TedTalk3_Philip Rosedale, on Second Life

Philip Rosedale, on Second Life
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/the_inspiration_of_second_life.html

This talk was about the virtual world of Second Life. He brings up the idea of why even build a virtual world. We as humans want to communicate socially. Second Life really came about by letting people shape their own online world. What he didn’t expect is that users would really take over and control their own surroundings. He points out that the gender of Second Life is about equal. Also that the average age of the user is 32. He found that as age increases, the amount of time spent in the virtual world increases.

My impression of his talk was shock. I had heard of second life, but never really understood the magnitude of this website. At one point, Philip Rosedale states that there is a potential for Second Life to be bigger than the web itself. Right now there are about 250 thousand users wondering around this virtual world. When he said that there was almost a million user generated items in that virtual world, this really made me wonder how this virtual economy is taking place.

I chose this talk to learn more about the idea of a virtual world. I really wanted to learn about what makes us want to be social through a computer platform.

Three links associated with the individual or talk with the following information of each:

Philip Rosedale Bio
http://www.ted.com/speakers/philip_rosedale.html
This is his bio from the Tedtalk page. Great place to start finding information about this speaker.

Linden Lab
http://lindenlab.com/
This is the Linden Lab home page. Philip Rosedale’s company page.

The Second Life Home Page
http://secondlife.com/?v=1.1
This is the second life home page. The virtual world Philip Rosedale created.