Cool article about IBM’s recent announcement that they’ll be investing $10 million over the next year on Second Life. Nice slideshow too.

Find the audio of the Sun Open Source Java audio stream here.

Great mentions of Leo Burnett, Crayon, Scion, Intel and AKQA.

I’m really excited to announce that Sun’s Tim Bray and Simon Phipps alongside Mark Shuttleworth will be hosting a Q&A session in the Second Life Sun Pavilion http://tinyurl.com/m338r this coming Monday, November 13th, at 1:00 PM PST. The Q&A session is to follow an announcement that morning by Sun via webcast and other media channels. We will be broadcasting the webcast at the Sun Pavilion to kick off the Q&A session.

A bit more about the hosts, as these guys have really interesting backgrounds: Tim Bray is Sun’s Director of Web Technologies and a co-inventor of XML and Simon Phipps is Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer. Joining them will be Mark Shuttleworth, the Founder of the Ubuntu project (and one of my favorite Linux distributions), and odd tidbit, the version of Linux I used to run (and test) the Second Life Linux Alpha when I worked at Linden.

We hope to see you at the event. Please RSVP via Second Life Instant Message to Ted Millionsofus or myself (Chris Millionsofus) if you are planning on attending.

First off David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor, published a piece about Second Life with the premise that Second Life is not over hyped, it’s important, and not going away.
The following quote really captures the power behind this medium “… one of the great things about Second Life is that whenever you are doing anything, you can see the other people who are nearby as well. This brings a dimension of social life - so elemental to how we live our lives offline - to the Internet in a way that up to now the Web has not. In Second Life everything you do is done in a social space, though you can get privacy if you want.”

But that’s not enough for a Friday! Gina Chon, of The Wall Street Journal, published today an article about Scion’s and it’s strategy to stay cutting edge. A part of that strategy is Scion’s entry into Second Life, which of course we have blogged about considerably here. The bulk of the article goes into the details of Scion sales strategy for the upcoming year and the challenges faced by an upstart brand when it has the potential to become to popular for its own good.
That all said, I can’t write about Scion and not post some of the latest virtual Scion that I have seen aroun Scion City.

I’ve always loved Morning Edition, so I was expecially thrilled to do this interview that appeared today on NPR. The challenge in producing the piece was to paint a verbal picture of a virtual world for listeners. To aid us in this, we put together an avatar for Steve Inskeep and tried to pay constant attention to the fact that listeners weren’t able to see what we could. It really struck me how similar this process is to the task we engage in daily — trying to explain Second Life to people who have never seen it.