Shaping Thoughts

ING stops activities in Second Life

See OurVirtualHolland.com

Maybe some more thoughts later…

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING

Comment [1] | posted Jan 30, 11:10 am on Jan 30, 2008 | category: Second Life

A Tribute to Vincent van Gogh in Second Life

Have no words for this…

Watch The World(s) by Robbie Dingo.

...well…just brilliant!!

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life

Comment [1] | posted Jul 20, 09:50 pm on Jul 20, 2007 | category: Second Life

Second Life can be hard work

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)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland

Comment [1] | posted Jul 5, 09:36 pm on Jul 05, 2007 | category: OurVirtualHolland / Second Life

Great Video of Our Virtual Holland Ghana Party

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)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland,Ghana

Comment [2] | posted Jun 4, 02:17 pm on Jun 04, 2007 | category: OurVirtualHolland / Second Life

Residents organise charity party at Our Virtual Holland

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!

COME JOIN US AND HAVE SOME AFRICAN FUN

The party location: SLURL

Latest news:

• Wow! The upcoming party was already featured in the important 3pointD weblog!

The party location!

The party location complete with animals

The Second Life replica of the orphanage (SL visualisation in action!)

(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland,Ghana

Comment | posted May 30, 11:35 pm on May 30, 2007 | category: OurVirtualHolland / Second Life

IBM shows future of Customer Interaction?

Imagine sitting on the couch with your wireless keyboard in front of your 40 inch LCD screen and looking for a new mainframe: a great video via Eightbar:

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, IBM

Comment | posted May 16, 09:57 pm on May 16, 2007 | category: Second Life

A Wiki in Second Life

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)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland,Wiki

Comment | posted May 16, 09:27 pm on May 16, 2007 | category: OurVirtualHolland / Second Life

Finally got Freeview Screen to accept my own movies

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)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, Our Virtual Holland

Comment [2] | posted May 6, 12:08 am on May 06, 2007 | category: Second Life / OurVirtualHolland

What will make Second Life grow again?

Being very interested in Second Life statistics and having some suspicions about a slowdown in growth, I revisited that great statistical overview Tateru Nino yesterday evening. I found out that:

• daily sign-up’s have been decreasing for a couple of weeks
• active residents (60 days) has not increased for a couple of days
• the concurrent logins have been flat for (at least) 14 days in a row

So this morning I left a comment on Tateru’s daily post on SL statistics asking about her view on what is happening right now in Second Life: a snippet:

Given the slowdown in sign-ups, accompanied by the much higher inflow in the months before, I guess you can forecast that outflow (users going away) was bound to get bigger than inflow, which could be a signal that the rise in real active users (core users) is actually very slow now or even zero.

Well it appeared that I was spot on, with Tateru replying she had just provided some nice charts the day before to Wagner James Au of New World Notes for his article (The World at a Plateau) describing the same issue: that the growth of active users has come to a halt.

Something that struck me about the article in NWN is that Tateru Nino linked the current development in core users fully to Second Life’s infrastructural problems (you know: lags, crashes, inventory losses etc.) which makes users turn away or at least make them think twice about the value of their time in-world.

Obviously, good stable infrastructure is a key condition for application attractiveness but to me certainly not the only one! How about linking the potential value of the “Second Life offer” to for example:

• an easier user interface (“freightening” newbies)
• more integration between SL and Internet (less need to switch apps)
• better graphics
• more in-world capabilities (HTML-on-a-prim)
• decreased cost of owning land / islands
• ....any other?

It could very well be that the first shift of (early) adopter has had their experience with Second Life and the dust has settled for now awaiting a new shift attracted by added features, functionality and usefulness, and so value, that will make Second Life a part of their real life.

What would those new features and capabilities need to be according to you?

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, Tarero Nino, Wagner James Au

Comment [5] | posted May 4, 09:20 pm on May 04, 2007 | category: Second Life

Launch Day at Our Virtual Holland!

So, it is all goining to happen today! Our Virtual Holland will officially launch in Second Life.

I will be busy on a “certain boat” in the Rotterdam harbour area in Real Life (see images of SL replica’s) as well as in Second Life later today.

Please find so images I captured this morning.

The boat in Rotterdam, with Erasmus Bridge as background

Detail of boat in Rotterdam

Concert stage

Flea Market detail

My house all set for receiving some visitors

At Drop Zone, the Second Life auditions for the Movie Zwartboek by Paul Verhoeven are part of the programme of the launch of Our Virtual Holland.

The SLurl to Virtual Holland.

(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland

Comment | posted Apr 30, 09:52 am on Apr 30, 2007 | category: OurVirtualHolland / Second Life