Kzero and the growth of Virtual Worlds

Kzero, resident experts in virtual worlds is a website on virtual world info. It has a chart of virtual worlds by types such as chatting/socializing, sports, education or for content creation. Another chart is of registrations by age categories. It age category chart lists the number of registrations for each vw over the world's existence up to 5 years. It shows both games/worlds that are live or in open beta as well as games/worlds that are in development or private beta. It is amazing to see the numbers that are in Beta status. Looks like we are on the verge of a huge leap in the numbers available. Habbo, Neopet and IMVU are among those with the most registrants. Hello Kitty fans will be pleased to see that it is in beta testing.

SLymposium

Last weekend, November 8th, 2008, the ALA Virtual Communities and Libraries group hosted a SLymposium in Second Life. The speakers talked about the different types of libraries and library associations that are in virtual worlds and what they are doing and they also covered how students and graduate library students are using Second Life and Teen Second Life. The keynote speaker was Tom Peters (Maxito Ricardo in SL), author of the just released ALA Tech Source publication, Libraries and Virtual Worlds. The first photo is of the avatar of Sue Bergren who is a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has been researching libraries in virtual worlds. As part of her work she has visited the Central Florida Memory exhibit in SL and has interviewed an OCLS staff member about it. Two of the other photos are of the avatars (Nick and Echo) of OCLS staff who attended the virtual conference. The crowd snapshot is provided to give you an impression of the numbers in attendance. Nick and Echo, attending their first virtual conference, gained some first hand (or is it second hand?, lol) experience about the sound challenges as well as lag and crashing that occur when large groups gather in virtual spaces. You can read a report on the event on ALA's Virtual Presence blog. You may also read more about it on Steven Harris' Collection 2.0 blog or on the SLA in SL blog.
--Laurel