The other day I was in a class, and in the wrap up at the end I was asked to say what I thought the differences between working for an educational institution and a commercial one were in SL. It's a situation I'm fairly well positioned on, I've worked with a range of both types of organisations. One group I haven't worked with is the "city council" or similar who try to sell their city and build it anew.

I came up, at short notice with a few differences. I've had a think and refined them a bit, and thought I'd share them and ask for your input and thoughts. You never know, it might be a good tool for one group or the other to learn (I'd suggest commercial to learn from educational - education seems to be booming in SL, although there are some corporate good practise elements from the commercial end too).

1. Build type:
• Educators are more likely (say 50%+) to eschew a "corporate build" - the administration office block or similar. Of those that do have such a thing a high proportion are likely to subvert it somehow elsewhere in their build.
• Corporate types are much more likely to go for "the office block" - I'd say 95%. They clearly identify their office as their corporation.
2. Build nature
• Educators tend to focus on the results. That's both in terms of meeting the educational needs, and being relatively happy if nothing happens, nothing happens, then a finished build appears.
• Corporate types tend to want regular reports, plans, milestones etc.

So, they're my thoughts. What do you think? Just Askin'

It was a day like any other when Kyro Kilian, proprietor of Tardimals, decided to finally meet his competitor, Wynx Whiplash, of Extrovirtual. Only it wasn't just any day. It was her birthday.

Having seen Wynx as online, he decided to head to Raglan Shire, home of the tinies, to "size" up her business. When his group arrived, they were greeted by birthday cake, a DJ, and many dancing critters. After reading her his sales pitch and giving her an avatar, there was nothing left to do but dance.

Surprisingly, she took it all in stride. Much fun was had by all. Happy Birthday, Wynx!

As a former resident of three of the seven counties burning in Southern California, I have been worried sick about my real life friends. Then a disturbing thought crossed my mind. There are Second Lifers in Socal too.

I only know of a few Second Life residents in the area, but I'm sure there are many more than that. Was your area evacuated? Were you allowed to return? More importantly, are you OKAY? Please leave a comment to let your virtual friends and family know that you're alright. I'll bet I'm not the only one worried for your safety.

Now, before you all start shouting at me, lemme 'splain what I mean. Two of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 experience are Interconnectivity and Transparency. Interconnectivity in the sense that it's becoming increasingly possible to share information between online applications -- store photos on Flickr, share them with Tumblr, link to them with Pownce, etc.

Transparency is the ability to see, at a glance, what a connected user's life contains. You can see what music they listen to, read their opinions, know who they call friends. Think of the networking involved in MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Now, try to imagine SL with these concepts in place. I'd like to see which residents you and I have in common. I want to see your Snapzilla photos in a window in your profile. I'd love to stream my iTunes music directly into my avatar, not my land, for others to hear by simply subscribing to my stream. I need to be able to IM my friends from without SL. If people are going to keep touting SL as the 3D Internet, and LL isn't going to disabuse them of that notion, then these things need to be done. What will it take? What coding is required? Someone tell me I'm smoking hash just by thinking this is possible!

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,222,000 at an exchange rate of L$269.6 to US$1
• Exchanged US$248,000 at an average of US$10,300.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$163,000
• Market sales were US$84,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$1,300
• The busiest time was at 4pm when about US$16,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 2am when about US$5,000 was exchanged.

Today in Second Life we had:

• 16,961 new signups bringing us to 10,231,629 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 50,819 at 1:50PM, and a minimum concurrency of 27,414 at 1:15AM. Median concurrency for the day was 38,642.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.36 (lower is better).
• Benjamin Linden announced a preview of a prospective client UI reskinning.

Many of you who have used the latest release candidate, 1.18.4(0) have probably noticed that the tooltip popup on the map that shows you the number of people in a sim/region.. well, doesn't actually show you the number. Instead it relentlessly reports zero for every sim except the one you are in, where it reports one (that's you).

How did this happen? Well, when you modify or refactor code, there's two important requirements. First, you have to know how to code. Second, you have to understand what is going on. Lacking the first is less dangerous. You can go safely stick pencils up your nose. Lacking the second, however, means you risk sticking pencils up everyone else's nose. This bug was relatively harmless, if irritating.

Machinima Guru, my Teen Grid alter ego, stopped by the College Fair on Sunday. It brought me back to the days when I had to wander around the smelly gym of my rival high school picking up pamphlets as I went along. Technology sure has come far! Storm Basiat, the dedicated teen manager for Eye4You, was waiting to send me a port as soon as I logged in.

When I arrived, I was greeted by two of the most adorable astronauts I've ever seen! I was able to listen to a few speeches before I had to log off. One of them, as presented by Daniel Voyager, was for TSL Greeters. When asked for comment, attendee Reallife Orca, of Digital Refinery, noted that "It was interesting to see all of the colleges who showed up, I was just a bit let down that no trade schools came out."

I grabbed pictures of everything I saw, but was really dismayed to find that I was unable to donate to the TG College Fund for some reason. If you would like to help, you can send your donations to Bluewings Hayek on the Main Grid. For a full write-up of the Fair from Storm, check out SLNN.

Chopsaw, named after the mainland sim it's located at, is the collaboration of sculptie master, Aminom Marvin, and skin goddess, Gala Phoenix. Their current offering, modular furniture, has three components to it - a 3-prim couch for L$500, a 3-prim loveseat for L$400, and a two-prim armchair for L$250. All items are no mod/no copy/transfer.

One of the features that makes this furniture unique is that you can change the sit pose for each individual seat. The main feature that sets it apart from the rest, though, is the ability to configure your furniture with a couple of mouse clicks. The armchair becomes an ottoman, the couch sprouts a corner piece that lets you put another couch or loveseat next to it. The possibilities are almost endless!

Sentient Services in Texas and the Kalypso Agency in Connecticut are both market research firms that have joined SL with an eye toward keeping track of how residents feel about the various RL companies with an SL presence. From the referring article: 'As the web changes from 2D to 3D we are expecting that there will be continued interest in marketing research in virtual worlds as this presents a new frontier for consumer engagement,' said marketing director for Kalypso Nicholas Cameron.

Has anyone in our audience had any contact with these companies? It's tough to do any kind of resident-involved research without going directly to the residents one-by-one; the biggest problem is making residents aware that one's company even exists in the first place. What's the best way to do this? Buy billboard space in a popular sim? Have a grand opening event? Advertising space in the many SL-related magazines?

(Via mrweb.com)

Reader Elle Pollack continues to bring The Real. First, yet another new commercial, this one featuring a little more info on the plot of the show, and some added footage. It's got a cute, maniacal tiny with a gun! And it keeps Mac's awesome 'Log out! NOW!'

Secondly, video from CSI creator Anthony Zuiker about the origin of the SL episode. He talks about the various mini games and continuing content coming up, all of which sound great! He's certainly excited about it, which makes me happy to see. To watch the video at the link, enter the code 'daz07'.

Some incidental information: Did you know the Sheep got bought by CBS? We'd reported that CBS invested in a round of financing in the Sheep to the tune of $7 million, but actually bought? Would anyone like to confirm/deny this? Also, a great quote from the video: " ... you're literally in a virtual New York City." Literally virtual; this guy IS a writer!

(Thanks, Elle!)

As Akela previously indicated, a new book on Second Life's virtual community is scheduled to be published in the spring by Princeton University Press. U.C. Irvine Professor Tom Boellstorff presents "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human". His experience in SL as avatar Tom Bukowski has culminated in a promising introduction to the culture developed in this novel space. Through the involvement of the community in preparing his book for print, he has shown an appreciation for the creativity of Second Life residents and displayed a deep respect for the existing social guidelines.

Read on to find out how the cover art for the book was chosen.

In a few days we're going to have people using the new OnRez Second Life viewer. Maybe a lot of people. Maybe a whole lot of people. The OnRez viewer differs from Linden Lab's version most obviously in that the user-interface has been completely reworked to make it easier and less overwhelming on new users.

That's got to be a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily. It brings some challenges of its own.

Electrolux, previously reported on here, have announced a new program that will award innovation: the Electrolux Innovation Grant Program. This program presents the challenge to all residents to invent a solution to a problem SL residents currently face. From the press release:

Submission criteria:

1. Describe the problem you're trying to address.
2. Describe a thoughtful, cutting-edge and innovative solution that is based on consumer insights.
3. Describe how you or your team is prepared to meet that challenge.
4. Describe how long you think it will take your team to complete the project.
5. Be as detailed as possible. How is this innovative? Will it be free or for sale? How will it help Second Life users?

The prize money is quite substantial: " Grants will be awarded in amounts of $25,000 Lindens for accepted proposals. Upon reaching a decided upon halfway milestone, a second $25,000 grant will be given. Projects that are finished and released into the community will be given a final $50,000 Linden award grant." Even better, the intellectual rights to entries belong to the creators, not Electrolux.

This is a fantastic offering to the community, so if you've ever had a great idea that could benefit us all, now's the time to share it! The deadline for submission is November 1st! For more information, contact Celebrity Millionsofus or Blair Millionsofus!

(Thanks, Celebrity!)

Linden Lab's user-experience designer, Benjamin Linden (aka Ben Glenn), has just announced the release of a visual viewer update preview. A part of the aim is to modernize the look of the Second Life viewer by reskinning it. [Click on the image to the right for a larger version]

The listed goals are:

• Improve visual appearance with modern UI graphics and icons.
• Improve discoverability through expanded use of iconography.
• Improve approachability with a lighter, friendlier color scheme.
• Improve legibility by using dark text on light backgrounds.
• Document technical limitations of current skinning capabilities.

There are a number of those technical limitations lurking in the viewer source that need to be addressed. You can download and try out the preview package (for viewer version 1.18.3(5) only at the present time) from Amazon S3.

More project details are available on the Viewer Visual Update page on the Second Life Wiki, and discussion and feedback are invited.