Second Life - Success Secrets

Is Las Vegas Second Life In Real Life?

Over at the Vanderwal blog, another great ironic posting made me laugh out loud....frustratingly some of the best bloggers don't have their trackback's turned on - or their RSS feeds, which means I can't subscribe easily....

"I arrived in Las Vegas last night feeling slightly out of sync with the world around me. I realized that Las Vegas is the First Life's version of Second Life. When I mentioned this to a friend in a chat they stated, "but the people are real". This was after I had just come through the Las Vegas Airport, which was filled with people who looked as if they just stepped out of Second Life.

Las Vegas seems to have taken the User Experience and turned it up to eleven.

Everything is synthetic, which is horribly disconcerting. When manufacturing user experience we must have a foundation on the real to build upon and shape things from. Las Vegas has no foundation in the real as it uses manufactured experiences as its foundation for building upon, there is no firm ground to use as context as it is all manufactured.

When I go to New York, London, or Amsterdam there is a flood of real experiences to use a frameworks for building a user experience. These places have a firm ground to build augmented or shaped experiences on top of, but Las Vegas has only a foundation in the plastic and manufactured. In Second Life there is the option to close that world and rejoin the grounded experience, but Las Vegas that button is a car, plane, or bus out.

This morning I went in search of the 24 hour breakfast in the massive hotel, only to find it served at a restaurant that did not open until 6am (0600).....

READ MORE HERE >>>>

The Pagan's Aren't Keen.....

Meanwhile, the Pagan's don't like it at all.....over at the very beautiful looking Pagen Godspell blog written by Sara Sutterfield Winn there is a deep sense of unease....

"So. I’ve been reading about Second Life.  For those who’ve been living under a blissful, glittery, real-time rock like I have, Second Life is an online “game” and virtual world where players go to concerts, attend parties, build houses, buy stuff, promote causes, go to meetings, and interact in general with other players. 

It’s like life, except it’s virtual.  It’s virtually life.  I’m assuming a large contingent of folks enjoy Second Life because it may enable them to explore things they wouldn’t otherwise in this life, or it enables them to lead the life they wished they could have, or, and this is an aspect of it I find particularly weird, it provides them a place to make real-life livings selling virtual products, and even virtual real-estate (virtual-estate?  VR-estate?  unreal-estate?).  It’s like playing pretend when you were little - everyone likes to play pretend.  Or role-playing…I can get that. 

One might also, if one were being cheeky, point out that it’s also a bit like being born again - having a life with a clean slate - sinless even.  Maybe they ought to have called it Born Again.  Still - I’m human and I live in our society and I understand the impulse here to an extent.  It’s the point at which Second Life, which is a product of a culture of extreme individualism and radical disconnection and therefore cannot help but enable this culture, becomes the Only Life that I get a little squirrely.  All right - I get a lot squirrely. 

I like science fiction.  I have luddite tendencies.  You can imagine that these in combination make me start eyeballing stuff like Second Life with visions of Terminator and The Matrix dancing in my eccentric, slightly paranoid head.....

Read more here >>>>

Gwen's Tips For Success In Second Life

Just stumbled on a GREAT site on Second Life - not only is Gwen really cool looking and has an animated gif of her Second Life avatar (I'm so jealous!) but Gwen includes her Top 6 Tips for Success.

Gwyn’s Tips for Success in Second Life®

1. Be the first to have a brand new idea.

It’s not difficult. Second Life is, after all, brand new. Whether you suddenly found an exploit or a way to trick the SL platform to work in a different way as intended, explore that idea immediately, create a new product, and sell it in-world. Excellent examples are things like the invisible avatars, the tiny avatars, animation overriders, GOM, e-Commerce websites that deliver items in-world, or primmed hair. Others, like the old ROAM system by Francis Chung, are an alternative to something that is broken - the teleport system that so often fails. And since Search is so often broken recently, it comes as no surprise that people are all eager to create their own 3rd party search engines — Second 411 and SL Query being good examples.
Imagination and creativity are crucial, but so is tinkering with SL for hours after hours. Sometimes a brand new idea is just waiting around the corner, and the first one to explore it, will become famous.

Sometimes “filling a niche” also suddenly gives birth to an amazing new market. When people understood that the SL default skins are really low-res (deliberately?), they started to create high-res skins instead. Some, like Second Skin, even replace the default ones directly on your hard disk. I mean, it was not a radically new idea — it should have been obvious — but it exploited an opportunity. Similarly, when Event support was dropped by Linden Lab last January, Tringo was invented, and this was so far the best example of something created in SL that managed to be sold in the “real world”. Even today, after years of Tringo having been invented, a huge proportion of all the entertainment events are Tringo-related.

Check it out over here >>>>

Jimmy'z Blog

Just found a great blog talking about how to make Linden dollars on Second Life ....

Jimmy sayz:

Last week, I reported in my IS Strategy class on IBM’s plan to invest $10MM in Second Life. I explained the concept of Second Life to the class because a large number of students had never heard of Second Life . This spurred an excellent discussion on the implications of virtual worlds on IS strategy, and what companies like IBM would have to gain from investing in virtual world technologies. Many people were blown away by the fact that people actually make money in Second Life . I was asked, “How do people make money in Second Life?” Unfortunately I didn’t know at the time, so I decided to do some more research on the topic. After looking into it, there are endless possibilities for Making Money in Second Life or in other virtual worlds.

How is it possible to make money in a virtual world when nothing is “real”?

One way that people are making money in Second Life is by creating virtual objects and by selling them in a virtual shop. For example, someone with clever design and marketing skills can create their own virtual brand of clothing and sell their clothing in Second Life . How are Second Life items created? I’ve been asked if you must buy raw materials in Second Life . The answer is, you can, but you don’t have to. Items are created by using Second Life 3D modeling tools and the Second Life scripting language. You can upload images that become the textures on your new objects. It costs money to upload these images to Second Life, so it might be better to buy pre-fabricated building blocks to assemble your new creations. Check out the Suzanne’s Guitar video for a demonstration of creating a virtual item.

Building and selling objects is not the only way of making money on Second Life. There is a large service and entertainment market inside Second Life.

Second Life  entrepreneurs can buy land.....

Read More About Making Money On Second Life On Jimmy'z Blog >>>>