The debate always rages, and it always seems silly to me. I often say that technologies accrete, which means that usually, new technology doesn’t replace old technology. In this case, the kinds of live text chat that we consider to be the “old way” are in fact the new way, having arisen during the 70s, long after the rise of party line telephony. An adaptation to limited bandwidth, text chat has stuck around because it has different affordances than voice chat does, and even now that bandwidth has increased, it still offers and forever will offer some things that voice cannot.

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Via Clickable Culture, I am pointed to this article on trademark infringement being rampant in Second Life.

Which we all knew, of course. But more interesting is the fact that this blog even exists: it’s called Virtually Blind, and it’s all about legal issues and virtual worlds. Yummy.

• There’s now a World of Warcraft credit card. Looks like you earn gametime as you buy stuff. Makes sense — tie the users in.
• My UO resource system articles (1, 2, 3) have been translated to Hungarian over at the new site mmogames.hu.
• NHN’s U.S. portal Ijji.com is out of beta and launching officially. Apparently, they’ve had 3 million registered and are hitting over 25k concurrent with games like Gunbound and GUNZ.
• VW2007 audio is up at REZNation. I should call out that Areae’s John Donham is on this one about the roadmap for future virtual worlds.
• Linden Lab is jumping into the issue of age and id verification. Land owners will have to mark their land as having adult content, Linden will provide a proof-of-age-and-id system (via a third party) that landowners can query, and “Landowners are morally and legally responsible for the content displayed and the behavior taking place on their land.” Basically, pursuing a very ISP-like policy.

Mike Rozak is looking for folks to try out text-to-speech stuff; he’s interested in large part because of its usability for virtual worlds.

For many years now, I’ve been posting that (in the long run) text-to-speech will be an important technology for MMORPGs.

If you want to listen to the latest bleeding-edge text-to-speech research, AND at the same time help improve text-to-speech, then please run through the listening tests at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mfraser2/blizzard2007/register-R.html .

A quick explanation of what’s going on in the test:

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