Secondlife Blogged

KQED recently ran a segment about the challenges facing professors who teach in SecondLife. As always, it’s cute to see professors encountering youth culture with the caution and interest of an anthropologist approaching a new tribe.

Myself, I think laptops and wireless access in the lecture halls were really the big change to universities in this generation. No longer reduced to passing notes in class or doodling in the margins, students can now spend lectures emailing friends, updating their Facebook pages, day trading, or, yes, running around in SecondLife.

Check out “Second Life: Big Avatar on Campus” here.

• Second Life Moves into Real Life in Linz, Austria « Official Linden Blog
  In Austria, at the Ars Electronica event, a city-wide festival of digital art, there was an exhibit which recreated Second Life in real life. A whole street (ok, an alley) was converted to Second Life, and dubbed Second City. Wow!
• A Guide to Your Virtual World - Second Life Insider
  Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World’ is a new book by Brian A. White. Looks like an interesting read if you’re new to SL.
• Second Life Herald: Second Life’s Slide vs. Everyone Else
  By at least one measure, Second Life’s growth since January has not kept pace with other 3D immersive environments - including World of Warcraft, The Sims Online, and IMVU.

As if flying weren’t cool enough, SecondLife also allows you to teleport to different places. Or it allows most of you. My computer, an old-fashioned fellow, is taking umbrage at the very idea. “Beam you up, beam you down, it’s a by-our-lady nuisance,” it grumbles. “Why don’t you walk places like everyone else?” In short, I cannot teleport.

Fortunately, there are solutions at SecondLife support. One possible fix is to detach all your attachments, which in my case includes my enormous bushy pigtails. Now I’m running around with a close-shaved head, eerily reminiscent of that one time in real life when I shaved all my hair off for a lark and spent the next year with a strange half-mullet look as it grew back.

However, even as hair-removal did nothing good for me in real life, neither did it assist me in SecondLife. Also fruitless was their suggestion that I fly 200 meters straight up and try to teleport, although this did have the side benefit of getting me away from a rather irritating conversation between a man who did not speak Italian and a man who spoke only Italian. It was taking the English speaker a really long time to get across his lack of Italian skills.

The best solution for me turned out to be setting my start location on the login screen. Now when I want to teleport someplace, I just logout and when I log back in I type in my desired location. It is tedious, but not nearly so tedious as it would be to always fly everywhere.

For more suggestions on how to zip around at light speed, I suggest you check out the SecondLife help screen directly.

My avatar walks funny. She’s got kind of a sideways limp going on that I don’t know how to correct. Or, as Reese Witherspoon puts it in Walk The Line, I’ve got a hitch in my giddyup.

To avoid watching myself walk, I fly everywhere now. This is also good because I’m certain it’s only a matter of time before someone introduces large mammal predators to SecondLife. After all, in real life we have to walk cautiously, watching for coyotes, wolves, Ninjas and humpback whales, so why not in SecondLife? Fortunately, I don’t think I can be maimed or wounded in this world, unlike real life, where Ninja attacks are very, very real.

Because I can’t be hurt, I see no reason not to just tumble to the ground every time I stop flying. It saves time, and if I land in a patch of virtual gorse my character extracts herself effortlessly. However, it does make me look like sort of a doof to be gliding along effortlessly and then suddenly fall on my face.

What I’m wondering now is, how much should I care about looking like a doof? What’s the norm here? I live in San Francisco in real life, where looking like a doof is almost a city-wide sport, so I don’t have a big problem with it in any case, but I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. So far I’ve spent a lot of time on Orientation Island, where no matter how doofy my fly-and-fall routine is, it’s still surpassed by the ultimate doofishness of watching people learn to walk. They walk right up to my face and just stand there, sometimes for minutes on end, while they figure out they can walk backwards. Sometimes we chat, standing with our noses squashed together. It would be threatening on a real street; here, I find it strangely endearing.

Got a story about your virtual gait, or advice on how to fall better? Drop me a line in the comments. Or just walk up, press your nose against my face and start talking.

 Let me share some of the most interesting SecondLife related articles I’ve read this week:

• Ronin Marketeer » Why your company needs to be in Second Life now
  Great article about the benefits for a company to be in SecondLife.
• Website Magazine : Sex Sells In Second-Life Competitor
  I hadn’t heard of it before, but this one is clearly booming too.
• SLEDucating » SecondLife Traffic Figures
  Interesting read about the algorithm used to calculate traffic figures.

They’ve exhausted sex, swearing and the Mafia, so what could HBO do but turn to SecondLife for their next big hit? The popular cable channel recently purchased the rights to a documentary that takes place entirely in SecondLife. The film is called “My Second Life: The video diaries of Molotov Alta,” and is supposedly about a man who disappeared from his real life and began issuing “dispatches” from SecondLife.

That’s all very well, but when will we see “The Sopranos: SecondLife” or “Sex  and the SecondLife,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker’s avatar? If Mr. Big had been able to fly, that show might still be on the air today.

You can check out the pilot of “My Second Life” on You Tube, or just click here.

At least, if we have to believe the tech consultancy agency Gartner:

“By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a ’second life,’ but not necessarily in Second Life.”

The company says that most of the active internet users (at this time this number is about 300 million) will by then move around in so called ‘non-gaming virtual worlds’ - like SecondLife. If you ask me I’d say that the social networks of today (like MySpace and Facebook) will evolve into more dynamic ‘worlds’, and chances are big that this will indeed be a 3 dimensional world.  And like at this moment, there will be serious (like LinkedIn) and less serious ‘worlds’ (like MySpace - altough that one is used seriously and with great succes by some small percentage in the creative industry).

On Friday the 14th of September, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic - a classic orchestra with an extraordinary modern view - will give the first live performance in SecondLife. They will perform several classic masterpieces by Ravel and Rachmaninov in a 3D version of their real life ‘Philharmonic Hall‘. Afterwards, there’s a possibility to chat with the conductor Vasily Petrenko and some of the main soloists. The show is limited to 100 people - to register go here.

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