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‘Life On Line’ launches

February 15, 2009 by 1 Comment

lifeonline I received a media release yesterday, announcing the launch of a virtual TV show, Life On Line.

It’s the latest project by Australian Steve Cropper, who produced a virtual worlds community called My Metaverse as well as a previous offering: The Late Show.

I watched the pilot episode and like any pilot, it’s pretty raw. The overall theme of the show is the multitude of ways that people spend time online, from Facebook to Wikis. The topics are covered in a fairly breezy way and it works to an extent. What doesn’t work for me in any way is the canned laughter. To say it’s annoying is an understatement – at points it harks back to some early TV shows in the 60’s where laughter appears in spots where there’s nothing to laugh at.

The news section featuring blogger Sigmund Leominster has promise, but the rest of the show to me seems to have a long way to go. It’s always great to see new options appear, and here’s hoping this is one that goes from strength to strength. The first episode launching today will determine to a large extent whether that’s the trajectory we’ll see.

Update – Episode 1 is now live, so you can judge for yourself the real deal:

Filed Under: Australian News, Events, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

My Metaverse

July 10, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Last week we received a media release with the lead “The Virtual Worlds’ answer to MySpace has
been created” and our scepticism meter red-lined. We read on further to discover that Australia-based Steve Cropper (SL: Angelico Babii) has recently launched My Metaverse, a virtual worlds community based on the Ning platform.

The focus is “developing the new media arts and community across all the virtual worlds”. I asked Steve how he thought My Metaverse would gain a critical mass for success when outfits like the Association of Virtual Worlds already have well-established networks, let alone the larger user communities around.

Steve’s response: “Like AVW, we too are setting up on the Ning system, because it is flexible and offers a lot of functionality. Our plans include migrating to a dedicated website and that will follow once we have established the network and it is up and running – hopefully in a month or two or even sooner.

The Metaverse is still largely virgin territory. Like the pioneers of the North American and Australian early settlement, we too find ourselves meeting up with familiar faces in the path well trodden. It seems the Metaverse still has enormous growth left in it and I am as excited as the next person to see what lies beyond the next valley.”

So if you’re in the pioneering spirit, jump into My Metaverse. One warning – music auto-loads when accessing the site, which does give it one (albeit annoying) MySpace comparison for sure.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

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