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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.”

However, I predict it will be a game that can do shoes better than Second Life, because if they can do shoes well, then everything else will have to be fabulous, too.

By that time I was primarily offering English/German at a price of 2 L$ / word, but soon requests for other languages came. I recruited French and Italian translators, soon Danish and Swedish followed. I charged 3 L$ for those languages, but kept English/German for a long time at the lower level as I was making these translations myself. In August 2007 I acquired my first reference customer. Blaze Columbia of Blaze Fashions not only insisted on paying the double rate, she also gave me some valuable business tips, like implementing a minimum fee for jobs. Back then I was in awe of what I considered "large" amounts of money, so I did not follow her advice of establishing 500 L$ as minimum fee, but instead chose 250 L$. I was reluctant to mention this limit to the first clients, but none of them objected. So up to date 250 L$ stayed the minimum amount for translation jobs.

In January I took my associate Tina Lynch aboard. Not only did she work on French translations, but she also replaced my notecard-based bookkeeping with a sophisticated spreadsheet based on Google docs. Under her lead we refined the spreadsheet over the next month, and now it is an invaluable tool of keeping track of jobs, degree of completion, distribution of jobs among translators and calculating revenues and fees.

In May, Babel Translation took over the competing agency "2nd Tongue Translation". For a couple of months we have silently cooperated already, granting 2nd Tongue a bulk buying rate for the languages they did not offer themselves. As 2nd Tongue's manager had to reduce her SL involvement, Babel Translations stepped in and integrated 2nd Tongue's business into our own.