lab's unannounced SLim lightweight Second Life client is available now. We grabbed it out of the starting gate and took it for a bit of a spin for an hour or so. It looks a great deal like Linden Lab needed some new feature or API in the SLS-1.24 server deployment to support this. As a result, preparation of the SLim software for release prior to an announcement at this year's Virtual Worlds -2008 conference in Los Angeles must have been awfully rushed.

We expected this to be the first purpose-designed client for Second Life to come out of Linden Lab since the original in 2002, but actually ... it isn't. The real story is rather more surprising.

SLim is a Vivox product and it connects to Vivox servers. Connection with Second Life and its grid and servers is only very peripheral. How much involvement Linden Lab actually had with any of this is debatable.

The short version: It does a lot less than you'd hope, and setup of the whole show is far clunkier than you'd like. On with the show...

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

You may remember Richard Minsky, founder of The Center for Book Arts in New York City and owner of SLART Magazine. We previously wrote about his assertion of his rights and obligations with respect to his SLART trademark, which covers (among other things) Minsky's SLART magazine. The SL portion obviously represents Second Life, and the ART well... that's art.

Minsky originally filed his SLART trademark on 22 March, 2007. It was published for opposition on 18 September, 2007, and finally granted formal registration by the US Patent and Trademarks office on 18 March, 2008 (registration number 3399258). SLART, therefore, is owned by Minsky insofar as the US Government is concerned at the present time, whether that grant was conferred rightly or wrongly, unless it is somehow overturned or abandoned.

Now he has filed a civil suit in a federal court, naming Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale, Mitch Kapor and one or more other Second Life users (as John Does) for (variously) trademark infringement, trademark dilution, tortious interference (that is interference that causes injury), and fraud.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Second Life user Jacek Antonelli has announced a new, user-interface oriented project called Imprudence as a major fork of the Second Life viewer. Citing difficulties and delays within Linden Lab's own development and quality assurance pathways, Antonelli and McCabe Maxsted have created the basis for a community effort to rework the viewer's user-interface.

'The Second Life Viewer suffers from a stifling atmosphere of non-change. This atmosphere emanates from Linden Lab, whose attitudes and policies discourage all but the smallest and most superficial improvements. This is the result of the nature of Linden Lab as a corporation,' they write, listing lack of resources, burdensome QA that punishes change, and a paying customer-base that actively resists alterations.

Antonelli and Maxsted believe that a community project can overcome all of these obstacles -- and that if users do not choose to attempt it, the status will continue to remain pretty much quo for the foreseeable future.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Telstra BigPond (a major Australian Internet Service Provider, with an approximate 50% market-share) already has among the most successful corporate presences in the virtual environment of Second Life. Right now, BigPond is in the process of launching a new initiative: A dedicated kiosk where BigPond customers can get support from live staff, both in text and through Second Life's integrated voice system.

The kiosk will be staffed by BigPond customer-service representatives from 11AM to 10PM Monday through Friday, Australian Eastern Standard time.

"Our launch of a dedicated virtual customer service team is an indication of the popularity of Second Life and provides us with another innovative way to continue to give our members award-winning customer service," said BigPond Group Managing Director, Justin Milne -- admittedly that's spinning so fast that a couple magnets and some copper wire would just about allow you to replace the Snowy River Hydro-Electric scheme.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

A/B testing has been used by Linden Lab for some time to gauge the effectiveness of the new user orientation experience in Second Life. A/B testing (also known as Split Testing) is a fairly straightforward system where a set of users are given the A experience (basically what already exists) as a control group and a random sampling are shunted to an alternative (the B experience) that differs in only one respect. The results of the two groups are then compared to look for statistical improvement. Through a series of A/B tests, the particular elements that tend to produce the greatest improvements can be determined.

It's a great way of improving new user experience over time. Unfortunately, the efforts of Linden Lab's VTeam (in charge of the volunteer programs) create results that are not only misleading, but actually statistically worthless.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Urban exploration and free running are activities normally associated with the real world. In recent years, however, MMOs such as Everquest 2, Age of Conan and World of Warcraft have become a digital stage for the arts. With entire new virtual worlds to explore, no risk of injury and no physical fitness required, it's understandable that many would-be free runners are going digital.

In this article, I take a visual tour of the world of urban exploration and rooftop running in MMOs and explain how you can learn to clamber onto the rooftops in your favourite game.

Linden Lab is putting together (but has not yet formally announced) a Second Life promotional video to be shown at this year's Second Life Community Convention (SLCC08) in Tampa Florida, 5-7 September. Linden Lab is looking for up to ten images, and up to 250 words on the topic, with permission for use assigned to Linden Lab and SLCC.

Linden Lab hasn't announced this yet, but we've been watching the development of the announcement on the Second Life wiki for the last couple of days now. We're guessing that the actual proper announcement still has to be crawled over by the PR people with microscopes before they dare show it on the official blog -- but we've got the real meat of it here.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

While the story of Kimberly Jernigan really has nothing much to do with the virtual environment of Second Life, you're probably going to read and hear a lot over the next week or two from people who would desperately like you to think that it does.

Jernigan from North Carolina and an unidentified older man from Claymont, Delaware met online, but their relationship didn't last out in the physical world. Jernigan reportedly became increasingly unstable when things didn't work out and then allegedly stalked and attempted to kidnap her ex-boyfriend at his home. Jernigan posed as a postal worker in order to obtain information about his home address. Charges include attempted kidnapping, burglary and aggravated menacing.

Just what is the lesson here? People from North Carolina can't be trusted? Watch out for people who seem to be postal workers? That you should always remember that everyone behind an online avatar or toon is an ordinary person? Actually, probably the lesson is that many ostensibly 'respectable' media agencies would walk through fire to demonize your online pastimes, interests and hobbies unnecessarily. Pay attention to whom.

Probably, at the end of the day Jernigan's ability to get the man's address by posting as a postal worker is the really scary part here. If you've ever had a stalker, that alone will give you the chills. Privacy and anonymity are only the thinnest of shells, and can be pierced by those who are determined.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Linden Lab has been granted another trademark on their hand-and-eye logo. This time for a credit card. Specifically, trademark registration 3378449 covers "Online financial services, namely, offering a fictional-dollar-denominated credit card to charge online purchases".

Of course, 'fictional-dollar-denominated' would mean Second Life Linden Dollars (L$). Exactly what sort of card this might be is uncertain. You may recall that in 2006, MindArk released an ATM card for Project Entropia (now called Entropia Universe) allowing access to Project Entropia Dollars (PED) and supported by the Versatel cash-card network.

There's no indication whether Linden Lab is (or was) planning a physical card, or some sort of non-physical card, how it would be backed or where it might be honored.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

According to an announcement by Linden Lab, the SLS1.24 (version 1.24 of the Second Life server/simulator code) rollout to servers is happening right now. While Linden Lab have normally given at least a little advance notice, and a schedule for the server-side software updates (which can be disruptive), no such notice or schedule were published. All we have been told is that it will "take a number of days"; we assume that is probably different to the usual three-day schedule. Actually, if you haven't been reading Massively lately, this whole update probably comes as a complete surprise.

As we mentioned previously, the 1.21 release candidate viewer that you'll need in order to take full advantage of this release isn't due until next week, though you can probably access the Mono functionality with the preview grid viewers -- just remember to change the grid target to -grid agni in order to access the main grid.

Patch notes are after the jump.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

By now, if you've been keeping track of the metrics, it should come as no surprise to you that Linden Lab's virtual environment Second Life is dominated by Generation X and Baby Boomers. Generation Y (also popularly called Millennials) don't make much of a mark on the landscape of Second Life at all. While the boxing and labeling of generations in this fashion seems a little arbitrary, it is commonly done as demographers identify various key socio-cultural differences between the groups, though the edge-cases between them, of course, tend to be a bit blurry -- and everyone, of course, is an individual.

The Metaverse Journal's Feldspar Epstein looks at assorted issues with the use of Second Life and education as it pertains to Millenials. In a broader social context, however, the generation gap between the Boomers/GenXers and the Millennials is starkly apparent. Millennials consistently number among the least active users of Second Life. The Baby Boomers dominate the virtual environment's usage landscape, followed closely by the Generation Xers.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

So, you think Linden Lab's work on inter-grid teleportation is for the benefit of third-party Second Life simulators like Opensim and its ilk? That's hardly likely, in the current climate. Actually, the ideal beneficiary for a straightforward inter-grid teleportation system like the one being developed is actually Linden Lab itself.

In what way could Linden Lab really benefit from a straightforward inter-grid teleportation mechanic? Why with a corporate grid, of course. A grid totally devoted to government, and corporate use -- maybe even with educators and non-profits, if you're lucky. Teleporting to such a location from the main grid could be as easy as using a landmark to a private estate elsewhere on the main grid. So -- what's the benefit of having a corporate grid?

Well, it doesn't have you or your content for starters. Sure you can go there, but that's different.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.