Teen Metaverse Blog

Everyone here has heard, or been, or both, to a mall, right? If you haven’t… well, that’s quite odd. They are literally everywhere.

Now, it brings one to the question: Which mall should I choose? No answer. Many malls are nicely designed, but they make you pay an arm and a leg; many malls look like they were made by a monkey with a mouse, but are cheap. So my answer is: Depends.

Malls are a way for a parcel owner or island owner to make a lucrative income while inputting little work to it. Malls are easier to make than in real life; a floating structure or an unstable-looking structure would not be able to exist in the real world, except maybe in orbit, but that’s besides the point. I could count the list of malls but why? It’s not very important.

A normal person could use their common sense to decide where to go. If it’s in Snicket, good luck. It’s bias that Snicket is a sim to avoid at all costs. It would be a futile attempt, at most. There are four factors that can make or break you: Sim, Size, Structure, and Selling. The four S’s.

Sim– This is pretty obvious. Out of the y number of sims, I would say y-x=25 are actually of acceptable++ quality to host a mall. Maybe a few less, but it’s for you to rent/get. Make sure you get the most out of it.

Size–By size, I mean three things: Area, Parcel Size, and # of Stalls. The Area of the actual mall is an important factor, because the larger it is, the more competition will come, and chances are the more traffic it will attract. The Parcel Size is mainly ineffectual; it just is a measure of how many prims per stalls there could be (one could use this: # of Prims/# of Stalls - ~50 to 200), but it is an estimate, not fact.

Structure–Structure is the Structure of the Mall, and of course, the surrounding area. If the mall looks like it was thrown together in <10 minutes, don’t go there. If the surrounding area is really bad, use caution. The surrounding area is a variable factor; sometimes the mall can be quite nice, but the area is bad.

And the last, but certainly not least:

Sell–Selling is the main point of any decent mall: attract people to your shop. If you don’t, you go out of business. If the mall is a ghost town, do one of two things: a) don’t go to it, or, if it looks very nice and worthwhile, b) try to attract attention. It’s good advertising for you, and it’s good for the mall owner too.

I am trying in the last few weeks to help boost some malls, with their design. What could look at first to be a hunk of junk can actually be rebuilt, and look pretty decent. Sometimes the mall can be a ghost town, but the next day all the stalls could be rented.

-Steven

Although (very) old news, last year the Maldives was the first country to open an embassy in Second Life on Diplomacy Island on the Main Grid. As a small developing country, the Maldives has little to no political outreach or voice, they would get more attention in Second Life than they would on the real political stage. It was not the country itself that decided to open the embassy, but the Diplo Foundation, a company that works with developing countries to give them more influence on an international scale. The Maldives has set the first example and now Macedonia, the Phillipines, and even Sweden have announced plans to open their own embassies. As time goes by, Second Life becomes more influential, and more and more Real-World companies and countries are looking to join in.

[via MinivanNews]

I thought that since the blog is more popular now and more people read it, I would do a repost of what I think is a very important and exciting post.

You thought WindLight was revolutionary and incredible? You ‘aint seen nothin’ yet! All of those beautiful WindLight clouds gliding gracefully and untouched in the sky are going to dissapear. No, WindLight isn’t going away, those clouds are just placeholders. Thats right, decoys. Linden Lab’s final installation in the new WindLight program will be the “Nimble” cloud rendering system, those boring static clouds you always see at about 200 meters are going away, and full 3-D moving clouds will replace them , and the WindLight clouds, you will be able to control those clouds in pretty much the same way that you control the WindLight sky and water. Second Life, is about to get a whole lot more life like! Everything I have just said can be pretty much summed up in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLfHDul5XGw

    Sandboxes, we love ‘em, we hate ‘em. It’s where most people learn to play the game, and it’s what turns a whole lot of people off. Whether you live in them, or you completely avoid them, they affect your game. Sandboxes are, to put it simply, lag generators. Why? Why have these magnificent things that were originally the thing that brought people together turned into lag generators? Overpopulation and under education, and those two words are the words that will ultimately be the downfall of Second Life.

I’d like to tell you a story. A few years ago, in the Goguen sandbox (on the main grid), there was this group of people. This group of people considered themselves to be “sandbox police.” They would go around and find people that were spamming random things, and kindly ask them to stop. They call themselves the “Alliance Navy.” The Alliance Navy (AN) had a significant influence on the Main Grid’s sandboxes, and thus a significant influence on the Main Grid itself. Their presence was obvious and demanding, at any time, you could look up and see the HUGE space ships that they operated out of floating above the clouds. Now, the AN was good for a long time, they would do everything within their power to solve problems in the sandbox. They’d call Lindens if they couldn’t solve the problem themselves, and it never came to shooting. Of course, eventually some other “military” groups (and I, being an attendee of a military school hate that they think that they resemble anything military) declared war on them, but that’s a story for another day.

But why was the Alliance Navy so successful? They were organized, looked good, and just gave off a sense of authority and professionalism. Would something like that work today? Maybe, but here’s what’s needed, and what you can contribute, to fix the sandboxes: knowledge. People spam because they’re bored and/or don’t know what to do. If they were taught how SL was meant to be played, the sandboxes, and world, would be a better place.

Following on from yesterday like a hurrying tortoise follows its tail, I’m talking about the problems we have and the bad things we usually do concerning Realty and land in TSL in general.

Something that really gets to me is the multitude of shops in housing districts, or houses in predominantly shopping districts. I know this is a small matter, but is only made worse by those revolting rotating signs people put above their shops. Yes, you know the ones I mean. Theses ones usually also follow the trend of [SBS] [Square Bracket Spam]; with their vastly obvious Times New Roman fonts calling me to buy “tehkill22’s birlliant guns!!!!”. Enough with that, that’s for another day. But the point I was making is that when you buy your land in a city sim, you pretty much have free reign, but as soon as you stick your honking house inside land surrounded by shops, you’re in for nasty business. 

Firstly, you get attention for all the bad reasons. Do you want people flying into your house, looking for what products you sell? No. Even putting “tehkill22’s house” won’t deter the worst of this lot from entering in your house. Now, you get people popping in and out, in and out; like they do to all of the shops around you. No Me Gusta.

Another problem with our Virtual lives is that the most exclusive land is not even owned by the company that created it; no: this lies in the growing multitude of PIs being erected around the grid. Mecca, Eden, and the rest of them flooded in, making sure that the transfer of residents from Mainland to Private Land was quick. Now, most self respecting shops open on PIs, infact, most do anyway. But one thing that we have to be careful of when transferring our funds and investments as well as businesses over to theses new horizons is the many time unreliability of many sim owners.

First, we have the fiasco of Dugley. This strangely named sim made TSL headlines when it seemed, overnight, to have changed from PI to Military base. This just highlights how human our fickle wills can be: you need to make sure that when you buy land on a PI, the owners are trustworthy. It’s always best to buy from people who have either established businesses and a sure income in SL, or from someone who has good repute already for owning PIs. This is not always easy, and most of the time, with places falling and prices rising in the most well known sims,  you need to take that risk.

That’s it, I hope you enjoyed these two articles =]

That’s all folks! ~Jak.

What is it about TSL realty which strikes fear into my heart? It’s mainly the PIs, and newly released mainland sims. These, for the most part are nice, peaceful places - The beautiful new Eden? Or full of exciting, fresh, modern architecture - The old Leviathan when it was done up by Aeternus?

We get the odd few, however, who stray from this trend of style and sophistication. The new block of sims, I’m thinking the ones including Kenafa, seem to have decided to mar our outlook somewhat. These have either been bought up by barons, and turned into mainly failed estates, flats, malls or ‘Cities’. The latter most frightening, in my opinion.

This is not to say some good things haven’t been done with buying up entire sims; or such. To quote a name twice, Novais has done a good job with the Aeternus Decorum crew in Tolkein. Check it out sometime, though it may be on Access List.

The real problem we have is that the lack of effort we seem to have is losk of real effort on our part; seemingly buying the land merits a reward to most residents. Then, there goes the age old dilemma of “Do I hire an architect, pay out my cash; or risk not making the build so awesome, and saving?”. This, again, is really up to you. Though, I would recommend to you who don’t have adamantly brilliant building skills to hire a builder. This really means a good longterm return on investment - although it can be quite substantial money, you have a special, custom build that works for anything (this is a goal of architects in SL), and will look good no matter what. This is no problem for the mass of unknown, yet talented builders out there.

More to come tomorrow in the 2nd Installment!

When I go into a plot, the first thing I do is make sure that the music play button is checked; without fail. It’s like breathing to me, I love the variety of music you can hear on a simple mosey around the grid. Techno, Podcasts, Comedy, Emo, Pop, Rap: as many types of audio you can name, you’ll find them in our burgeoning Grid.What I’m looking specifically at today is the role that the Music you play in your shop/business plot. This is, in fact, less trivial than you may think. Whether your customers come back may depend on whether your music is good; of course they can always press ‘Mute’, but a place which plays in accordance to their music taste always wins over somewhere which doesn’t.This is not just for shops - it’s for any self respecting place of work/public area. I’m going to outline the main points in two, simple, bitesize, eejit-proof paragraphs:

#1 - Make The Music Match The Plot

This is the most simple, yet glaring insane mistake some people make with their choice of music for their land: Choose only what suits it. This is blatant. One example is me flying over a military base earlier on (Yes, flying in a Base! Novelty nowadays with the “ZOMG ANTIFLY!!!1″), and, not naming names for fear of embarrassment, the plot owner was streaming Shakira. Shakira. Now, not being mean to Shakira, but what discerning, self respecting puts the words “Imperial [etc.]” in the land title, then plays Shakira? Seriously here, are you going to strike terror into the hearts of the foe by proudly declaring that Whenever, and Wherever, You’re Meant to Be Together? Not good. One good example for once, the new Talon base used to boast some spectacular Halo music. Like it or not, Halo has a damn good soundtrack: dark, atmospheric, yet boosting and exciting. Bravo.

#2 - What You Like Is Not What The Customer Likes

The No.1 End All Rule for modern business is this: The Customer Owns You(!!). It’s true.You need to cater for a broad range of tastes, likes, hates, mild cringes and the rest. You can’t get away with playing Rap when some of your customers like Pop. You can’t get away with playing Pop when some of your customers like Rock. This means a dilemma of epic proportions: what do you do?The simple answer is, stream from an online radio station. This means that you usually get a wide range of music, fully equipped for when the homies are in the hood, or the goths in the coven. The idea is, don’t please yourself, please everyone else, especially those with money to spend in your plot.There you go, a few pointers on picking music to complement your interests.Thanks for reading!~Jak

Greetings =), I’m Daniel Voyager, I’ve been in Teen Second Life since October 2006 and I like to say “It’s great to work with the Teen Second Life Blog Team”. If you don’t know me i’m a friendly and reliable person, I am currently a TSL Volunteer Mentor, TSL Welcomer Manager, Eye4you Estiate Manager, D.I.D.I Ambassador and i’m in many other well known groups. Read the rest of this entry »

Dugley, a very controversial new sim on the grid, has underwent many dramatic and controversial changes in the past few months. It all began when the sim first opened, Cody Bracken wanted to make a “city”, then decided to trash it all and make it a lawless sim, then, trashed it all yet again, and hired builder Natalia Obscure to design the new sim, which she did beautifully. Then Cody asked her to make a mall, which she also did, but once again, Cody changed his mind and returned the mall, at which point Natalia (an Estate Manager) returned everything on the sim. After that, Cody disappeared from the scene, and MichaelRyan Allen, the actual sim owner, rented around half of Dugley to Sin Kovacs, owner of Carthago. Sin asked friend Shaun Banshee to build the island, roads, bridges, buildings, and even Dugley-exclusive cars (Shaun is famous for his “luxury” high-quality cars). When I visited the island, I must say, it was pretty impressive. One day, however, everything disappeared; MichaelRyan had returned everything Shaun owned on the sim (which was pretty much everything), removed Sin and Shaun from the Estate Managers, and even banned Sin Kovacs from the island. One renter said that they saw MicahelRyan wearing Roman armor, and in the presence of another roman. MichaelRyan had reclaimed all the land on the sim, and made a giant platform and has begun construction of a military base. The name of the plot, that is on restricted access, is called “[New Nex Empire] [Dugley Complex]“. Aside from the fact, that Sin Kovacs has payed MichaelRyan Allen a very large sum of money to rent out the sim, MichaelRyan has defaulted on the deal, and taken back the sim, the real world equivalent of evicting a renter at the beginning of their rental period for no reason, something severely punishable in the United States. The absolutely most outrageous part of this whole incident is that MichaelRyan does not respond to any messages sent to him by Sin Kovacs, something very dishonorable, and extremely rude and immature. Whatever the future of this island is, TSLB advises that all future renters and clients exersize extreme caution in investments with this island due to a consistent lack of organization and volatile owners.

Well.Seeing how secondlife.com has been dishing out those god forsaken error 503’s for the last week and a half, I figure this is a good time to do the first “Grid Weekly” column.So, just to recap, this weekly column will cover the week’s economic news, social news, and other miscellaneous news stories or opinions/rants.

In other news, Global Kids held a special event where members of the press where allowed onto the GK Islands, to learn about the D.I.D.I Initiative and meet the D.I.D.I pioneers. For those who don’t know, D.I.D.I is a partnership between GK and Youth Venture. The Initiative provides funding and resources to teens who want to create a social venture within TSL, and the real world.

Since the creation of Second Life, wait scratch that… since the first avatar joined SL way back in ‘01…wait, no…since the Main Grid opened in ‘03, a creation as old as time itself: multitools, or multi versatile practical tools, or in the real world, Swiss Army Knifes.

However, as many of us have seen, most of the features on the multitools are pretty much, impractical. As newer and newer multitools make way into Teen Second Life, each has “more features” than the last. “Oh looky, now I can teleport instantly from point A to point B, just by typing!” But my question to you guys is: do these features actually have any use to you?

When I first came here 1 1/2 years ago, as a newbie, I was delighted at the thought of multitools. Of course, this was still back in the time of Ming Chen and his thingie, of which the name escapes me. Since then, like animals if you believe in evolution (which I most certainly do), they have “progressed” or “evolved” if you would. Now, I am not trying to discredit any of the creators of these tools, but still, c’mon guys, originality?

What I’m trying to say is, sure, these multitools are “different” in the fact that in some obscure way, their features differ from one another, but most of the bare basics remain the same. I would like to see one multitool, just one, that doesn’t have the option of a script checker, a posing stand rezzer, and all of those other trinkets.

If the title still seems to stump you, what I mean by paper or plastic is: would you like to have something original wrapped in a less, for lack of better word, snazzy package, or something that seems appealing but gets less and less useful over time?

The idea of a multitool is fascinating to some, I know. I once fell into a similar chance. I can give you with almost 100% certainty that at least 50% of TSL, if not all of SL has one of some kind, with 40% or more having them buried in their Inventory, never to be seen or used again?

*Disclaimer: What am I about to say below is not directly pointed to anyone, group, or organization.*

My opinion is that multitools are not worth the money, and shouldn’t be invested in. Why? Because I can assure you, 99% of the features in them can be replicated with little or no effort, depending on your laziness or actual willpower. So, instead, pocket that L for something useful.

I would love to hear your comments below.

The title is a bit exaggerated of course. Still, these are some places I would avoid, unless you decide to be adventurous and risk crashing.

Let’s start off with some basics:

The Sandboxes: If one decides to look on their Map, what do they see? Green dots scattered around, some alone, some grouped, even the odd stack or two. But, venture off the main map, and you come across these four sims that don’t just seem to fit in. While the average population density at any sim at one time is quite low (popular Private Islands excluded), there is a steady stream of people (about ten) populating each of them.

What’s there, that’s attracting so many people? Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first annual Vintryx Top 10 Second Life Avatars Most Likely to Succeed on the Main Grid.

Editors Note: All avatars in this list were not chosen at random, or based on popularity, we reviewed their businesses and skills, activity, and also asked around for nominations, the readers may disagree with some of the placements, some readers may disagree more violently than others, so, we kindly ask that you keep the discussion respectful, as this is one of the rare times that we will exercise our power to delete and censor disruptive comments. This List does not mean that other avatars will not succeed, or that these avatars will definitely succeed, it is not a list of those WE deem most likely to succeed.

Here it is! : Read the rest of this entry »

As shown in the following graph…

…since the beginning of the third quarter in 2007, SL users have stopped spending as much money in Second Life as they did in late Q1 and Q2.  This is about the time that the value of the dollar also began falling, driving the USD => EURO exchange rate from 1.28 to 1.48, and for the vast majority of SL residents who are in the US and are affected by the economic slowdown that has affected America.  This might be the reason that the value of the Linden Dollar (L$) has been fluctuating so much these past few weeks.  Formerly, the exchange value was at around L$260-270 per 1USD, last week, at around 12p.m. PST the value of the L$ tanked down to L$87 per 1USD.  That crash lasted around around an hour before the exchange rate shot back up to L$200/1USD  (note: I have not managed to find that graph again.).  At the time of this writing, the exchange rate is L$187/1USD  which is still a major rate decrease.  With the recent news of congressional aprooval for a market stimulus, I predict that the LindeX will recover back to its regular rate, because in the past few weeks, it has become very volatile.  The forecast still looks good, Second Life is an ever-expanding economy, and will always stabalize on its own, but at the same time, will respond to the economic slowdowns of the Real-World markets.

Second Life. Original name, but what does it mean?
Well I guess it’s a life second to your first. But, as Im sure many would agree, second life seems to be a replacement for many resident’s first life. This is an image that is being associated a lot with second life and its community at the moment. Anything that takes a lot of work and effort, requires some technical skill (most web users aren’t too technically minded) acquires a geeky image. It gives the impression that the people who use it have way to much time on their hands. It’s this image that is slowly killing Second Life’s growth.

The world that we all create and love appears to be dieing. Out of all the people who sign up, very few continuingly use it.

I remember going to school one morning and a few lads where reading the paper, looking at an article on second life and poking fun at it, with the stereotypical view of a MMORPG in mind. At one time, whenever I was caught online by anyone, they would tell me how ‘sad’ it was. This of course is just a negative stereotype of the group SL comes from. It seems that through reputations of similar online worlds, Second Life may have been born tagged with that outlet for escapists reputation so many online worlds have gained. It would appear to mean a certain death from what Linden Labs wanted to achieve by giving people a chance of a ‘second life’.

When voice was introduced, I was speaking to someone who said the main gridders didn’t like the new addition because it took out that role play element of second life, you became pretty naked, your avatar mask was taken off, the real-you was revealed. It’s often easy to forget that there are people behind those avatars, which in a way shows how we forget that an avatar is just a representation (how ever far off) of the real life user. But people are scared of this mask being lifted. Second Life was never meant to be a mask, but a big screen to flash your face up on.

The main idea that most people have of SL is it being mainly role-play, whether it’s owning a shop to having sex or being in an army; its all role play and people where scared of being revealed. I couldn’t understand why. This was when I first realised that the whole place was really just a playground where you could be someone you where not, live in a fantasy world. In some ways this is good, but it just enforces negative stereotypes, makes the place less desirable for people new to this virtual world idea.

The only way I can see Second Life becoming truly successful is for it to become a social networking application, not a pretend world, but a medium for communicating with friends and family. It would be like the instant-messagers that many use, except you could sit with all your friends together (instead of being in 100 window conversations) and build them things. Then off you could go to use some of the currently available positives of Second Life, the resource for interactive learning. MSN meets Skype Meets Wikipedia meets Facebook. Surely that would succeed?

The social fabric of the grids would change of course. The language would change, more txt language, less of the perfect Queen’s English we see so many use to get out of virtual puberty. The current “celebrities” we hold dear to our breast will be forgotten, as no one would really care about that previous social structure, the social structure we have at the moment, a fantasy one.

Of course if everyone gets a second life, then quality clothes makers and other well known avatar’s first lives could be enhanced. Would virtual popularity increase first life popularity?

But the grid would have to change. Second Life will have to become more accessible, easier to use, and have some social networking tools built in.

The current main barriers between your average-joe who is thinking about joining and using SL are having to have some sort of identification info on your account and having to download software. It’s at these two fences that most people will fall down. If it’s too much effort to learn and get used to, to download and to set-up an account. Why bother when there is MySpace and Facebook? And so with the hard work comes the ‘for geeks’ tag so many try to avoid.

If Linden labs don’t go down the social networking virtual world, I know that one company will, further down the line when virtual worlds such as this prove to be a bit more profitable.

At the end of the day, its all image; the Nazis and Max Clifford have shown us that.

What do you see as the future direction for SL?

Well as for me, Im off. Until the time comes, MSN and Facebook it’ll have to be.