Reposted from iliveisl: Why we are in Second Life

We love Second Life for many reasons. It’s a wonderful creative outlet and social channel. Linden Lab has the balance just right which allows Second Life to be a social platform, support online gaming (role playing), and be a true virtual world (where you can create almost anything and engage in commerce).

The creation tools and land ownership combined with ecommerce make it a powerful platform that spans both personal and professional endeavors. This makes it viable for use as a personal social tool (such as Twitter and facebook – think of your Second Life home or favourite hang-out as a Facebook page), a collaborative tool (corporate meetings, college and university extensions), and a business opportunity (creating and selling items, buying and selling land, event planning, corporate branding and product demonstration, and so on).

These factors are what brought us into Second Life. The iliveisl estate is evolving into a wonderful group of collaborative people that understand the ups and downs of Second Life. Being an evolving platform, Second Life has its share of challenges – crashes, lagginess, service outages, and so on.

Those who understand this and can roll with it, tend to stay in Second Life and find success.

We have seen our share of n00bs that come in to start clubs, shops, and event planning with the thought that they will make serious money in the first few weeks. Just like in real life, making money takes a clear vision, a business plan, and persistence plus passion.

But . . . for those that persist; success often follows. Building a shop and having great products is a start, but you have to market yourself dilligently.

That’s why you see us talk about Twitter. Twitter has yielded the best results for us so far. We are in Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning social groups, Second Life forums, Flickr, YouTube, blip.tv, and even CraigsList. We have the standard necessities as well, with a website and this blog.

All of these “social tools” are what almost everyone needs to be successful in Second Life or other lives. You simply have to get the word out, yourself, about what you have to offer. There are over 32,000 sims in Second Life. What are you doing to be noticed?

So, as a business, where is the iliveisl estate going?

Continual growth is a given. We are looking at adding an Adult sim to Enercity.

Why adult? The changes in content rules by Linden Lab makes it almost difficult to not have everything rated as Adult.

Even the self-serve martinis in Enercity Park and in the Eville Atomic Lounge changes their sim’s ratings from PG to Mature.

The cold cuts are PG, but not the martinis. =D

Second Life as a 3D animation program

What happens when a beaver in Second Life has time to explore? Well, maybe a little culture at a pretty neat build. Made from megaprims, this fantastic art gallery is suspended by chains.

It’s a beautiful example of what happens when 3D creativity is served up in a manner that allows many people the opportunity to create. It is easy to take Second Life for granted and even complain about it, but Linden Lab has created a platform that makes it easy to build 3D graphics.

If you have ever done Maya, Blender 3D, or Studio Max, then you can appreciate how much easier it is to build in Second Life. Of course, if that is your background, you may be more likely to also snub Second Life as a 3D animation tool.

If you measure the success of your 3D skills in the number of people able to view it and experience it first hand, then there are far more successful people in Second Life than in Maya. Yes, undoubtedly Pixar and DreamWorks create amazing graphics that make a lot of money. But the number of people producing those are incredibly few and I can’t walk around in Shrek.

In Second Life, many people express their creativity, share and sell it, and almost anyone can actively participate with it in real time. This art gallery, Enaxia, is a fine example of that. A real world artists works hang in it, anyone in Second Life can come enjoy it and the space.

They can even buy the artwork!

In that respect, Second Life, imo, is a fantastic 3D tool. And apart from Blender 3D, it’s free to start using right now. Hats off to you Linden Lab!

If you have not tried it yet, give it a whirl, you can even come here to the iliveisl estate to try out building in Second Life.

The Enaxia on Ener Strait of the iliveisl estate

Enaxia Flickr set | Enaxia slurl

note: re posted from the iliveisl blog

figuring out Twitter

On Twitter you have “retweets”.  What is it called to post the same blog post twice? Probably lazy.  =D

In it’s entirety (including some hot air) from the iliveisl blog:

We have been messing with many social networking platforms such as Google Groups, Facebook (rock Ener’s world and become a friend), LinkedIn (connect to Ener), Ning, blogging, Twitter (tweet iliveisl or Ener), Flickr, Blip.tv, CafePress, several Second Life forums, the Second Life Wiki, Wikipedia (as editors), Yahoo 360, del.cio.us, plurk, technorati, threadless, Busted Tees, websites (both iliveisl and enerhax), and even Urban Dictionary (vote for enerhax!).

While a few of these are not strictly social, they still provide the opportunity to raise “brand awareness” in the overall social community. Blogging is simply a necessity and works very well and it is easy to interpret the analytics. I think blogging can replace the conventional website for many endeavors, including ours.

All the channels we use do add to our visibility and the top ones, for us, are the blog, Twitter, and Flickr. The blog has many different analytics attached to it, Flickr Pro has fairly decent analytics, and there are third-party analytics for Twitter. Our favourite Twitter one is Twitter Grader.

Twitter is an interesting one for us and has resulted in several pieces of business (land sales on the estate and custom projects for me).

One could argue that the best analytics are resulting monetary measures.

In that case, Twitter is the winner for us. But it is hard to fine tune Twitter. You certainly do not want to fall into the “get 12,000 followers for $12.95 schemes”, nor do you want to use any other ones that basically lead to crappy followers (I can’t think of a better word).

Twitter Grader looks at many factors, much more than simply a ratio of followers to following. This is exemplified below. While coachoncall (respected life coach from New Hampshire) has double the followers and less than one percent the following, you would think her ranking should be higher. Much higher. Yet it is not.

On the iliveisl Twitter, we carefully follow those that offer informationwe can use, or those whose message we want to support, and we tend to tweet on the light side (read: silly).

We are vigilent about dumping the people we follow if all they do is post on how to get more followers. We also have this blog automaticaly tweet new posts (a great time saver by the way).

Using tools like Tweepular’s Build Tweepularity may be tempting, but it seems to lead to crappy followers and a lower score and rank (I experiment with a few other Twitter accounts). Tweepular does have great tools, such as No Follow Love. We also use UnTweeps to remove “stale” tweepers (more than 30 days silent).

Use Twitter as it was intended to be used and your rank will improve. Collecting followers is dumb (how is that for an “official” opinion?).

What does it all mean? Beats us, what’s your take on all the social networking out there? :)

be real and twitter will help you

about subQ: typically behind the scenes at iliveisl, avid elearning guy and speaker at subquark.com, custom sim developer and all around Second Life consultant (who talks straight and even talks people out of Second Life if it is not right for them), experimenting with OpenSim as an alternative to eliminate draconian limitations, and the world’s second biggest fan of poutine. The honour of number one would go to our very own Ener Hax.

And yes . . . long winded and you are stuck with me for a bit as Ener deals with some other challenges.

Is eLearning about the technology and the tool?

There was a brief, but good topic, over on Chief Learning Officer Network that I responded to and I wanted to post my response here (that way you don’t need to create a Ning account if you don’t have one and I can refer to this myself in the future). This sums up my opinion of the our focus on technology in eLearning:

I like to keep in mind that these “social media” tools are simply forms of communication. As a past high school and college professor turned eLearning “developer”, I am always a bit put off by how we “eLearning gurus” focus so heavily on these tools. To me focusing on wikis, micro-blogging, and even virtual worlds misses the only thing that has any importance (in my opinion) to education – the content.

Plato taught, arguably, some of the most significant “things” by drawing in sand with a stick. The focus of his teaching is not the technology he used in its delivery; it is his message, his content. Personally, I do not think it matters very much the delivery method. Certainly, some methods reach differently and I do not mean to discount the value of those who study these methods.

If success of the delivery method is measured in engagement and retention, then we should be delivering our content via an American Idol or The Biggest Loser format. Both of which reach millions and are the topics of conversation at water coolers the next day.

My view is that most of us have tools at our disposal that work very well and are inexpensive. Tools such as Windows MovieMaker or Mac iMovie work very well to create video podcasts (remember to offer textual options – especially since you probably have the script or text written). Second Life and OpenSim are almost free alternatives to Maya, Blender 3D, and 3D Studio Max – both in cost and time to develop.

Jay mentions Second Life which is certainly seen as a “Web 2.0″ application and seemingly on the hype cycle’s Slope of Enlightenment and it is a wonderful tool for collaboration and creativity. Many fine eLearning examples can be cited from Second Life. Twitter is also useful in certain forms of eLearning. I am biased towards those two methods because I am active in Second Life (owning 12 sims) and experiment with a few accounts in Twitter (one is in the top 0.7% according to Twitter Grader – for whatever that is worth).

Both those tools are simply forms of communication (like the dry erase board – which somehow missed out in being a focus of much debate in education – much like our current discussions of these social tools). Their use and effectiveness lie in dispensing your content effectively. Japan’s number one novel a few years ago was completely wriitten as 140 character (or less) text messages. The story made it successful (and the delivery did influence it’s feel with concise and impactful writing).

Thank you for the very good discussion and I must disclose that the reason I am in both Second Life and Twitter are as a direct result of Jay Krupp’s open view to delivering content. He epitomizes the open-minded wisdom that allows and encourages developers to look at content, the tools at hand, and (hopefully) produce content that enriches lives, impacts people’s happiness, and leads to greater successes on many fronts.

Jay Krupp said:

Bill you are dead on with the hype cycle. While the industry tries to figure out exactly how to be use this, there are a number of mavens out there that have the recipe. The use of things like virtual worlds has application immediatly, if you can be creative with the approach. I suggest you check out subquark.com . He presented at a number of eLearning Guild conferences. He has put 2.0 in action. His sessions were not all theory as many are, he explained how to do it, in detail.

Green Avatar Day

Today, Friday June 19th, is a day where you can use the power of social media to further support the people of Iran.  The heavy use of Twitter and Flickr has already helped keep the Iranian government in check.

You can do a small part by colouring your avatar green today.

We don’t mean your Second Life avatar, but your social media avatar, such as through gravatar.com.  Take a peek over at Twitter and you’ll see this in action.

What does it matter?

It helps the people in Iran see that the global community is watching and in support of their efforts. Most of us are very lucky to be in countries where we take many freedoms for granted. 

*steps of soapbox – thanks Ener for the pic*