To Our Readers:

With this combined March/April edition, The Seventh Sun goes bimonthly and will be published once every two months.

To be honest, we’ve put a lot of hours into bringing you the same high quality, in-depth coverage of virtual worlds month-after-month. While this has been a labor of love and passionate commitment, we are completely self-financed. In order to meet our research and production deadlines, we have sometimes put aside real-life opportunities.

We will continue to publish articles to our web site in HTML format with RSS notification just as frequently as always—maybe even more so—but you’ll see the high-production-value PDF version only once every other month. We feel that this is sustainable and will allow us to pursue other opportunities as we continue to develop The Seventh Sun into a viable, revenue-generating publication.

That said, we think you will find this an exciting, all-Second-Life edition.

Miss Pollywog’s alter ego, Claire Condra, visits Charleston, South Carolina to provide the keynote address to the Association for Business Simulation and Experiential Learning (ABSEL). We’ve provided this presentation in its entirety as an innovative web-based slideshow with machinima and audio clips.

Because certain unscrupulous Second Life residents are stealing the clothes off their backs, a group of prominent Second Life designers have decided to do a “Full Monty” and take it all off. Dreamingen and Surfdaddy explore intellectual property rights with a group of avatars led by Chez Nabob who are raising awareness of the theft of finely-crafted virtual goods such as skins, skirts, sweaters, clothing, and shoes—by tastefully posing in the buff.

We are also very pleased to introduce our new correspondent, Sage Truss, a self-described “techno-shaman” and the real-life VP of a 501(c) nonprofit. She provides interesting commentary on the irony of Earth Day 2008 in Second Life, which she is helping to organize.

As always, it is our pleasure to serve you, our readers, with a variety of topics related to the virtual world. We intend to continue to do so with the same passion and commitment—except on a bimonthly schedule.

Pollywog Gardenvale, Publisher
Surfdaddy Orca, Editor-in-Chief