Meet Fellow Musician and Metaplace Founder Raph Koster

If you are a musician looking for your first virtual world experience, think about starting in Metaplace. Metaplace is the brain child of Raph Koster - a blend of passionate visionary, thoughtful scholar, pragmatic developer and best of all, a soulful artist, writer and musician.


I met Raph in person in 2007 to talk about Metaplace (then Areae). It was an informal business discussion and I watched over his shoulder as he flew through the basic tenants of Metaplace, talking at speeds normally reserved for livestock auctions. We talked more over lunch (slower this time, there was chewing involved) about the future of virtual worlds, the collision of the social web and gaming, music, guitars and poetry. I won't bore you with our excursions of thought and speculation, but if I boiled down the conversation one thing predominated - the power of virtual worlds is unlocked when people can create, connect, and have fun pervasively.

Imagine what that means for a musician.

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Photo challenges for virtual worlds members

The autumn is getting "very hot" on Koinup. Members have the chance to enjoy a series of lovely initiatives that challenge their skills. These initiatives are open to all the virtual worlds members, they have only to register on Koinup.

If you're not yet signed on Koinup, you can join by creating your account or login using your pre-exhisting social media accounts. The first reason, because you may want to register on Koinup is to join the 1st 3D Fantasy Art Contest. The contest is about creating fantasy-like themes and submit as pictures to Koinup. Read more »

Winter Wonder

Winter is coming upon us. We are on the verge of the holiday season where we dream of twinkling lights reflected in a glittering snow, a warm bright room with a cozy fire in the fireplace.

I put together two looks from two different worlds to get a feel for the holiday season.

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Stories From The Machine Presents: The Princess And The Pea

A great many have no idea how difficult it is to make machinima. While my personal taste strongly favors original, coherent stories rather than the artsy type films, never let it be said that any machinima is "simple." Even more difficult is the adaptation of material and the translation of it to a new medium. Koinup member Toxic Menges tackled this with her rendition of the classic children's fairtytale "The Princess and the Pea."
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Changes in the Koinup "coolest" algorithm

The "coolest" algorithm is the "Koinup item algorithm" that assigns to any images and videos posted on Koinup a specific weight. Its has been built with the purpose of ranking contents and displaying some of them with more frequency in the front-pages of the website. The "coolest" algorithm is the reason because some works are more frequently seen and displayed than others on the website. The algorithm was based on democratic criteria such as the number of favs and comments.

If you login today, probably you may notice that the list of Koinup coolest works in the various pages dramatically changed. This happened because we upgraded the algorithm in order to include new criteria and elements in the measurement of the specific weight of the contents. Read more »

3D Fantasy Art Competition!

According to Wikipedia: Fantasy Art is a genre of art that depicts magical or other supernatural themes, ideas, creatures or settings. The 3D Fantasy Art Contest is about depicting, by using images and sceneries derived from virtual worlds, games and 3D tools, magical and supernatural themes and avatars: as fairies, wizards, dragons, etcetc... Read all the rules and guidelines in the discussion board.

Read all the rules & guidelines and join the competition! Express the magic in you!


The winning works will be picked by the jury made up by the italian journalist Mario Gerosa (curator of the Virtual Renassaince Exhibition in Florence) and Simon Newstead, founder and CEO of Frenzoo


JOIN THE CONTEST NOW!

Grace's Liner Notes

photo credit: Paddy Wright

Do you have any idea how hard it is to write your own introduction? Seriously, this is entirely too difficult and even a bit unsettling. I guess we should just start with the basics and keep it short.

I'm Grace McDunnough and I am pleased and honored to have joined the Koinup team.

That's me there performing live at my cafe on Nevi in Second Life. You might call me a wandering minstrel; I'm a live musician in Second Life and a member of the ground-breaking virtual world live music tour called "Rocking the Metaverse" presented by Koinup.

Here I'm unofficially in charge of sass, and officially charged with writing stories about the magic of music in virtual worlds, affectionately labeled Grace's Liner Notes.

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Koinup for Arts News and Views.

Welcome to the new style KoinUp blog, kinda smooth-looking I think. In these Virtual Arts posts I hope to be able to bring you some of the more interesting things on offer in Virtual worlds.

In this post.....
Breaking News for AM Radio Fans
University of Western Australia
Brooklyn is Watching
Lindens Support the Arts????


There’s nothing more frustrating than going to see a show, waiting ten minutes for the thing to rezz and then finding out there’s loads of dodgy photos of roses or cats which would be more at home in Google Images than wasting both prims and my valuable time in some poorly designed virtual gallery. So....I hope to be able to point you, whether you are a noob or veteran in the direction of some tasty bits and pieces.

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Harper Beresford's guide: "Style Across the Worlds"

Dear readers, we're pleased to announce the launch of a new column on the Koinup Blog. It will be called: Style Across the Worlds
and it will guide you through the most fashionist people, style, trends that are spreading out (NOW) from the Metaverse. The column will be held by Harper Beresford.

Second Life bon vivant, business woman, and builder, Harper Beresford is the Duchess of RFyre (CMO and Business Manager) and blogger for House of RFyre. A Second Life Mentor, owner of two sims–Avant Garde and Vanguard, photographer, art collector, and jewerly-maker, Harper has made her mark on the virtual fashion scene with her SL fashion blog, A Passion for Virtual Fashion (http://slfashionpassion.wordpress.com).
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Style Across the Worlds

Hiya. I’m Harper Beresford. Welcome to my world—the world of avatars and avatar apparel and enhancement. It’s called “fashion” in common parlance, but it’s more than what an avatar wears. It’s about how a person represents herself in these worlds and the artists who make those enhancements.

In this case, the person is me, so you are subject to my whims and tastes. However, my choices range across a broad swath. I like anything imaginative, artistic, elegant, fun, well-crafted, and/or evocative.

I will be exploring the worlds of Second Life, Frenzoo and IMVU. You will probably see more of Second Life here as I am an established resident there, and frankly, the tools for wearing, exploring, capturing images of, and making fashion seem a lot easier. That doesn’t mean IMVU and Frenzoo don’t have a lot going on and coming up. IMVU has a very lively avatar enhancement scene. Frenzoo puts a big focus on fashion. Let’s see what they have!

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