The Second Life craze continues.

Interactive advertising agency TMP Worldwide, which specialises in recruitment, said on Monday it will allow corporate recruiters to hold job fairs and interview potential employees via TMP’s space on the Second Life virtual world.

I’m not the least surprised, not after that Swedish embassy thing. Still, I think it’s silly. 3,3 million users is of course quite a bit, but it doesn’t merit this kind of attention. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper to actually put up something in Second Life and perhaps have someone watching it on select hours, than doing the same thing in real life. TMP, in the story quoted above, is doing the right thing there, in principal, since job fairs are expensive and time consuming.

But let’s face it. This Second Life craze is nothing else than new media link bait for old media coverage.

Originally posted on February 13, 2007 @ 1:14 am

YouTube has identified a user who was accused by Fox of uploading episodes of 24 a week before they were scheduled to air on television, and has handed over the information to the company. The same user allegedly uploaded episodes of The Simpsons as well. All hopes of Google resisting the subpoena as they have done in the past with respect to US government subpoenas, were summarily crushed, according to a report on internetnews.com.

“We intend to use the information provided to pursue all available legal remedies against those who infringed our copyrights,” 20th Century Fox Television Vice President of Media Relations Chris Alexander told internetnews.com.

Where’s the EFF when you need them?

Originally posted on February 13, 2007 @ 10:41 pm

Yahoo! has announced the launch of Yahoo! Messenger integration into Yahoo! Mail, in a long expected copy cat move following Google’s integration of Google Talk into Gmail last year.

The new feature allows Yahoo! mail users the ability to utilize instant messaging from the one screen without the need to either download nor have Yahoo! Messenger running on their computer.

Reuters reports John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, saying in a phone interview embedding instant messaging makes e-mail “an even more social experience” — by transforming how one communicates from a letter-writing experience into a back-and-forth chat.

“We are hopefully bridging the gap between e-mail users and IM users,” Kremer said. “There is still a chunk of Yahoo Mail users who aren’t using IM.”

Tags: Yahoo

Originally posted on February 12, 2007 @ 6:35 pm

Former pop singer and actress best known for playing Rose in Doctor Who, Billie Piper, has been confirmed as the lead in a new TV series to be filmed in the UK “Belle de Jour” based on the book “Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl” which itself was adopted from the blog Belle de Jour, a “chronicle of the exploits of a high classed prostitute in London”.

All Head Lines said that the series is still at the early stages of development, and will show on Channel 4 in the UK.

Sky News reported that the series will be about “a sexy London prostitute who makes a fortune by describing her sexual acts on the internet”. Yep, the fortune came via the blog.

As far as I’m aware, this will be the first time a blog to riches tale will be made into a TV series, although there has to be some irony in the fact that the story centers around a prostitute.

Originally posted on February 13, 2007 @ 7:16 pm