Cubist Scarborough and The Manual: Second Life edition

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I hope you have a little spare time, dear readers, because I am about to lead you down a rabbit hole, a veritable treasure-trove of ideas so rich and varied that I have not yet been able to unearth them all myself.

As personal blogs go, Ian Truelove’s (Cubist Scarborough in Second Life®) is almost buoyant with optimism and analysis of all the inherent possibilities and joys of virtual worlds, and that’s very good news, because he’s an educator and he’s teaching 100+ students at a time, often introducing them to Second Life for the first time. He is Principal Lecturer (Technology Enhanced Learning) at the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, in the Faculty of Arts & Society.


Cubist makes three-dimensional holograms of people's Real Life faces. Here is one of himself


Ian (Cubist in Second Life) is watching you everywhere on the Leeds Met sim

His blog reads like a private journal at times and is chock full of insights and deliberations he has with himself and has siphoned off onto the web in a way that we might all consider and possibly benefit from… simply one of the best uses of a blog I’ve run into in a very long time. Ian expounds on the dichotomy of dealing with people in public and private spaces, both in Real Life and in Second Life. He defines and deconstructs the virtual studio. It’s a fascinating stockpile of thoughtful documents pertaining to education, Second Life, OpenSim and a project between Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan and Kings College London called Open Habitat that took place earlier this year and set out to explore how Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) can be used in Higher Education.


Ian's sculptures make it possible for you to get inside his head

Ian also designed the accompanying Open Habitat magazine that serves as a repository for vast quantities of data that the universities collected working with art and design and philosophy students, including surveys, blogposts and chatlogs.

But what I simply cannot wait to share with you is a document called The Manual: Second Life edition, a collection of micro-projects created by lecturers from the School of Contemporary Art & Graphic Design at Leeds Metropolitan University that Ian adapted for Second Life as part of the Open Habitat project. You’ll find different versions, including a cut-out one with instructions for folding it, a text version, and even an iPhone version here.


The Manual: Second Life edition, in Second Life

While Ian asks that we keep all 81 tasks together with the CC license text, he did allow me to share a few of them with you, just this once, to give you a taste:

# 5 Find some gesture animations and practice using them somewhere on your own. Work out a physical comedy routine and perform it to your friends.

# 6 Find a freebie stall on the mainland. Grab 12 small objects that have something in common. Arrange all of your objects into a sequence.

# 7 Build one or more of the following:
The beginning of the world
The end of the world
A self-portrait that includes your full body
Something that happened at breakfast
An image from a recent dream
Something that has yet to happen to you

# 8 Start a cult. Establish rituals. Create a meeting place. Meet.

If this isn’t a formula for discovery and enjoyment of one’s virtual life, I don’t know what is. I believe every single newbie in Second Life should be handed a copy.

You can visit the in-world version of this document and take the notecard form of it by teleporting directly from here.

If a picture tells a thousand stories, what does the new Koinup slide show do for us?

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Our friend and partner at Koinup, Pierluigi Casolari is a darn good listener and community builder. Earlier this week, I DM'ed him via Twitter, asking if we could create and post slide shows on our blogs. This morning he DM'ed back to say that he and his wizard tech team had whipped up a widget just for us. All you have to do is set up the slide show with your own pics in Koinup and then go to "share this" for two dozen options. Now I can show you - all at once - my Bond-ish pics taken at Juria Yoshikawa's retrospective, presented by Atlanta, Georgia's Kennesaw State University (teleport directly from here).


Koinup is an inclusive social networking site for all Virtual Worlds that permits storage and sharing of imagery: photography, Machinima, and "storyboards." Among the Virtual Worlds you'll find images of on Koinup: Second Life®, World of Warcraft, Lively, The Sims, IMVU, vSide, Kaneva, There, and more.

Bryn Oh ruminates: Who are our favorite Second Life "characters?"

She's no stranger to these pages, and she hasn't touched the tarmac even once since she set flight as a content creator, leaving us enchanted time and again with her steampunk imaginings and sculptural story-telling. Now Bryn Oh has begun her own blog, and in one of her inaugural posts she lists some of her favorite characters in Second Life®.

Oh boy... *rubs palms together and grins.* Bryn, to your great list I would add these names, which I jotted down in under two minutes. In no particular order...

Gazira Babeli
Tooter Claxton
Truthseeker Young
Orhalla Zander
Arcadia Asylum
Molotov Alva
Blaccard Burks
Hamlet Au
Andrek Lowell
Ordinal Malaprop
Komuso Tokugawa
Tuna Oddfellow
Flea Bussy
Chance Abattoir
Naxos Loon
Spiral Walcher
Adam Ramona
Sabine Stonebender
thomtrance Otoole
(of course, this list is quite, quite incomplete)

What do all these people have in common? One look at them makes me smile. Their avatar is instantly recognizable. They rarely change much (though Flea is certainly an exception to this rule and Tooter's not far behind). Tooter, we miss you! Hurry home! And yes, they are all certifiable characters in Second Life.

And Bryn, welcome to the madcap world of blogging! Here are some interesting stats about blogging in the U.S...

According to Blog World Expo:

- Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
- More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
- Over 57 million Americans read blogs.
- 1.7 million American adults list "making money" as one of the reasons they blog.
- 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
- 9% of Internet users say they have created blogs.
- 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog.
- Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs.
- Over 120 thousand blogs are created every day.
- There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
- 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs.
- 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006.
- 51% of blog readers shop online.
- Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.

Now, get thee over to Bryn's blog and let her know who you think the greatest characters are in your Second Life!

Content is King

It took years (the 80s... the 90s... Okay, okay, decades elapsed) for most marketers to figure out that this flat thing you are looking at right now, the 2D web, needed real content before it would have any value. Some of you will recall how - when they finally got around to it - corporations slapped their brochures and their contact information up on a pretty little website and thought they'd done their day's work. They've since come around. I just Googled the phrase "content is King" and got 717,000 returns. Hehe.

Pretty much anyone who reads this blog already knows that the 2D web has become scarily democratized and that, with a wee bit of know-how, any fool can create a platform in minutes and have a voice. To be heard and to develop a following is another matter. You've simply got to provide fresh and meaningful content. As much of it as possible.

This is my first blog, ever, and it's been fun watching it grow and easy to come up with blogposts thanks to the never-ending always-amazing quantity of content-rich stories arising from the creators of Second Life®.

I've been so busy with the Garden of NPIRL Delights the past ten days, however, that I haven't been able to do more than publish posts prepared by my fellow NPIRLers KK Jewell and Douglas Story and Desdemona Enfield. Even with their contributions, nary a word has gone up here since Monday.

The thought of looking at this blog's traffic stats for the past few days made me cringe, so I chose not to.

I finally got around to it a few minutes ago, and what I saw amazed me. How is it possible? Readership is up. Not by a lot. But enough to bend my mind.

The only explanation I can come up with is that these are new readers who landed here through web searches that pointed them to older blogposts. How cool is that?

Turns out that even a blog can be forgiving.