The Wall Street Journal has launched a four-part podcast series called How to Build a Metaverse, with the introduction posted on September 19th, 2022:
We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining a 3D virtual future. But there’s a metaverse that’s already been around for decades. In this world, people have started businesses, built homes and fallen in love as avatars.
In a new four-part series from The Journal, producer Annie Minoff heads back into that largely forgotten metaverse – Second Life – to tell the story of the metaverse we already have and what it can reveal about the one that’s coming.
Start listening to How to Build a Metaverse on Friday, September 23rd.
You can listen to this podcast via The Wall Street Journal website for the podcast The Journal (here’s a link to the first episode), or via your favourite podcast service, such as Apple, Spotify, or Google. I will definitely be listening in!
As I often say on this blog, Second Life is the perfect model of a mature, fully-evolved metaverse, which newer companies entering this marketplace would be wise to study, learn from, and emulate. This seems a rather appropriate time to share an image which I discovered while browsing on the r/SecondLife subreddit over on the social media website Reddit, directed towards all those newer metaverse wannabees (looking at you, Meta!):
UPDATE Sept. 27th, 2022: I listened to the first instalment of this podcast on Sunday, and I can recommend it highly! Annie Minoff interviews many different people—including former Linden Lab senior staff like Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka—and it’s clear that she has immersed herself into Second Life and its culture a lot more than most reporters! I look forward to listening to future episodes of this podcast.
UPDATE Oct. 4th, 2022: The second episode has dropped, and can be found here: Avatars Behaving Badly (LOL!). Note that new episodes of this four-part podcast will be available to listen to on Fridays.
Thank you to Zella Jane for the heads-up!