The LA Times, which has historically been quite critical of Second Life (at least, in regard to its usefulness to businesses) published an article last month showcasing the increasing use of SL as a corporate meeting space.

Ubisoft is making a game for the DS based on Allan Carr’s “Easyway” to Stop Smoking. Love it. Really hope it works. This could be great for our industry.

Valve’s Steam Cloud has been unveiled. Steam users will now be able to access game-generated data (such as save and configuration files) from anywhere. Nice.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, DOTA is a hugely popular Warcraft 3 mod with an interesting development story. Very fun, too. A nice article about it can be found here.

Forbes publishes How Technology Can Save Retailers, which, in fact, is all about online games, not technology in general. The topic — using games as marketing and consumer research platforms — is something that I cover extensively in my upcoming book.

Sandra Day O’Connor is working on a video game that will teach children how the judicial system works. (Lots of great serious game-related links in this post, I’m realizing. It feels like an inflection point of sorts.)