Edublog awards (again)

Just thinking some more about why this event didn't quite work for me...

Firstly, I picked up audio thru the SL voice channel. In usability terms there are some issues with using one avatar's voice channel to stream in the audio for a RL event. With the way my SL client is configured, the volume on the voice channel is directly related to how close the listener's camera (and/or avatar) is to the avatar that is feeding in the stream. In the case of the Edublog awards, the avatar doing this was moving around the venue - as a result, the audio varied in volume unless I explicitly tracked that avatar with my camera. Furthermore, I also tended to find it somewhat counterintuitive that a generic stream was appearing to come from one particular avatar.

With hindsight, it might have been better to dedicate this job to some kind of 'alt' avatar, possibly made to look like some sort of a 'bot and given a name and/or group indicating its role in the event (e.g. setting the group to 'Edublog audio stream' or somesuch), positioned clearly up the front of the event space, and not moving around.

Secondly, I struggled a little to engage with the awards themselves because I wasn't familiar enough with most of the award nominees - clearly this is my fault for not doing my homework properly. It meant that I kinda felt a bit like an outsider. Prior to the event this would have been helped (a little... maybe!) by having access to either an OPML file of all the nominated blog feeds (allowing me to quickly add them all to my favorite rss reader) or a single aggregated feed of all of them (or both).

To demonstrate the potential value of this I've since created an OPML file of all the nominated blogs (though I suspect there may be a couple of errors in it - apologies to anyone's feed that I've got wrong). I've also created an aggregated feed of all the winning blogs.

Hope this is useful...

Edublog awards

I spent some time earlier on this evening at the Edublog Awards on Jokadia.

It seems to me that we still have a lot to learn about doing this kind of thing well. Just in case anyone thinks I'm being very rude to say that, please note that I absolutely include myself in that statement (as readers familiar with any of the de-briefs after my own SL events will know). In particular, the sound quality was variable tonight - I mainly got it thru the SL voice channel though it was also available as a parcel stream and thru ustream.tv. It went from good to bad and back again with everything in between.

I would have also liked there to have been more in-world discussion about the awards. As it was, there was a lot of noise but not a lot of signal (I did nothing to improve this it has to be said!). My gut feeling is that discussion would have been helped by having more in-world visual material available to complement the audio stream. There were slides that told us which award was currently being presented - but it might have been nice to have something about each of the shortlisted blogs - and then a longer slide about the winning entry.

Doing that might have helped focus our attention a little bit? Perhaps this is something that could be tried next year...

Darwins spotted together in SL at least 9 months ago...

"I tried to sell 'dead' canoeist virtual land", admits Art Fossett.

UK police are investigating claims that the Darwins were spotted together in Second Life at least 9 months ago. "We don't understand why they made their avatars so lifelike", said a police spokesperson.

Second museums

Over on Museum 2.0 Nina Simon asks, "What Might Bring You to Second Life?", not a bad question as such though I prefer the emphasis on the "what is possible?" than the "what is stopping us?".

In his comments in response to the entry, Mike Ellis is quite skeptical about Second Life as a truly social experience:

I don't particularly like SL as an experience because I don't feel it actually adds much to my life: it's actually pretty lonely in there, not terribly sociable, and I find myself continually asking "why?"... www.there.com on the other hand is completely compelling to me because it is about social contact, immediate gratification (meeting different people) as well as visually beautiful. So the question inevitably comes back to "why a 3d environment?" rather than "why this particular 3d environment?"

I tend to disagree. SL is as social an experience as you want to make it, either by explicit design (e.g. attending or running a meeting in a subject area of your choosing) or by accident (e.g. going to a club or other area and seeing who you meet) though I would agree that the latter is not always as easy as it might be, in terms of finding the right kinds of places.

But Mike is absolutely right to say that we should focus firstly on the generic aspects of 3-D virtual worlds rather than the specifics of one particular technology (Second Life), and secondly on the immersive and social aspects of the experience.

What does that mean for museums as they enter 3-D environments? Well firstly, museums need to conceptualise themselves primarily as social spaces rather than collections of artefacts - I'm not saying that they don't do that already you understand... just that they need to be in that frame of mind before thinking about what they do in virtual worlds. Then they need to think about how 3-D environments might expand that aspect of their role virtually - bringing global participants to a virtual or hybrid discussion forum being one obvious example.

Such an approach doesn't rule out recreating virtual artefacts in the new environment - but doing so is absolutely not the end of the story.

Blurred backgrounds in images

There's been a little thread of discussion on the Second Life machinima mailing list about whether it is possible to take images with soft or out of focus backgrounds in Second Life. info@rufilm.de suggested a simple approach, which I've simplified further as follows:

• Take a snapshot of the background you want.
• Blur it using your favorite graphics package.
• Upload it to Second Life and place it on a large prim.
• Stand your avatar in-front of the prim and take your snapshot.

Neat!

Here's a couple of examples, using a background image taken on Nagaya, a nice little Japanese community.

OpenID and this blog

I've experimentally switched over to using the Draft Blogger service to maintain this blog which means that adding comments using your OpenID is now supported. Good news!

Eddies party in Second Life

Note that this year's Edublog Awards party is taking place in Second Life - details here and here (Facebook link).