Tuesday, December 25, 2007
I finally got a friend to sign on to Second Life so I wouldn’t be so lonely, and now I feel obligated to speed her initiation by pointing her to some really good sources for how to live in Second Life. I share them with you all as well, in case they are helpful.
1. Check out this article on Second Life from BusinessWeek. This was written in early 2006, but it’s still relevant. The author got an avatar for the purpose of seeing what the big deal is. He learned that SL is so complex that there’s no way to actually know everything that you can do in SL. I agree!
2. Look for Flickr’s slide shows on Second Life. These SL residents have created whole photo albums and uploaded their pictures to them. You can get a really good idea of what people do in Second Life by flipping through these slide shows.
3. Create a photo album on Flickr for your adventures on Second Life. Learning to take pictures has been really fun. If you do this, be sure to read up on “pose balls” – they help you arrange yourself for a photo.
4. Try out the online commerce system. I
found out that you can buy land, hair, clothes, complete avatars, furniture, animations, jewelry, toys, dogs, cars, and even sex parts. You can do this “in-world” in thousands of shops, or you can go to eBay or OnRez or another of the regular Internet commerce sites. I went to OnRez and succeeded in figuring out how to buy new hair. My hair is a cool basic cut and it comes in 40 colors, which I can change anytime! Right now it’s plum. Goes great with my green eyes.
5. Learn about SL fashion. Fashion is really important on SL because you can make and buy an infinite variety of clothing. You can also make some silly mistakes while learning the ropes on fashion. I ran across this Second Life fashion blog and laughed a lot. I had already made several of the errors! They’ve photographed the offending avatars and put black bars over their eyes to protect their identites! LOL.