To Our Readers:

This month marks the first anniversary of The Seventh Sun.

When we first published The Seventh Sun in February of 2007, little did we imagine that our little “newspaper” about our adventures in Second Life would turn into a web magazine with readers in over 1,800 cities worldwide. Looking back on that first four-page issue—Surfers Attacked by Zombies, Into the Eye of a Hurricane (on the NOAA sim), and the newly opened House of Flames music venue—it is amazing to see its evolution into a forty-page publication with six contributing correspondents.

Over the past year we have had the good fortune to explore virtual worlds such as Second Life, Kaneva, There.com, IMVU, and HiPiHi, and have met many interesting and innovative people along the way. We have also followed developments on the cutting edge of technology, law, government, economics, and art, as expressed in the virtual world space. In this month’s anniversary edition, we continue the exploration with articles on Metanomics from Cornell, the interactive, multiple-reality Newseum, the financial crisis in Second Life, Journey Island, and open source scripting with LSL Mono. There are no zombies this time, but you might find a Klingon or two…

Because we share a commitment to free speech, we have decided to embrace this issue as a core value of our publication. Many of our readers live in areas of the world where freedom of expression is either restricted or is simply outlawed altogether. To help raise awareness, we have dedicated a page to this issue and would like to invite you to put a “Freedom Widget” on your blog or website. The widget displays the Freedom of Expression World Map that tracks incidents from around the world. We encourage all of our readers to learn more about this issue by visiting the Freedom Forum, Freedom House, and of course, the beautiful new virtual Newseum in Second Life.

It has been our pleasure to serve you, our readers, with a variety of topics over the past year. We look forward to bringing you a fresh, new supply of news from the virtual world—and will try our best to do so with intelligence, heart, and a little humor.

Pollywog Gardenvale, Publisher

Surfdaddy Orca, Editor-in-Chief