NEW YORK -- Brooklyn N.Y.'s warehouse district was the setting last night for a party celebrating the launch of the long awaited book, "Second Life Herald, the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse" by Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar in SL) and Mark Wallace. The book offers a history of the Second Life Herald , which began in 2004 as The Alphaville Herald. When not writing books, Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Wallace, former editor of the blog http://www.3pointd.com , makes his new offices at a converted industrial warehouse called 3rd Ward, a working space where Internet startups work alongside metal craftsmen and woodworkers.
Wallace joined Wello Horld -- a startup whose mission is to turn the World wide Web into the World Wide World, a couple of months ago. Jerry Paffendorf (SnoopyBrown Zamboni in SL) former resident futurist at the content developer Electric Sheep, founded Wello Horld earlier this year, and hosted the partylast night, which featured an open bar.

The usual group of New York-based Second Life residents showed up. Press members attending included, among others, Andrea Foster, staff reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Tish Shute (Tara5 Oh in SL) of http://www.ugotrade.com , Eric Reuters of http://www.secondlife.reuters.com , Prokovy Neva of http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ and Marvel Ousley of SL News Network. They had not received review copies or advanced copies of the book, so the party conversation regarding the contents of the book was minimal.

Leo Newball, better known as DJ Nexeus Fatale, a Brooklyn native, discussed yesterday's announcement that the 4th annual Second Life Community Convention would be held Sept. 4, 2008 in Tampa Fla. Fatale is a board member of the Future United, the nonprofit group that runs the SLCC.
The conversation also turned to Second Life Insider, which moved into the space left behind by Wallace's http://www.3pointd.com by repackaging itself as Massively and covering MMORPGs and other virtual worlds in addition to Second Life.

The event drew non-Second Lifers also. Margaret Wallace and Nicholas Fortugno teach virtual world design to graduate students at Parsons, the New School for Design in New