Coverage of news, issues and events occurring in virtual worlds or those who create those worlds
We’ve created a poll widget on The Metaverse Journal website – it’s just below our machinima of the week section.
We’re after your thoughts on what you’d like to see more of on TMJ. We’re particularly testing the idea of whether there’s interest in a TMJ podcast. If you could take the time to vote it’d be appreciated.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Some of the most read articles on The Metaverse Journal are our regular features: Weekend Whimsy, The Watch and our semi-regular Interviews.
We’re about to launch another one : V2 (short for Virtual Two). It’s a chance for two people to write about their views of the other person. Here’s a real-life example, but I have no doubt there’s much more interesting stories going on in virtual lives. Second Life is the obvious source, but if your friendship / relationship is happening in Habbo, Kaneva or World of Warcraft, we’re definitely interested in hearing from you as well. If this sounds like your thing, contact us and we’ll respond within 24 hours with some guidance in putting your story together. We currently have one couple working on their story and hope to publish it in the next week or so.
As always, your thoughts on this new feature (or anything else) is always appreciated.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Being the new year and all, I’m doing some much-needed maintenance work on this site. The discussion forum has been very quiet the past couple of months and I’m actually wondering if it may have outlived its usefulness.
What are your thoughts? If you’d like other sub-forums or have a special interest area you’d like to moderate, let me know. If there’s no real response in the next month I’ll probably close the forums.
Popularity: 3% [?]
As we mentioned last week, we’ve had some plans in development to further develop what we do. The first part of that is a rebranding of SLOz to The Metaverse Journal. Why? Essentially because we want to broaden our coverage to virtual world developments from an Australian perspective, not just Second Life news.
That said, Second Life remains the focus of the site – it remains in our opinion the premiere virtual world in relation to the education. health and business opportunities it presents. It’s also one of the best online social interaction and creation options around.
To coincide with the new title, we’ve upgraded the site. Any comments on the new site are more than welcome – the upgrade is meant to make your reading experience better, so if that’s not happening for you, let us know. On a technical note, www.sloz.info will redirect to www.metaversejournal.com. Our RSS feed subscribers will also not be impacted.
Here’s to continued growth and improved service for our readers. Enjoy!
Popularity: 2% [?]
We had a little shindig on Saturday night to celebrate a year of news reporting for Australian Second Life residents. More than forty individuals popped in over the couple of hours and much dancing was had by all.
A big thank-you to all those who have given their good wishes in recent days. As we’ve already mentioned, there’s some changes on the way that you should enjoy. Stay tuned 
Popularity: 3% [?]
A year ago tomorrow, we posted our first comments on SLOz. We launched in the midst of the mainstream media frenzy around Second Life that brought so many new residents. When we started out, we knew that no-one was covering events in Second Life from an Australian perspective on a daily basis. What we didn’t know was the level of response there’d be. Each day we get IM’s and emails from SL users with story suggestions, tips and feedback. Each week we have someone from the mainstream media making contact, asking us to interpret trends and events in-world. It’s made it the interesting ride we’d hoped it would be and we’ve never been more motivated to continue the work we’re doing.
Over the coming weeks we’re going to be making some fairly large changes to the site as well as to our in-world presence. We’re also hoping to expand our stable of writers so we can cover more issues and events. We even have a book on the way – more on that in coming months.
A big thanks to all of you who’ve supported SLOz over the past year. Kudos to Graham, our education writer and gratitude to our sponsors who help to keep the site running.
As always, we’re very keen to hear any suggestions from you – after all, you’re the reason we do this each day.
Popularity: 8% [?]
In the eleven months SLOz has been running, one of the most vexed questions about Second Life and virtual worlds in general in pornography. Our story on Linden Lab’s ban on ageplay is the most viewed story on SLOz and by an extremely large margin – its follow-up is also regularly read. The reason for the enormous number of views comes down to the venerable search engine.
Each day we get hundreds of views of the ageplay story, through people typing a bunch of terms into Google or other search engines. Some of the more common being used are:
- child porn
- virtual child porn
- preteen porn
- preteen panties
- beastiality
- virtual porn
- legal porn
- child panties
There are a bunch of other ones I won’t publish here, suffice it to say there are some sick people out there. What it illustrates is the universality of the issue across the internet. Linden Lab’s crackdown appears to have been effective in minimising overt ageplay. What it can’t do is minimise the significant demand for undesirable images nor the dilemma of defining what consitutes pornography or otherwise.
Where do you see this issue progressing in future?
Popularity: 14% [?]
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