Chris's Random Ramblings
I've been playing around with building and scripting in the Second Life virtual world, mostly building simple things like teleport pads, greeter objects, and fountains in order to learn how things work. I've also been thinking about linking real life concepts into the virtual world, so built an object which bridges IRC channels into second life.
When placed in Second Life, everything publicly said within 20 metres is relayed into the IRC channel and everything in the IRC channel is relayed into Second Life and can be heard within a a 20 metre radius. There is an existing project SLIRC which uses the open source libsecondlife, but it requires a spare Second Life account to setup. In contrast my implementation just uses RPC-XML calls (you can effectively make function calls into Second Life objects over the internet) and is glued together with a bunch of Perl and PHP. There is some latency (average of about 2 seconds) in the bridge, but for IRC I don't think that matters too much.
If you're interested you can have a look at (and play with) it in Second Life in the OzLabs building on Hursley Island.
Kelly has been building up a virtual model of a house design we've been working on (no we wouldn't really have a moat in real life). Its been really quite useful in deciding what sort of things would work and what wouldn't in real life and we've been tweaking the original 2-D design in response.
It has been interesting to see that Reuters now have a presence inside Second Life, with a reporter spending an hour day inside Second Life to report on events. I had a look around their virtual office and saw that they have RSS and video feeds of real life news. From what I have read elsewhere it sounds like they are also trying to develop areas within SL for discussion of real life news which will be an interesting change from web type forum discussions.