Some SL Related Links
Here is rather good review of Second Life from someone who took it for a test drive. It's good in that it comes at things from a very technical side instead of the "wowzorz - you could make milli0ns for sayin 'Hi'" or "You can pvp andpwn them!". It's got a few strikes against it because it points out that in just two days of working with the system one is already expecting things like Havok2 and mono are actally being worked on and might come some time in the future :)
The article is at http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/07/17/second-life-for-a-weekend/
I had not noticed until yesterday that QAvimator is outpacing Avimator development. So much so that on their site they refer to Avimator as no longer support older software, haha. They have a nice little beginner's guide on their site, and they link to the Second Life Knowledge Base where one can find an "Animation Guide".
I've been thinking of how to get a machinima project going recently. As such this older write up on machinima in SL is a good read. On the same site Eric Linden's top ten tips for machinima is also good. Heck, even Ordinal's recent blog post shows a nice quick and dirty video file with a few edits and some text transitions.