It has been quite the year and Ener not only has chronicled the move from Second Life to OpenSim with over 500 posts in 2010, but also has built many wonderful field trip locations on our grid. Along the path, Ener has provided some great tips for making a move as easy as possible and [...]

One of the things I covered in eLearning presentations about the use of Second Life, and now OpenSim, is that video captured from this type of virtual world is “real-time”. There is no rendering time as found in “real” 3D programs. Those of you reading this on the iliveisl blog take this fully for granted [...]

Virtual worlds are experiencing rapid growth due to several factors and their future is being defined now. The first, and most important, are the availability of alternatives to Second Life. There have been, and are, other virtual worlds out there, but with the ease of in-world building tools, Second Life has enjoyed widespread adoption. Secondly, [...]

Decorum prevents me from completing this post’s title . . . or being Canadian, since we have that “polite” reputation to maintain. Ener’s post on parcel division and measuring technique this week may pale in comparison to this one. Second Life and OpenSim land can be divided into 4 metre square parcels at their smallest and here is an [...]

Education used to be fun. We all remember that one great teacher that turned us on to some topic or at least made it fun. Somewhere along the way, education and learning became somewhat separated. Not intentionally, but as a result of some who wanted to make it better, and who genuinely thought they were [...]

The hospitality industry is responsible for getting myself and Ener Hax into virtual worlds. In the media frenzied coverage of Second Life in 2006, two hospitality giants received a fair share of coverage and worked that to their advantage. Starwood had the Virtual aloft built as an architectural feedback project and International Hotel Group (IHG) [...]

What is Enclave Harbour and why being counted in OpenSim stats don’t matter? Counting the regions that come and go in OpenSim is a bit like counting sites using Flash was ten years ago. Flash was new and allowed for new things to be accomplished in the World Wide Web. Today, Flash has enjoyed a [...]

When I spoke at conferences about using Second Life for eLearning, I discussed it as an animation tool and not as a learning environment. Multimedia developers creating eLearning for internal and/or external clients are always looking for fast and easy-to-use tools. I believe Second Life is very easy to use for creating video for use [...]

With Second Life’s Teen Grid closing in December, where does that leave the educational use of virtual worlds? Adult education can carry on but K-12 may need to change. Certainly those working with students under 16 will need an alternative. Those working with students 16 and older may also want an alternative rather than be [...]

After reading Ener’s post OpenSim – patience, patience, patience I thought I’d better check in on our star builder, cook, and bottle washer. I stay out of Ener’s way and rarely give advice on how to build. I put in support tickets and have seen the challenges Ener has at times. I frankly do not [...]

Ener has always loved Zeppelin’s and airships and with Second Life it was possible to create them (even though Ener’s personal zepellin was a slow beast to fly, it was a lot of fun especially when you’d get stuck against a building). Airships of all types are widespread in Second Life and, until now, have been relegated [...]

Ener asked me to write a bit about what we are doing with Enclave Harbour in Reaction Grid. In thinking about this, I wanted to say that Second Life is still the best choice for many people and you can see that by number of active users and concurrency levels. OpenSim-based worlds are growing quickly [...]

Ener Hax does a great job blogging on the iliveisl blog in my opinion. The term “blog” is only about ten years old yet there are more than 120 million blogs in the world according to Technorati! Certainly a good deal of these are inactive; either never having been used after setup or having been abandoned. Blogs [...]

Reading Ener’s recent post prompted me to chime in on Linden Lab, SEO, and social networking. Virtual Worlds are a tough go and rather niche-based. Look at Habbo Hotel; it started in 2000 and is squarely aimed at teenagers from 13 to 18. It has done very well in the last ten years with Wikipedia [...]

Online branding is very easy to do, but takes discipline, persistence, and more time than many people think. What is online branding? Awareness of something – that something could be you as an “expert” and an expert does not always mean some self-proclaimed smarter-than-you person. Not at all and that often makes the word branding [...]