Welcome to my weblog, which I use for keeping track of interesting stuff. It serves as my basecamp for the exploration of the Internet, the "Blogosphere" and life in general.
As I have written in the past, Second Life and blogging are hard to combine. Well at least for me, with only 1-2 hours to spend on these things per day.
So regular readers (do I have any?; please comment…) will have noticed that the pace of blog posting has dramatically slowed down last few weeks.
So what am I doing in Second Life then? Well, actually noting more than trying to “co-manage” a community (can SL residents actually be managed, being such a creative bunch?). There is a tremendous challenge in managing a non face-to-face community with the SL toolset I feel now. Take for example meetings. How to structure them properly, how to make them efficient?
And we are also thinking hard about some innovative idea’s as well…
All in all, it takes a lot of time and hard work. Time to relax in the pool with Our Virtual Holland community manager Jolanda… (location)
(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)
Last Thursday the 31st of May, we had a great charity party at the Our Virtual Holland sims in Second Life. There was a relaxed atmosphere brought about by great African music from African Music Radio and a nice scenery created specifically for the party. Yes, you can pull that off in Second Life, within a reasonable amount of time!
Around 100 unique avatars showed up during the 3 hour event and we managed to raise quite a few bucks for the orphanage in Ghana, although in looks a bit more impressive in Linden Dollars. But hey, SL is all about micro-transactions, so you cannot expect a three hour party to deliver huge piles of cash.
Besides that, as a community we have learned quite a lot organising this party, and even more we felt how nice it is to work together and achieving goals like this.
And when, in the end you end up with a video like this below, created by community member Irwo Merlin (SL name), we feel really proud of ourselves:
So what’s our next community event…?
(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)
Tomorrow evening 31 May, 21.00 hours (Amsterdam time), that is noon in Second Life time, the residents of Our Virtual Holland will kick-off their first joint party.
The event is fully dedicated to raising money for the construction of an orphanage with a little farm in Ghana. One of Our Virtual Holland’s residents, Naomi Talon, has close ties to the Dutch organisation behind this charity project.
At Our Virtual Holland the residents have been very busy thinking and discussing the event for the last few weeks. Our weekly meetings and our wiki proved their value. It has been a worthwhile time, considering the fact that we have learned a lot so far and we surely intend to do some more of these events in the future.
So what can you do at the event:
buy tickets for the lottery (LL$ 50 each and have a shot at the big price: a month’s stay in a house with a private beach in Second Life!)
have a look at the Second Life replica of the orphanage
dance on some nice African music
get yourself some trendy African clothes for the occasion (all money goes to charity project!), designed by our star designer Indira Bekkers
enjoy the beautiful African scenery
pick up a copy of the first issue of our magazine PRIM (Periodical Revealing Information Magazine)
and, last but not least, meet the Our Virtual Holland residents!
Ok, that was an attractive title wasn’t it? Well, I wish it would be possible to directly access a wiki though the Second Life user interface and having other residents around see the changes in real time. We are not quite there yet I am afraid. It is this HTML-on-a-Prim thing we have been waiting for quite some time now…
Anyway, I actually have been busy creating a private wiki – for – Second Life, a wiki where the residents of Our Virtual Holland can exchange their idea’s and experiences and ask questions. All to promote our Second Life well being and to further develop Our Virtual Holland.
A week ago the wiki was presented to the current group of residents during our weekly meeting. But how to do such a presentation, not having this HTML-on-a-Prim thing? Well, as a second best solution, I created some big prims with screenshots of the most important wikipages for our wiki newbies. And that worked out nicely.
After a week of testing I must say that progress on the wiki is quite ok! Next to the live (static) demo in Second Life, the adoption process was speeded up by creating a bunch of short help pages. I guess the current residents of Second Life are not representative for the average people you would try to get on to a wiki, being rather computer literate by nature. These people pick up these things relatively easy.
To date we have been using the wiki for:
co-creating and discussing our meeting agenda
storing the minutes of meetings
discussing about Second Life in general and the development of Our Virtual Holland in particular
posing questions to the OVH community team
creating Userpages to better get to know each other
describing our projects on Second life
uploading and sharing screenshots
sharing links
All in all, the wiki appears to be a good tool for storing information and community building, that any healthy and growing community requires.
(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)
Sometimes you can be working for ages on stuff that does not work. Take the nice Freeview Screen in Second Life.
After the whole process of sharing the “equipment” (the screen) with the group of builders on Our Virtual Holland and getting the group’s officer to deed the stuff to the group, I have been quite busy trying to get one of my own movies played.
I uploaded a few test movies to my hosted server, but Freeview did not seem to accept them. Until I found out, I had been entering an incorrect URL format: unlike the on-screen help explains, I had to include the “http://” characters in order for the thing to work.
The second thing I learned, was about the format for the movie I wanted to stream. First I had used some online conversion tool to convert from .flv to .mov, but later I tried to more precisely specify the .mov format settings. I found out I could “hint” the file for streaming, which makes Freeview start displaying the movie while still downloading. I also found out I could compress the .mov format by using, in my case, h263 compression.
Some new stuff learned on a Saturday evening…
(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)
In preparation for Monday’s official launch of Our Virtual Holland, the 4 islands of Talpa, called Drop Zone have been temporary attached to Our Virtual Holland.
Having the two island groups joint, makes it just a bit easier to “share” visitors and at the same time it provides some more “green dot” effect as well.
Today the Our Virtual Holland community got the final schedule for the official luanch party on the 30th April, Queen’s Day here in the Netherlands.
Here is the announcement I received over email:
Queen’s Day: Flea Market, look-a-like competitions, auditions and much much more…
Do you want to experience Queen’s Day from your armchair? Prevent being crushed by the crowds? Or sell the things you cannot sell in real life in Second Life?
On Queen’s Day you are invited to Our Virtual Holland grand opening! There will be a flea market, a maze race, a Queen Beatrix look-a-like competition, avatar auditions for Zwartboek 2 and a surprise opening event of Our Virtual Holland and much more.
Flea Market
Community members will be selling their goods, but you are also invited to bring your own Second Life items to sell at the flea market. If you want a stall to sell your stuff, then send a mail to our community manager Jolanda@RiversRunRed.com. First come, first go, just like in Real Life!
Maze Race
Come and play in a maze full of surprises!
Queen Beatrix look-a-like competition
Best look-a-like avatar will win a dreamhouse in Second Life!
Our Virtual Holland goes live!
Come and join the official openings ceremony.
Zwartboek Auditions
Does your avatar want to be a star? Join the auditions for Zwartboek 2. read more…
Disco and fireworks
No party can be without music and fireworks. We will be virtually grooving all night long!
When I first found out about Twitter, I really thought that for me personally it was “overkill”, a tool to leave alone to hedge the risk of getting addicted to another time eater, just like Second Life.
However recently, in my search for tools that portray some integration between Real Life and Second Life, I thought about hearing something about Twitter and Second Life. It must have been on For Immediate Release, my favorite podcast. Anyway, I went to search for Twitterbox, which I remembered the tool was called.
I found the tool on a nice weblog maintained by Second Life resident Ordinal Malaprop. Ordinal is the very generous creator of the Twitterbox, of which version 0.4 was released a few days ago. The Twitterbox, when installed, works by entering “/282 ….some text…..” on the chat line, so is very easy to use. After hitting enter some nice graphics are presented (see first image) above the avatar, which by the way, might leave nearby avatars wondering what happened…
Like I do (too) often, I already started to think about the tool even before really trying it out and came up with the idea that it would be nice to show tweets in Second Life as well. So I left a comment to Ordinal’s weblog sharing my idea, to which she reacted quite fast and after only a day or two the complementory Twitterbadge was ready.
The Twitterbadge offers to display anyone’s Twitter tweets via so called “floating text”. In the image below you can see the Twitterbadge script has been put into a prim with the Twitter logo featuring as texture.
As for my twittering: I intend to only use Twitter while in Second Life, providing some thoughts and shoutouts about my ventures over there.
By the way the official twitterbadge is also visible on this weblog on the Second Life section.
Twitterbadge in action, with as base a special textured prim
becoming the first Formula 1 team to exploit the unique opportunities for fan interaction offered by virtual worlds.
About the intentions:
...helping to put enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike behind-the-scenes with a championship-winning Formula 1 team. The experience is designed to take them closer to the dedication, technological excellence and teamwork required to achieve Formula 1 success, alongside a number of unique interactive virtual experiences.
For the first time, people with a shared interest and a desire to connect have a place where they can meet without travelling. In this virtual world, they can share and communicate their enthusiasm, making it the perfect venue for connecting a community of fans spread around the globe.
Wow, what a great potential stimulus for Our Virtual Holland, ING’s venture into Second Life! I wonder if both SL project teams, at ING and Renault, co-operated on this? Must be considering the fact that both use the services of Rivers Run Red. Oh wait, Our Virtual Holland is even mentioned in the official press release.
All content on this weblog is presented on my personal account, representing my own views, and as such does not necessarily reflect the views of my past, current or future employers.
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Comment [1] | 
posted Jul 5, 09:36 pm on Jul 05, 2007 |
category: OurVirtualHolland
/ Second Life
When I first found out about 
