The Smarter Earth Institute has established ArtMuse as a means to announce and promote art, museum, musical and other cultural cultural events within Second Life and other virtual worlds.
Within Second Life, ArtMuse is instantiated as a Subscribe-O-Matic ungroup, allowing subscribers to receive notices without having to use a precious SecondLife group. The way "unGroups" work is that a person wishing to join an "unGroup" simply touches an in-world kiosk (see below). A second touch at any location allows users to "unsubscribe". ArtMuse "UnGroup" members receive messages as IMs, and may subscribe to an RSS feed if they wish. Like an ordinary group, items are sent to members (via in-world servers). In other words, "unGroups" look to users like regular SL groups but don't take up valuable SL groups for the user and don't suffer from all the spam and group chatter that tends to happen on SL groups.
A few snapshots from SmarterEarth art gallery as of 2010-05-15 are available here.
