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October 18, 2006

Second Life travel guide; Rear windshield art; 'GooTube' changes; What's free at AllOfMp3; Polling from India; Fish oil pacifies?

Wired Travel Guide: Second Life: The virtual world into which many former bloggers have slipped gets the travel-writer treatment:

Getting There

Make your way to Secondlife.com and download the required software for free. No passport necessary, but you do need a credit card or PayPal account if you want to buy local currency. Your stay begins on Orientation Island, a secluded area designed to familiarize you with the interface. Then you can beam down to Help Island to let volunteer mentors assist you, or you can proceed straight to the bustling Welcome Area [above]. As with any port, this place is crowded with cheerful, often eccentric locals eager to tell you about their home. But beware of hucksters looking to separate you from your Linden dollars or entice you into the red-light districts.

Second Life is one tech trend I've skipped. It reminds me of The Matrix -- while you're sitting in your chair, your life is just a movie in your head. Meanwhile, bills pile up, dishes go unwashed, and your years slip away -- real life unlived.

Its best use would be to get you through a prison term.

Why stop at "For Sale?" A drought in Central Texas gave Scott Wade lots of dusty rear windshields to work with, and time to appreciate his creations. Scott Wade's Dirty Car Art Gallery gives new meaning to "ephemeral art."

The Good News About 'GooTube'. At Wired,

This time around, the labels are starting to cooperate with GooTube one by one, seemingly allowing content to go un-DRMed on the site as long as they get a piece of the action, and some control over what gets posted on the site. YouTube has pulled infringing videos on a piecemeal basis, but no one has delivered a massive list of infringing files to YouTube or Google, the way Lars Ulrich did to Napster.

This could be because one of YouTube's many cultural byproducts has been to act as a Noah's Ark for analog content. Videos from the analog era that have made it onto YouTube have been granted passage into the digital age without the actual copyright owners having to spend any money digitizing it, and content owners, online distributors and users seem to agree that that's a good thing.

What's more, these deals allow people to create their own music videos to upload to YouTube using copyright sound recordings. This amounts to the labels giving GooTube users somewhat of a blanket license to create derivative works out of their music videos.

Allofmp3 is giving away entire catalogue at P2P Blog:

There was a tiny little detail the folks from Mediaservices forgot to mention during their press conference yesterday. What's that, you ask? Well, only that Allofmp3.com is starting to offer their entire catalogue for free.

Allofmp3 started a new offering called "Music for Masses", which according to the International Herald Tribune will be officially introduced today. Music for masses gives registered Allofmp3 users the chance to download 128 kbps encoded MP3s files. The files are coming with the extension ".mp3x" and are using some special wrapper or custom header so they can only be played with the official Music for Masses player.

Treasure trove: Folkstreams -- A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures.

Leading the page, Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began. More Lomax from Cajun Country, New Orleans, Appalachia. Pete and Toshi Seeger's Singing Fisherman of Ghana.

Thanks to Liz Donovan for the pointer.

Outsourced polling: We got a survey call last night from Delphi Research in Bangalore, India. The din of a big, busy room could be heard as the caller struggled through questions about referenda and -- mostly -- the casino.

We took pity on him and told him how to pronounce candidates' names. (No, it's not fo-GAR-ty.)

Oddly, the survey ended with the question, "Now that you've learned more about the casino, have you changed your mind?" We hadn't learned more, we just answered his questions. He learned more than we did!

Fish oil pacifier? Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat, in the Guardian (U.K.):

The researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of NIH, had placed adverts for aggressive alcoholics in the Washington Post in 2001. Some 80 volunteers came forward and have since been enrolled in the double blind study. They have ranged from homeless people to a teacher to a former secret service agent. Following a period of three weeks' detoxification on a locked ward, half were randomly assigned to 2 grams per day of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA for three months, and half to placebos of fish-flavoured corn oil.

An earlier pilot study on 30 patients with violent records found that those given omega-3 supplements had their anger reduced by one-third, measured by standard scales of hostility and irritability, regardless of whether they were relapsing and drinking again.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:21 AM | Permalink