Group items tagged

[SLED] Grad Colony - Demo Sloodle Web interfaceParticipantsBlogs Page:  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  (Next)Add a new entryBlog from the top of the libraryby Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 11:40 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Hello again. Live from the top of the San Jose Library...by Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 11:06 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Sitting on the edge of the prim... Top of the world!by Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 10:46 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Sitting on a prim on the top of the library. Blog Post #1 - Posting from SLby Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 10:44 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Here I am on top of the San Jose Library sitting on a prim. Posting with the 2 in 1 Toolbar...very handy!by Grant Potter - Thursday, 19 April 2007, 10:26 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Campus I dropped the HUD to the ground and resized it. I put it back in my inventory and attached it to the center of my HUD. Works (and looks) great now that is it larger. Testingby Kip Yellowjacket - Monday, 16 April 2007, 08:28 AM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Hyperborea asfdjasldjlasjdlajsdlasldjasldjlasdjlaösjdlöasjdlas Greetings from Sloodlevilleby Clark Shah-Nelson - Thursday, 29 March 2007, 07:14 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Hyperborea Testing the Sloodle Toolbar from Hyperborea, 56, 179, 22 Sloodleville! 12 Sloodle Toolbars have been served. I can't quite figure out what to do with the Sloodle Box... Clark Sakai signing out. Blog 2by Clark Shah-Nelson - Thursday, 29 March 2007, 07:08 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Hyperborea

this post is her detailed look at keeping new male residents engaged in SL

Right, where was I? Oh yeah, the learning curve. I’m supposed to be telling you about “The lack of encouragement for new male residents to stay in Second Life”, but since I’m, err, female — does a quick check, right, okay, definitely female — I decided to conduct an Extremely Unscientific Survey among male residents to see what they had to say. 16 male residents responded, and the general consensus is that… [drum roll] … friends are generally the greatest form of encouragement for new male residents to stay in SL. “I came and went my first year. I hung around when I finally started making some friends and started going places and doing things with them,” says Dyami Jameson.

“I think men in Second Life are more motivated by ‘goals’ and scoring systems, which makes SL less attractive to them than women, who are more attracted to the social aspect of the metaverse,” comments Prad Prathivi. “Guys are naturally competitive and aim to lead the pack, which is harder and less obvious to achieve in SL.”

Second Life continues to expand each and every day. New Residents are joining, artists are creating amazing content, new businesses are springing up, big companies are entering for the first time, educational institutions are building virtual universities… and the list goes on. Everyday I learn of something new, something bold, something you’ve created.

Second Life offers something no ones else does - an astoundingly rich array of user-created content and a large, diverse and ever-expanding virtual economy.

The content and economy reflect the diversity of the Resident population. Your creativity covers 1.5 billion meters of space that’s taken more than 500 million hours over the past five years to assemble. It’s a mammoth undertaking.

What Louise has done is work on a guide dog and a white stick that use sensors to detect the surroundings and say in text what is around you. You can pick up your own copy at Wheelies.

EVA: Essential Voicechat Advancement. This is, in effect, a plug-in for Windows that reads the chat log and reads it out via the system's text-to-voice system.

(no new virtual world supports the Mac these days, in spite of the “promises” done to “support it soon” — with “only” 8% of market share and growing, the Mac is simply not interesting for developers to focus on)

Being — like all Google products! — a Beta version, there are perhaps 40 or 50 available options (not the “millions” announced by Google reps) and they can be somewhat configured, but the choices are confusing and very, very limited.

“Linden Lab” room a close second. Figuring out that here I would already find a few familiar faces from Second Life®, I went for that one. The choice was certainly correct — Dusan Writer, Grace McDunnough, Jurin Juran, and likely a few others (sometimes it’s not easy to figure out who’s who!) were around in the room, testing the cumbersome interface. And cumbersome it is!

For many people outside of the "virtual worlds industry" the terms "virtual world" and "Second Life" are still more or less synonyms. This is especially funny, as many people in the industry seem to have written off Second Life because of many disappointing developments in 2007 and the big negative hype in the press.

It is not a secret, though, that Linden Lab's management and investors still believe that the Second Life technology will be the (or a least "a") corner stone of the future Web3D. Is this totally unrealistic? And would would Linden Lab have to do, to make this come true if it isn't? Making the platform more stable is a simple answer - and certainly a pre-requesite. But what about other decisions? More control? Or less? More openness? Or a tightly controlled product? And a product for which target groups? Based on what business model?

Both will tell you, that Linden Lab indeed has a rather profitable business model, is expecting significant growth and is targeting markets way outside the current user base (actually alienating large groups in the current user base).

The Nielsen people record actual minutes using various "sites" across 180,000+ US-homes. Second Life comes out at 760 minutes per week (that's over 12 hours), or over 1h 45 minutes per day... (wimps - I'd be an outlier around the 2500 minutes per week mark!). Amongst its users (comparing to other user-minutes per week) this makes it more popular than even the 800lb gorilla of World of Warcraft (653 minutes per week).

What does it all mean? Well, it might mean Second Life is a niche market, but it's a fiercely loyal niche market that really, really gets it - and this gives Linden Lab a reasonably solid (hard numbers are impossible to come by) income stream and around that a reasonable likelihood of continuing to provide its service.

Comparing it to social media sites the difference is even more extreme - Facebook does the best at 84 minutes per week: that's 11% of the time that Second Life users spend. Twitter weighs in at about an hour a week on average. Stephen Fry is much bigger in his usage I'm sure, but the averages are up there for easy comparison.

How did the media go wrong in coverage -- and participation -- in SSL, and what went right? It was a typical hype-and-backlash scenario, as I detailed in a previous post on MediaShift. Some journalists simply tired of SL, as so many people tried it and then bailed because of its steep learning curve and high technological requirements. But the journalists that have been more enmeshed within the world have been rewarded with plenty of cultural and sociological (and yes, business) stories.

John Lester leads customer market development for education and health care for Linden Lab, which runs Second Life. I met him in-world and had an instant-messaging chat with his alter-ego, Pathfinder Linden, about how the media has covered SL over the years. My SL name was Lynx Wickentower: Lynx: Did media miss the bigger story of Second Life? Pathfinder Linden at the educational meeting in SL Pathfinder: That seems to be a typical pattern for the human species, yes? We did it with all the previous mediums. We'll do it again in the future. We always misunderstand new mediums, initially treating them like pre-existing ones (e.g., treating the web like print media; treating television like radio). But then we learn new ways of seeing the tools and new ways to leverage them.

As for Reuters' coverage of SL, they did better than most journalists who did drive-by stories with a day or two of research in-world. The bureau lived for more than two years. Still, James Wagner Au, who writes the excellent New World Notes blog about SL said they could have done better. "Their writers, Adam Pasick and Eric Krangel, are fine journalists, and did some great external business-oriented reports, but at the same time, I don't think they were ever passionately engaged in the medium or Second Life's community on an experiential level," Au told me. "Consequently, their reporting very much had a distanced, 'outside looking in' flavor that caused them to often miss the big picture, in my opinion."