Second Life economy

There's a brief entry on the Official Linden Blog about the SL economy - how it works and so on. Worth a quick read.

All of which is really just a pathetic excuse to display my 'art dollar' :-).

Creativity

It seems to me that creativity is the key to what makes Second Life the place it is so I think that the NMC were spot on in choosing it as the subject for their week-long in-world symposium. If you don't believe me I urge you to go to any sandbox in SL, sit around for a while and watch what people are creating.

A video of Larry Johnson's keynote, Why creativity matters, is now available. In some ways it's quite a laid-back, measured presentation - delivered with a gentle style that is very easy to listen to. Worth the 30 minutes or so that it tales to watch. Johnson highlights 3 key aspects of SL as:

• a social platform (the growth of which has happened in parallel with the growth of social platforms on the Web),
  
• a user-built embodiment of self-expression and dynamism,
• an inherently expressive environment.

He leaves us with the exhortation that we need to make our spaces in SL places where creativity flourishes. I certainly agree with that.

Where's my avatar's OpenID?

I blogged here about OpenID and group membership and hinted that Second Life needs to support OpenIDs. Wouldn't it be neat if Second Life functioned as an OpenID provider, offering every avatar an OpenID URL such as

http://openid.secondlife.com/ArtFossett

or somesuch? This would be particularly useful for those of us that blog using our avatar names.

As far as I can tell, it would be relatively easy for Linden Lab to support. Now, I just need to work out how to suggest it to them?

Orb - an in-world student magazine - feedback required

I just noticed this posting to the SLED list which seems worth repeating here - partly as a way to get some volunteers and partly to highlight what appears to be an interesting UK SL activity.

Hi,

My name is Jennifer Young, and I'm a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. I've been using SL to create an online student magazine which is hosted inside a virtual literary festival. The magazine, Orb, is staffed by UH students. The publishing remit is to publish the best creative writing by UK university students.

The magazine will launch on October 23 with a streaming performance by UK performance poet Patience Agbabi.

We are in the final stages of design, and we're looking for users to provide feedback. Would you be willing to spend a few minutes walking around our site and giving us some feedback? There are post boxes on the site, or you can email me at j.m.young@herts.ac.uk. The SL address is: http://slurl.com/secondlife/SMIRKworld/128/128/0

Just to make you aware, the pieces of creative writing that are up are still in draft mode and are acting as place holders. Before the magazine launch in October, the authors will record audio and provide visuals to accompany their work. At the moment it's just text with the student editors' voiceovers.

Thank you for your assistance -

Best wishes,

Jennifer
(in SL: jmy Writer)

UK Second Life Educators Facebook group

Despite my general mistrust of Facebook groups I've taken the liberty of creating a UK Second Life Educators group.

Please feel free join if you are in the UK and interested in the use of SL in education.

Hacienda revisited

The proposed UK Educators voice trial in the SL Hacienda yesterday failed miserably because of very long login times to SL which, AFAIK, stopped a lot of people getting in-world in time. Either that or no-one was interested!

Shame.

Anyway, we've agreed to do the same thing next week - same day, same time. See the Facebook event page for details.

As it happens, I accidentally went into the SL Hacienda again last night and bumped into the owner and a couple of her mates. They didn't seem to like me very much, taking the piss out of my jesus sandals and general appearance somewhat remorselessly.

I took it in good spirit, though it felt slightly over the top, coming from people I didn't know - one of whom was both fat and blue! Luckily I had my fat and green avatar to hand (the one I use in my SL in 3600 seconds presentation). They seemed to cheer up when I changed into that.

I explained that we wanted to use their venue for a meeting. They seemed a little bemused, but generally agreeable and I left on good terms - I'm now a proud member of the 'Hacienda Crew' SL group.

All's well that ends well as they say.

Teachers TV experiment on Eduserv Island

Via a Gavin Dudeney posting to the SLED list I discovered that the Guardian have got together with Teachers TV to offer a selection of video podcasts aimed at teachers. The expectation, as far as I can tell, is that people subscribe to these using iTunes but I noted that they also offer an RSS feed of available videos. Not only that, but each video is available in Quicktime format... perfect for viewing within Second Life.

The RSS feed contains about 50 entries. As a feed, I assume it is going to change on a regular basis. So making the videos available in-world needs to be more flexible than simply hardwiring a list of 50 media URLs into a scripted 'video screen' prim.

One of the 'usability' challenges of SL is how to do this kind of thing, given that one can't simply present an HTML view of the list on an in-world prim. One possibility is to grab the RSS feed, pull it in-world, and chat it to the end-user, letting them chat back an instruction to play the required video - '/1 play 47' kind of thing. Another option would be to present an in-world dialogue box - but very difficult, if not impossible, to do with a list of 50 videos.

I chose a different method for my experiment. Why not take the end-user out to a Web page, show them an HTML view of the RSS feed, let them select one of the videos in their Web browser - then bring them back in-world to watch the video?

That's what I've done... and it seems to work pretty well. A single 'play' script in the in-world video screen, and a small set of external Perl scripts to parse and display the RSS feed, save the chosen video and tidy up when you the video is finished with combine to offer a functional but simple approach to video selection.

You can try it for yourselves on Eduserv Island. Click on the screen to get started. Have fun!

Note that once you have selected a video, you are in control of the screen until you either click on the screen to end the video or you leave the area. Other people can't jump in and choose another video while you are watching. This is a bit like holding onto the TV remote to stop your kids changing channels half-way thru your favorite programme! :-)