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Some of Millennium Park's interesting architecture; the glowing structures are actually video-equipped displays that spray water at people frolicking in the nearby reflecting pool. No joke.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

CHICAGO, Ill.--This might just be the perfect city for a Second Life convention. At least this out-of-towner thinks so.

When you think about it, a good number of Chicago's urban planning quirks have quite a bit in common with the aesthetics of some of Second Life's more popular "sims." It's because parts of the city are so planned--as though they were created with a few well-thought-out mouse clicks that could easily be tweaked and improved. The business and shopping districts are peppered with bright displays of greenery and flowers, the streets and gardens in the Michigan Avenue vicinity are impeccably manicured, and skyscrapers extend literally to the banks of the local bodies of water. (Anyone who's seen New York's still-industrial waterfront will understand why this is a novelty to me.)

Plus, the city of Frank Lloyd Wright has all those eye-catching feats of modern and post-modern design--just walk into Millennium Park--that could make any jaded New Yorker say, "Holy (expletive), they actually built that? It got off the drawing board? Red tape and bureaucratic cronyism didn't halt it at stage one?"

The Second Life Community Convention kicked off Friday night with a number of art- and music-focused panels, but a good number of the attendees won't be in town until tomorrow morning--the recent spat of inconvenient weather phenomena in the Midwest crippled more than a few travel plans. Nevertheless, a small crowd of metaverse enthusiasts turned out at the Chicago Hilton on Friday evening to listen to live performances from musicians whom they'd previously known only as avatars, as well as to hear about the phenomenon of Second Life machinima--films created using the virtual world as a platform. (For those who are unfamiliar, machinima has made its way squarely into pop culture: there was a South Park episode that was about 60 percent World of Warcraft machinima, and Coca-Cola's heavily YouTubed Super Bowl ad was essentially Grand Theft Auto machinima.)

I'd never been to any kind of in-the-flesh Second Life gathering before, so taking note of the attendees was interesting. People had come from as far as New York (like me), Boston, San Francisco, Australia, Japan--there were plenty of foreign languages and accents. The crowd was largely a mix of geeks and art-school types, but the geeks were much more on the mainstream end of dorkdom than I'd have expected. There were a few unnatural hair colors, a wacky hat or two, and about a half dozen people who'd chosen to wear sunglasses indoors, but otherwise it was quite an average (albeit loquacious) bunch. A few were even flat-out business casual in dress pants and button-down shirts.

The average age was somewhere in the early- to mid-thirties, but interestingly skewed a bit older for females (i.e. the twentysomethings were primarily male). And Macs appeared to be the computer of choice, both at the SLCC events and at an offshoot art-and-music reception at Columbia College down the street (where machinima called "Zombie Horde" and music from the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse were showcased).

It was difficult to tell whether attendees, whose name tags displayed likenesses of their avatars, were introducing themselves by "meatspace" names or Second Life names. The latter seemed to prevail.

Judging by chitchat, nonprofit uses for Second Life are going to be a hot topic. One person at the machinima screening told me that he wouldn't be surprised if we saw discussion of the dissonance between residents who see Second Life marketing efforts as a cool and creative turn for corporate America and those who think it's just tacky advertising and product placement.

At one machinima screening, the host gave a rundown of the genre's definition for newbies, explaining that machinima is a form of filmmaking in which a video game is used as an artistic platform. "But Second Life isn't a game," he added quickly.

"It's a thingie!" several audience members shouted out.

If you haven't been following the brouhaha around Wikipedia recently, Glyn Moody's excellent synopsis will give you the skinny. It turns out that Wikipedia is more open than anyone thought, not only because anyone can theoretically edit it, but also because it records the IP addresses of those who do.

My favorite? Microsoft's view of itself:

As we head into the dog days of summer, most technology announcements are lukewarm at best. Usually vendors save their juicy stuff for September and the push toward the end of the year.

With that as a back drop, one announcement last week may have been a curious exception to this rule. Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft got together with a few others and announced the Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA). What is SISA? The press release defines it as a "commercial off-the-shelf architecture that was created to make data easily, and securely shared among multinational environments."

Pretty vague, I know but in reading between the lines, SISA seems to be the beginning of a multi-vendor architecture that blends the best of Network Access Control, user authentication, network directories, and enterprise DRM. Combining these technologies could make it easier to enforce business policy rules without getting mired in multiple layers of technology. Want to add a new consultant to a project? SISA provides a framework that would streamline user provisioning, security enforcement and rights management. Mapping business initiatives with security policies gets a whole lot easier.

So will it work? Sounds good but this initiative hasn't lead to market ga-ga like the iPhone announcement. The architecture needs a lot more clarity and the group needs more participants. What about IBM's participation for document and identity management? Where is Oracle and Adobe? How about the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect? MIA so far.

It's too early to tell whether SISA is a passing summer fling or the real deal. But Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft are definitely on to something here. We need better standards and frameworks to consolidate access controls, privacy, and security up and down the technology stack. Next-generation business processes depend upon this happening. SISA may or may not become real but I guarantee that something resembling SISA eventually does.

Artist's conception of living house

(Credit: terreform.org)

Many traditional societies have partaken tree house living. And some of us had tree houses when we were kids. Now a New York-based nonprofit is promising a tree house for future high-tech, low-impact living.

The group is terreform.org. In their own words, "Terreform is a nonprofit organization and philanthropic design collaborative that integrates ecological principles in the urban environment."

Terreform says it is close to making its first sale. Zoning regulations and building codes may present a problem. Walls that grow and change shape?

Like any self-respecting tree, the Fab Tree Hab would collect rainwater. The walls would be clay and straw. Windows would be a soy-based plastic, capable of expanding as the structure grows. Now, if they can only insure that closets would grow faster than the rest of the house.

More information on famous American structures is now available to view on Google Earth.

In January, Google Earth 4 made it possible to build and share rich 3D content. The change resulted in 3D renderings of famous architectural sites and terrain, seen when the proper layers in Google Earth are turned on.

As part of the 150th anniversary of the American Institute of Architects, the organization has added photos and information on the architects behind several famous American structures.

The "America's Favorite Architecture" layer features the top 12 winners of a poll taken by Harris Interactive on Americans' favorite buildings, bridges, ballparks and memorials. They include things like the Biltmore Estate by Richard Morris Hunt and homes by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The "iPad." It brings to mind the home of an urban hipster/tech geek whose plasma TV, DVR, laptop, et al--along with the lighting scheme in his loft--can all be controlled by a single click wheel.

If only it were so.

So, what is the "iPad"? Think big. No, bigger. The "iPad," inspired by Apple's ubiquitous media player, is a skyscraper. Or rather, a building project in Dubai, according to a report in Wednesday's Guardian.

Scheduled to open in 2009, the 23-story tower "will be perched on top of a docking station, and will ape the iPod by sitting at an angle of six degrees," reports the Guardian.

James Law Cybertecture, an architecture firm based in Hong Kong, is designing the project, while Omniyat Properties is the developer behind it. The tower will reportedly include more than 200 homes and offices.