Second Life as a 3D animation program
What happens when a beaver in Second Life has time to explore? Well, maybe a little culture at a pretty neat build. Made from megaprims, this fantastic art gallery is suspended by chains.
It’s a beautiful example of what happens when 3D creativity is served up in a manner that allows many people the opportunity to create. It is easy to take Second Life for granted and even complain about it, but Linden Lab has created a platform that makes it easy to build 3D graphics.
If you have ever done Maya, Blender 3D, or Studio Max, then you can appreciate how much easier it is to build in Second Life. Of course, if that is your background, you may be more likely to also snub Second Life as a 3D animation tool.
If you measure the success of your 3D skills in the number of people able to view it and experience it first hand, then there are far more successful people in Second Life than in Maya. Yes, undoubtedly Pixar and DreamWorks create amazing graphics that make a lot of money. But the number of people producing those are incredibly few and I can’t walk around in Shrek.
In Second Life, many people express their creativity, share and sell it, and almost anyone can actively participate with it in real time. This art gallery, Enaxia, is a fine example of that. A real world artists works hang in it, anyone in Second Life can come enjoy it and the space.
They can even buy the artwork!
In that respect, Second Life, imo, is a fantastic 3D tool. And apart from Blender 3D, it’s free to start using right now. Hats off to you Linden Lab!
If you have not tried it yet, give it a whirl, you can even come here to the iliveisl estate to try out building in Second Life.
Enaxia Flickr set | Enaxia slurl
note: re posted from the iliveisl blog
figuring out Twitter
On Twitter you have “retweets”. What is it called to post the same blog post twice? Probably lazy. =D
In it’s entirety (including some hot air) from the iliveisl blog:
We have been messing with many social networking platforms such as Google Groups, Facebook (rock Ener’s world and become a friend), LinkedIn (connect to Ener), Ning, blogging, Twitter (tweet iliveisl or Ener), Flickr, Blip.tv, CafePress, several Second Life forums, the Second Life Wiki, Wikipedia (as editors), Yahoo 360, del.cio.us, plurk, technorati, threadless, Busted Tees, websites (both iliveisl and enerhax), and even Urban Dictionary (vote for enerhax!).
While a few of these are not strictly social, they still provide the opportunity to raise “brand awareness” in the overall social community. Blogging is simply a necessity and works very well and it is easy to interpret the analytics. I think blogging can replace the conventional website for many endeavors, including ours.
All the channels we use do add to our visibility and the top ones, for us, are the blog, Twitter, and Flickr. The blog has many different analytics attached to it, Flickr Pro has fairly decent analytics, and there are third-party analytics for Twitter. Our favourite Twitter one is Twitter Grader.
Twitter is an interesting one for us and has resulted in several pieces of business (land sales on the estate and custom projects for me).
One could argue that the best analytics are resulting monetary measures.
In that case, Twitter is the winner for us. But it is hard to fine tune Twitter. You certainly do not want to fall into the “get 12,000 followers for $12.95 schemes”, nor do you want to use any other ones that basically lead to crappy followers (I can’t think of a better word).
Twitter Grader looks at many factors, much more than simply a ratio of followers to following. This is exemplified below. While coachoncall (respected life coach from New Hampshire) has double the followers and less than one percent the following, you would think her ranking should be higher. Much higher. Yet it is not.
On the iliveisl Twitter, we carefully follow those that offer informationwe can use, or those whose message we want to support, and we tend to tweet on the light side (read: silly).
We are vigilent about dumping the people we follow if all they do is post on how to get more followers. We also have this blog automaticaly tweet new posts (a great time saver by the way).
Using tools like Tweepular‘s Build Tweepularity may be tempting, but it seems to lead to crappy followers and a lower score and rank (I experiment with a few other Twitter accounts). Tweepular does have great tools, such as No Follow Love. We also use UnTweeps to remove “stale” tweepers (more than 30 days silent).
Use Twitter as it was intended to be used and your rank will improve. Collecting followers is dumb (how is that for an “official” opinion?).
What does it all mean? Beats us, what’s your take on all the social networking out there? :)
about subQ: typically behind the scenes at iliveisl, avid elearning guy and speaker at subquark.com, custom sim developer and all around Second Life consultant (who talks straight and even talks people out of Second Life if it is not right for them), experimenting with OpenSim as an alternative to eliminate draconian limitations, and the world’s second biggest fan of poutine. The honour of number one would go to our very own Ener Hax.
And yes . . . long winded and you are stuck with me for a bit as Ener deals with some other challenges.