Top 99 workplace eLearning blog?

Call me fast on observation, I just noticed that Tony Karrer listed this blog as one of his top 99 workplace eLearning blogs!

I guess that means I need to step it up a bit!

I have put blogging about eLearning on the back burner after a whirlwind of conference and online speaking invitations (8 in six months). These were directly tied to using Second Life as a tool for eLearning development. Part of the reason for stepping back was partly due to the difficulty of getting Linden Lab to answer a question on proper attribution for a college textbook I wanted to write.

In the meantime, I have been putting efforts toward growing the online presence of our Second Life endeavors.  Mainly in the form of virtual real estate.  With 12 sims and the transient nature of virtual land ownership, making a strong online presence is vital.

The social networking has been fun to do and the results are very good if you set ip up properly. Fortunately, I discovered Maki at DoshDosh and follow much of his advice. It helps leverage your time effectively.

iliveisl and it’s spokesperson, Ener Hax, enjoy good SEO mainly from daily blogging (5 contributing authors), Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook.

But, as serendipity tends to have it, those efforts have led full circle. If you are immersed in Second Life, you could not miss the unfortunate handling by Linden Lab of one of Second Life’s biggest eLearning and education proponents – Jo Kay!

Thankfully, there was an upside to this news.  Reaction Grid offered a great alternative to Second Life for education and business use and Jo Kay let the world know.

Reaction Grid is strictly PG in nature, can be private, firewalled, or hypergrid connected to a large number of other OpenSim-based grids.

The Reaction Grid team is incredibly passionate and supportive.  I have already had a few Skype classes with the CEO and CTO.

OpenSim has been recompiled and is far more efficient than Second Life’s server code.  You can have 45,000 prims per sim (vs. 15K) and prims can be made as large as 256 metres (vs. 10).

And Reaction Grid is far more economical!  Four sims for $75 per month versus $1180!

So look for renewed eLearning posts about using Reaction Grid as an elearning video tool and as far as the honor of being in Tony’s list?  I am deeply humbled and am tiny in the shadow of Tony’s outstanding blogging and resources.

Tony's eLearning blog is miles ahead of most others

Easy analytic tool

As the driver behind the social networking strategy of the iliveisl estate (Second Life virtual real estate), I look at various analytic tools to measure what are the best “fits” for these efforts. The iliveisl estate has a presence in many social networks, including LinkedIn, Youtube, blip.tv, CafePress, Urban Dictionary, Threadless Tees, Gravatar, Ning networks, Google and Yahoo profiles, various Second Life forums, and so on.

An easy analytic tool to use is grader.com. It’s a nice and easy tool for benchmarking your efforts.

The relatively new Facebook Grader does not have a large dataset yet, but can sill be used to measure your growth from a week to week.

Here we see the Twitter grade for the account updated by Ener Hax, the spokesperson of the social campaign.  Secondly, the Facebook page of Ener Hax for the estate, and lastly the iliveisl blog.

Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to the blog. The blog posts automatically update the Twitter account and that updates the Facebook page.

Why does any of this matter?  How does it apply to eLearning?

Effective social networking is vital if you want to promote your educational efforts and share your lessons learned with the eLearning community. 

Individuals will post comments to our iliveisl blog posts on the Facebook wall and carry on a conversation with each other about our posts. That was a suprising and pleasant discovery.

Second Life keyboard shortcuts

Nice post by DreamWalker, our official scripter for our new venture into Reaction Grid, blogged a great iliveisl post on keyboard shortcuts in Second Life.

http://blog.iliveisl.com/second-life-keyboard-shortcuts/

by ::Prad Prathivi @ Amodica::'s photostream

Social networking for virtual endeavors

Me and my numbers. Actually, “our” numbers. And very nice Ener on your post about me pimping you out* (nice bikini btw). =D

iliveisl blog statistics dropped this week and I should have suspected a possible error on my part. We added Feedburner to our strategy this week as well as changing a few SEO and traffic plugins.

Since we look at multiple traffic indicators such as the stats in Flickr and Blip.tv, as well as things like grader.com, we feel pretty comfortable with the accuracy of any of those numbers. If traffic is a steady 1,000 visitors a day on the blog, you would also expect supporting stats for our sites that point to it to stay steady.

Some of those “organic” indicators are Facebook friend comment activity and Twitter reach (see below).

If blog traffic suddenly goes down and you have not changed your efforts (such as blogging frequency, content, authors) then digging into other stats are warranted. The iliveisl blog is hosted on the bullet-proof servers of Media Temple which come with Urchin statistics.

Once I pulled those numbers, all was right with the world (and actually higher than before the drop – what a geeky world I live in!).

So what does this have to do with Second Life?

Promoting ourselves is obvious, but we also encourage in-world businesses and venues to use the many free social networking tools out there to achieve greater success.

I do consulting for individuals and small businesses in the real world on social networking and use iliveisl as my “living” example. Ener does a great job in-world with encouraging residents to use these tools as well. You can see those efforts with some of the links in the iliveisl blog’s sidebar.

So be smart, don’t let social networking become a “time suck”, and have fun with it (maybe don’t get so obsessed with traffic numbers!). =)

nice chirping Ener!

so this and 4 cents will get you one snapshot isl!

* Look for a possible offering of virtual world space for meetings, functions, and eLearning providers. We host a few corporate meetings on the iliveisl estate for free. However, there is a need from some of our clients to have “tighter” virtual space that is more business-like and less expensive. Enter what Ener mentioned below – Reaction Grid . . . stay tuned.

It’s okay to have fun with images

One of our silly images gets air time in a French political blog!

Sometimes we get so serious that we can lose the joy of what attracted many of us to eLearning.  Creating interactions, graphics, and 3D environments is something I love to do as part of teaching. Fortunately, it’s also the way I unwind.

I count myself lucky that my vocation is also my avocation.

One of my hobbies is dabbling in social networking and I use iliveisl.com and our spokeperson, Ener Hax, as the focus of these efforts. Part of that strategy is using Flickr for images to help in SEO.  Since Flickr is owned by Yahoo, it’s impact can be substantial. Especially with our 5,000 Second Life images!

Take a moment and let your inner child come out and play, it’s rather refreshing!  =D

See the blog post on deregulation in French or in English.

everyone loves good poutine!