I guess I should've put up a formal notice awhile ago, but wanted to let everyone officially know that as of spring 2007, this blog stopped actively publishing. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with the popularity of ITG itself -- at its height, after all, it was one of the top-15 Second Life blogs on the planet, according to Technorati.com -- simply that the game client for Second Life grew too big and complicated for my puny little Mac Mini here in Chicago, and as the owner of a new small business (The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) I can't justify buying a brand-new computer just to play a videogame. It's a real shame, but I do at least want to thank all of those who followed along regularly with In The Grid, attended the group's events (both in-game and real-world), and consented to interesting long-form interviews. And in that spirit, rest assured that ITG's archives will remain up for some long time to come, for all you interview subjects who wish to continue linking to the articles about you, as well as those of you coming in through Google searches at later dates.

Now, that said, I do now have 1,536 square meters of virtual land in the grid, as well as plans to try to make some pocket money from a micro-business there; and that's why I still continue to actively make plans for my Second Life prefabricated housing company "Fabb." (This image above, for example, is a nighttime shot from the aerie inside "Asimov," one of Fabb's first three prefab starter homes to go on sale to the public in a few weeks.) It's just that I've set up a new blog for that, so as not to confuse it with the old ITG journalism publication; the dedicated Fabb blog, featuring regular how-to articles on building as well as the latest with the company, can now be found at fabbhomes.blogspot.com.

I want to thank all of you regular gridhoppers again for coming by during this publication's "salad year" (spring 2006 to spring 2007), when interest in MMOs and virtual worlds seemed limitless and the amount of investment money available seemingly unstoppable. I hope in that year I was able to record some honest stories about what life in one of these virtual worlds was like, what was legitimately cool, what was essentially BS, how various corporate structures and underground artists were able to take advantage of these situations, and what came of them. Here's hoping that the couple hundred essays I wrote on the subject in that year will help people in the future understand the first big explosion of public interest in MMOs in those years. And don't forget that I'm still writing about MMO and virtual-world subjects at the CCLaP website; just that I focus exclusively now on interesting cutting-edge artists doing experimental projects within the grid itself, not any other types of residents. All new essays on the subject (post-2007, that is) can be found there under the usual "Gridhopping" search term.