Second Living Bay Sweetwater @ home

Back in college lit, we studied a Ray Bradbury story called Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Basement! The premise of the story was that aliens, who could take on any form, packaged themselves as mushroom spores, then sold themselves via advertisements in kids’ magazines like Boys’ Life. When the boys ordered the mushrooms, raised them, and ate them with their families, the mushrooms could take over whoever ingested them.

I thought of this story when I saw that Google over the past several years has induced ordinary people to build a world for them–Google Earth. This is the virtual globe that Google first offered as a free software download in 2005, which it still is today (although business-oriented versions Google Earth Pro and Google Earth Enterprise cost some serious money).

Google Earth–like any other social network these days–has been busy harvesting its customers as product. Dangling the lure of free software, Google Earth has enticed people with time on their hands, and an unfulfilled creative urge, to start building houses, parks, trees, water features, bridges, buildings, castles, and every kind of world landmark–all modeled in exquisite texture, size, and scale to match real world counterparts. Your grocery store clerk is probably spending his evenings modeling a 3D masterpiece for Google Earth. Right under our noses, Google is populating its virtual world–and getting us to do it!

Linden Lab’s got nothing on Google . . .

When I first began hanging out in Second Life years ago, I marveled at Linden Lab’s ability to somehow convince a bunch of hugely talented people to spend untold hours building a world that Linden would profit from. More amazing, Linden actually noodled these same people into paying for the opportunity to do so! Even now that I’m a serious Second Lifer, I still marvel over Linden’s ability to crowdsource the building of a world.

Continue Reading “Boys and Girls! Raise giant worlds in your basement!”

I received an IM a couple days ago from an avatar who was trying to find out if her entry for Linden’s Month of Machinima had been received, and she came across the hit for my blog (below). She hadn’t been able to raise anyone else at Linden and thought I might know something about her MOM entry because you’ll notice (in the third line) that Google says this blog entry was supposedly posted by “Bay Sweetwater in Linden Lab.”

Hahahahaha. To set the record straight, I do NOT work for Linden Lab. All hype to the contrary, not everything Google says is true! This search hit was an odd juxtaposition of my “Linden Lab” tag next to my name. Go figure.

The funny thing was, I did apply for work with Linden awhile back (ducks all the flying fruit), but never heard anything from them. Hmmmmmm. Maybe Google knows something I don’t after all?

Here I am “gone unicorn” with the Linden bear I bought to benefit the Japan relief fund, sitting next to the cherry tree that is blooming its heart out to send hope and love to all the Japanese. You can get your own Linden bear here.  I was so moved by @Ambassador Roos’s tweet (April 2) that the cherry tree at the U.S. Embassy in Japan is blooming. What a symbol of hope and renewal.