Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.
Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.
So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all. 🙂
Not sure how I missed this before!
Sweden moves to tax in-game transactions | Virtual Economy Research Network
Transactions between participants in a virtual world, where the deal is about the sale of a “product” or a “service” against reimbursement in an internal currency, should be considered, according to the Swedish Tax Agency’s ruling, [actual] sales of electronic services, if the internal currency can be exchanged to a valid legal means of payment. If the internal currency cannot be exchanged to money, the transactions should not be considered [actual] sales.
Edit: to be clear, the reason this is important is because it refers to taxing in-world earnings prior to cashout. Limited to virtual currencies with a cashout mechanism, but still — the line isn’t drawn where the virtual currency becomes “real.”
A few years ago, I warned everyone that “the rest of the world is coming.” Well, they’re here now. Check out these stats.
I suggest you go to the SlideShare site and view it full-screen, it’s text-heavy.
Remember how I said that 3d in Flash was catching up? I got a lot of flak for it in some quarters.
Check out this demo. OK, it’s not 3d, it’s actually parallax. Still. 🙂 It’s apparently from this new platform called Alternativa, which looks quite promising and which does have quite a lot of 3d. Check out this interior or this exterior.
The way things are looking right now, 3d on the web is in a position where there’s multiple solutions coming down the pike, though none are fully baked yet. There’s Flash itself, which is the dominant platform. There’s Shockwave as well. Microsoft sees a strategic imperative and is doing Silverlight. And the open-sourceniks are not going to let something so critical be all proprietary, so there’s the <canvas> tag with OpenGL.
This is basically console wars for the Web. The Alternativas/Away3ds/Papervisions of the world are middleware developers for the Flash “console.” Heck, the latest Away3d demo even somewhat reminds me of the first time I saw Magic Carpet on the PC.
Is it “here” yet? No. But you can see it from here.
