The Second Life Herald

When a virtual journalist for a virtual newspaper reporting on the digital world of
an online game lands on the real-world front page of the New York Times, it just might signal the
dawn of a new era. Virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from The Sims Online for being a bit
too good at his job--for reporting in his virtual tabloid The Alphaville Herald on the
cyber-brothels, crimes, and strong-arm tactics that had become rife in the game--and when the Times,
the BBC, CNN, and other media outlets covered the story, users all over the Internet called the
banning censorship. Seeking a new virtual home, Ludlow moved the Herald to another virtual
world--the powerful online environment of Second Life--just as it was about the explode onto the
international mediascape and usher in the next iteration of the Internet. In The Second Life Herald,
Ludlow and his colleague Mark Wallace take us behind the scenes of the Herald as they report on the
emergence of a fascinating universe of virtual spaces that will become the next generation of the
World Wide Web: a 3-D environment that provides richer, more expressive interactions than the Web we
know today. In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson imagined "the Metaverse," a
virtual space that we would enter via the Internet and in which we would conduct important parts of
our daily lives. According to Ludlow and Wallace, that future is coming sooner than we may think.
They chronicle its chaotic, exhilarating, frightening birth, including the issue that the mainstream
media often ignore: conflicts across the client-server divide over who should write the laws
governing virtual worlds. Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy and James B. and Grace J. Nelson
Fellow at the University of Michigan, is the author of Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in the
Metaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press, 1999), among other books, and the editor of Crypto
Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (MIT Press, 2001) and High Noon on the Electronic Frontier
(MIT Press, 1996). A freelance journalist, Mark Wallace has written widely on virtual worlds and
online games for a variety of publications, including Wired and The New York Times. He is the editor
of leading metaverse blog 3pointD.com, and an author of Second Life: The Official Guide.