Richard Sealey Exhibition
November 12, 2007
On Telstra’s Ponden sim, an artist has created an exhibition presence. Richard Sealey (SL: Ritchey Jacobus) is pretty up-front with his intentions:
“I’m looking at creating a pemanent display of my art using SL to promote my name around the world with links to my website. Through this I hope to generate RL sales”.
The exhibition opens this Sunday the 25th November at 11am AEST (Sat 24th 4pm SL time).
Popularity: 10% [?]
Victorian universities run Second Life event
November 11, 2007
Discover your Second Life is an event hosted by Monash and Swinburne Universities. It’s being held Saturday 17th November at Monash Uni in Caulfield, Victoria.
Registration is required but free.
The speakers arranged are:
Debbie McCormick
Glenda McPherson and Malcolm Jolly
Chris Yeoh from IBM
Popularity: 9% [?]
Australian business interest growing in Second Life?
November 10, 2007
In the next two weeks I’m involved in two separate events that have the same purpose - to raise awareness of the opportunities that Second Life presents. The first has a corporate focus and the panel discussion involves key people from Telstra, REA and the ABC involved in their respective Second Life presences. The second one is also business orientated with a communications flavour.
In both cases, there’ll be up to a hundred representatives from Australian businesses, most of them medium to large operations with varying understanding of virtual worlds. A while back we wrote about Australian business taking a ‘wait and see’ approach - this may still be the case but there’s certainly no shortage of forums where SL is being presented as an innovation option.
Popularity: 9% [?]
New SL Music site launches
November 9, 2007
Slusic is a comprehensive new SL site devoted to music. It has the whole social networking thing down pat - playlists, forums, charts, blogs and so on. Australian artists are well represented - the top artists chart has Australian musician Dexter Ihnen at number one.
I could be wrong but this seems to be the most well fleshed out SL music site I’ve seen. Is it something you’ll use regularly?
Popularity: 20% [?]
Weekend Whimsy
November 9, 2007
Another Friday and another dose of SL machinima:
1. Could It Happen?
Part of a musical calleed ‘The Time Travelers Convention’
2. Scott Adams in Second Life
3. alto octanaje
Popularity: 15% [?]
Simon’s community approach
November 8, 2007
One Australian Second Life resident I’ve met in recent months is Simon Kline. Simon is a very active resident and his approach is one that has made an impact on quite a few others. Essentially, Simon loves creating things for the benefit of the wider SL community. He’s created a great notecard of Australian locations in SL that you may have seen and he’s a regular attendee at ABC Island events.
In conversation a few months back I mentioned to Simon that the available in-world RSS readers didn’t meet my needs and/or were very expensive. Simon mentioned he’d been thinking about creating something like that, and create it he did:
Simon’s happy to see his creations used to help the Aussie SL community and as one of the beneficiaries of his community spirit, SLOz salutes him.
Check out Simon’s work in-world
Popularity: 11% [?]
Interview - Tateru Nino
November 7, 2007
Tateru Nino is arguably the best known Australian SL resident. Over the past year I’ve run into Tateru in-world regularly at events and we’ve shared anecdotes and information here and there. What has made an impression over that time is Tateru’s commitment to what she does and how well she does it. I finally got around to asking her for an interview and as always she gave graciously of her time.
Lowell: Tell us a little about your role within SL as it stands now.
Tateru: Catalyst. Journalist. Consultant. Developer. Handy person to blame for stuff.
Lowell: It’d be fair to say your own of Australia’s longest SL users - is it a badge you wear with honour?
Tateru: I hadn’t actually thought of it like that. I’d been aware of SL since it was in Beta, but hadn’t felt the urge to try it out. Then in August, 2005 - a friend of mine and her partner (both in the UK) convinced me to give it a try. I’ve been here ever since.
Lowell: You write for New World Notes, SL Insider (now Massively) and your own blog - how do you fit it all in?
Tateru: And consultancy, and a few other things. It’s what I do, and I do it seven days a week every day of the year. It keeps the bills paid, mortgage taken care of, and the family fed. I make a living doing it - though it /is/ tight sometimes. It’s my day job - a long day job.
Lowell: And will the new site, Massively, make you even busier?
Tateru: It already has - pleasantly so. Writing more, doing more research, visiting more worlds. It keeps the wolves from the door, and that’s a good thing.
Lowell: Would it be fair to say you’re an immersionist?
Tateru: I don’t hold with the immersionist/augmentationist division. I’ve got elements of both camps - most people do, in my experience. I don’t meet many immersionists who are not also augmentationists. I think the two spectra intersect, rather than existing at opposite poles.
Lowell: You’ve written regularly about mainstream media coverage of Second Life and how they tend to get it wrong more often than not - are things improving in that respect?
Tateru: Sturgeon’s law. “90% of everything is crud” - there’s a lot of mediocrity out there. I don’t think that coverage of Second Life is actually any worse than mainstream media coverage of almost anything else. Most mainstream media pieces on nearly any topic are littered with inaccuracies. Out of the remaining ten percent? There’s some great reporting out there, but it’s balanced by an increase in truly shocking reporting. I think things are trending upwards, but I won’t bet money on it - not today.
Lowell: How often do you get SL developers lobbying you to cover a build or to alter your opinion on one you’ve already written about?
Tateru: Weekly. Store and product reviews? I only review places where I or a friend actually spent our own money. I tend to shy away from covering places that send me freebies to review. It’s hard enough to tell when you’re being unbiased. Having free swag in your inventory doesn’t make it any easier to make that distinction, so I avoid the folks who send me free samples.
Lowell: We’ve had discussions before where you’ve talked about your ability to ’see’ the grid numerically / via the data feeds. Can you elaborate on this?
Tateru: It’s tricky to describe. I see almost everything in … non-visual pictures. Abstracts. Senses of shapes and colours, relationships in any number of dimensions. I can look at a machine or a process and ’see’ (or sense) how it all fits together. It’s a kind of synesthesia, I suppose. When I actually look at something, I’m almost never seeing the visual part of it. I’m ’seeing’ the qualities of it that aren’t strictly visual. It makes it awfully hard to recognise people visually from photos and such, I can tell you. Graphs and numbers have trends, curves, shapes. I’ve no particular skill at math, but I can sense trends in data- as long as there’s enough data to actually work with. Give me too little and I have to shrug my shoulders. If there’s not enough, I can’t even venture a guess.
Lowell: If you had to describe the impact on SL since population explosion in late 2006, how would you do it?
Tateru: Chaotic. Second Life as a society (and I can’t think of any other word that fits all of us in aggregate) is something of a lost generation. A bit like Japan, in a way. We have our traditionalists who remember ‘the old ways’. We’ve got our progressives who look to what it could be. The rest are trying to figure out what it is now, and how to get along. Second Life society is a society that doesn’t know what it is, or what it is becoming. In a sense, it’s a grand adventure.
Lowell: How likely is the adventure to have a happy ending?
Tateru: Ultimately people are people. There’s nothing wrong with self-interest, so long as self-interest is not at the expense of others. Most of the problems we have in RL and in SL is a result of self-serving decisions that are made at the expense of other people. Just as we’ve never solved this problem in RL, we’re unlikely to solve it in SL either. But it’s something we can live with. Most people are reasonable, honest folks most of the time. That said, there’s always a balance - and sometimes a precarious one. SL is not so solid at this time that the balance cannot be tipped, and SL would vanish fairly quickly if it did. It’s still got some growing to do before it can toddle around the house on its own.
Lowell: What’s an amusing experience you’ve had in SL in recent memory?
Tateru: Your mileage may vary on recent. I was standing with Torley Linden, and another Linden staffer at the tail end of a public meeting. A relatively new (two weeks) SL user came up to us, and tried to sell us freebies from his Library folder. The name Linden had no impact on his consciousness. He didn’t know, or didn’t remember ever hearing of the name Linden or of Linden Lab. He was very keen to sell us some things to ‘make some ellz’.
Lowell: Who inspires you in SL?
Tateru: Tough question. I’m not exactly prone to a lot of that kind of inspiration at all. I suppose I’d have to say Robin Harper. She’s got a tough job with a lot to live up to. Harper, like all of us, makes mistakes and takes a lot of extra flak for hers, but keeps on pushing. At the end of the day, it’s not success or failure that’s really so important as it is that we don’t stop trying to do our best.
Lowell: Speaking of flak, Linden Lab cops plenty. Are there specific areas you believe they need to work on?
Tateru: Communication is a big one - and I don’t think a lot of people would argue about that. They’ve been looking for a resident communications manager/community manager for months and no sign of one yet. Also, I honestly think Linden Lab as a whole presents a very timid image, as if they’re afraid of speaking honestly and openly, of lawsuits, and of the appearance of favoritism. They may not be, but they give the strong impression that they are in their methods, timing and style of communication.
Lowell: What’s your take on the Aussie contingent in SL - just part of the pack or a sub-culture?
Tateru: Depends on the people. In a group, we can be quite a pack of yahoos at times. Get a whole bunch of us together and we’re pretty distinctive. Alone, we’re just part of the pack.
Lowell: If you had to provide a new user with three must-see places in SL, what would they be?
Tateru: NCI, The Shelter, Caledon, Metabirds (that’s four, yes).
Lowell: Would you like to get the crystal ball out and make any predictions about SL in the coming year?
Tateru: Well, we’re not quite through my last lot of predictions for 2007 yet.
Popularity: 11% [?]
