There was an interesting woman at the Church shows...she has a Guthrie area in Second Life. She has live entertainment there occasionally, and your avatar can go to the concert, dance if you want to, talk to people, and hang out and enjoy the music.
If you're on Second Life, look me up...I'm Pansy Barrowstone. I'm in there a few times a week. The kind person running it has an avatar that goes by the name Dottie Iceburg.

I've been thinking about doing Second Life for awhile now. Wanted to learn it so I could use it as a teaching tool for my students. Thanks for reminding me about it. Oh, happy birthday!

Happy bd & have a good one. The Pentecostal church down the road has where you can go on Sat nites & attend church thru Second Life over the internet. I had wanted to try going to that with Mike but we never got around to it...

Thanks, Terri!...it's not until Wednesday, tho!

I thought this place WAS that?!

Just be sure to check out the situation before using it as a teaching tool. Second Life is distinctly and deliberately adult although Linden Labs is trying to segregate the adult content on the mainland and to create a separate continent for the kids. They are under tremendous pressure from their VCs to make profit and from certain business partners such as IBM to clean up their act. Sam Palimpsano spent millions in IBM funding to get into the business without understanding it and now there is pressure to show Second Life and virtual world tech has a business payoff.

There are better approaches but they require technical sophistication most won't have so go with SL for now because the aggregation of services that make a live gig there possible are not something one can put together without some serious investors. Do be aware that the technology is proprietary, the clients are flakey and LL changes the rules early and often. There is a culture war going on between their regulars and LL.

Mainly, be aware that you can't get much control in that server system and you are entirely responsible for the safety and well-being of the children you open this up to. LL indemnifies themself against any and all complaints or litigations resulting from the behaviors of its users. You may have missed the Flying Penises the griefers set loose on Anshe Chung during an interview with a techno-column writer a few years ago.

Inevitably, someone will want to put the Guthrie Center there. Just be aware that griefers don't discriminate. They live for the conflict and chaos they create.

The first night I was on. a kind guy was able to talk to me over my computer speakers, and helped me navigate, find stuff and was very frank about some of the seedier aspects of Second Life. If you're not into stuff like that in RL, , you don't have to be involved in it there. His advice? Watch out for other people. Some are kind, and some just want to take advantage of you.

I just signed up and it began in Berlin. How do I get out of there? I thought I signed up for Campus in 3D.

OK Terrie---first of all: DON'T PANIC!!! We'll get you outa there. Now scan the horizon for any large or unique landmarks, and pull out your compass......you did bring your compass, didn't you......???

First, vee need to zee your papers......

Haben sie papieren bitte ?

Ich bin ein Berliner

Go to the west Terrie , you are not far from Belgium , i shall waight for you on the border .

That's pretty much it, Sue. There is some learning curve for people who haven't spent time in-world or playing games. Virtual world tech has been on the web since 1994-95 but until the rise of online gaming (eg, Everquest, Ultima, etc.) it has been a niche content type. The big server farms brought out some of the social dilemmas.

SL's problem is no zoning. This became a big issue for the megacorps who found they could pay Electric Sheep a hefty chunk of change to build a site for them in SL, and the next morning, a virtual brothel opens up next to them or just a cheesy gift shop. This is one of the challenges of so-callled "user-generated" content sites. So now they are trying to zone it and their old tenants are fighting it.

From my perspective as a virtual reality artist, SL is proprietary. Full-stop. It is a content-lobster trap. As long as you are a visitor, that's not a problem. If you are a content-maker it's a risk for you and/or your customers Real-time 3D is THE most expensive content on the web. Imagine paying the going rate for a Tesla then having the company go out of business in a year. In the auto market, there is likely another source for parts if you drive a Ford, but if you drive a Tesla, you are SOL unless you bought a spare. In Second Life, if LL changes their mind or defaults, your content goes with them unlike with HTML where reasonably good standards give you a reasonable chance to recover. In the 3D world, only one standard has lasted and that is VRML/X3D. Content made for browsers from companies that went out of business ten years ago is still running in the new browsers. LL fights VRML/X3D at every turn for reasons easy to understand: it defeats their core business strategy to keep all content generated by their tools on their servers and the owners with it.

LL is not in the virtual world business really. Like Google, they are in the server farm business. IOW, it is about selling services to other service providers and using the in-world traffic somewhat like a shopping mall or a nightclub. So if you are an entertainer, this is great. I actually played at the world's first virtual reality concerts a decade ago in Cybertown. It was fun but I soon realized the meatspace problems followed us there in spades. A different discussion....

OTOH, if you are the club owner and paid for the content and fees for the location, it's risky. That said, LL does a good job of consolidating the services and making this possible.

That is why I advise people who want to set up there to consider the risks if they are going to build content that they value. When Google's Lively was shuttered, the content builders lost big time. It has happened in other 3D start-ups. I don't think LL is going out of business tomorrow, but it has taken some sponsoring by rather large businesses such as IBM to keep them open, thus their current cultural dilemmas with their original customer base for whom porn is assumed to be a right. Go to http://www.virtualworldsnews.com and read the articles. It is not that you 'want' to be involved; it is that you can't protect yourself the same way you can in meatspace. Like living in a big city, you have to be aware.

It's a market with "flux" which is one reason I don't make a living doing that though I've got the creds and the chops. I heartily recommend learning it though. 3D is great finger painting and if you understand spatial sound, the engines open up composition potentials for musicians that few really know how to use yet. It is the very bleeding edge and that is fun with a big F. for musicians who record.

Don't get me wrong: the Second Life gigs are well worth doing and fun. I'm only talking the business side where investing a lot of time or dollars has risks and locating in a free-to-join-free-to-build server farm without having any say over what gets done with content is a little too much like signing a record deal with a major label and a sleazy lawyer. Ya takes ya chances.

Len wrote:"That is why I advise people who want to set up there to consider the risks if they are going to build content that they value. When Google's Lively was shuttered, the content builders lost big time."


Maybe a bailout is in order......"I am changing my name to Second Life......"

Nah, opt in. SecondLife to a musician is a gig. To a virtual artist, it is a canvas. Canvases are portable or they end up being site sculpture. Build it. Forget it. Tour act vs houseband.

The Deal: if you want to build a body of work in the medium, use VRML/X3D so you can take it with you. If you need walkthrough to sell other products or to be seen (basic nightclub), SecondLife is the place to be. It's THE gig du jour.

If you want the room most people have easy access to, use Vivaty in Facebook. Why? Shares the ID with other services. The problem is it isn't as service rich yet but the Rascal Flatts premiere had excellent walkthrough. Second Life's advantage here is precisely that it hosts live acts. In Vivaty, at the moment, it is videos and recorded audio which for a free service is excellent. Vivaty will be happy to let you use their resources to put together a gallery. Simple to do because it's drag and drop. Numbers show a definite increase though. It's advantage is integration with Facebook. So if say you already have maxed out 5000 friends on FB, you will have excellent walkthrough. If I were RisingSon's sales manager, I'd look at this because it enables them to put Jackie's YouTube library, live recordings, other stuff in one easy to walk-around-room.

And like most web stuff, you can do multiple projects.

Terri, go to Showcase and teleport somewhere else!