As Nortel comes closer to the official unveiling of web.alive, the guys in the w.a team have started showing the 3D collaboration tool to a few select media and analysts. Almost without fail, anyone that experiences the 3D virtual environment

— complete with 3D spatial audio and a variety of in-world collaboration capabilities

— comes away impressed.

Over the last few weeks, multiple industry pundits have written about their tour of web.alive, and each seems to glean something a little bit different out of the experience. So here are a few links to some of the recent coverage:

• Rich Tehrani of TMCnet was one of the first to get a glimpse of Nortel's w.a tool (back then it was called Project Chainsaw). Recently Rich was given a tour right from his own PC, and he wrote about it in this blog post: Nortel's Web.Alive Brings Virtual Worlds to Business . Rich has inserted quite a few screen shots in his post that are worth a look.

• Rich's post induced TMCnet's VoIP & Gadget's blogger Tom Keating to give his slightly more skeptical view of web.alive.

• David Greenfield was in the same room with Rich Tehrani when we first showed off w.a earlier this year. David also got an updated look at the tool and had this post on his experience: WebAlive: A Virtual World that Means Business

• About a month ago the w.a team gave an early look at the tool to Christian Renaud, who is a big virtual worlds proponent. You can see his review here: Nortel and Immersive Spaces

• Finally here's a nice feature on Arn Hyndman - the chief architect of w.a - in a recent edition of the "Odd Jobs" section in the Metro.

• Updated: just found another new article on w.a - this one too has some great screen shots.

Of course, several of you have been asking the right questions about web.alive in today's environment: how do you productize it and how do you make money on it? That's the topic of my next post.