Second Life – Page 40

November 12, 2015

Linden Lab Unleash Marketplace Search Beta

Linden Lab yesterday blogged; Introducing Marketplace Search Beta :

We’re pleased to share that improvements to the existing Marketplace search functionality are now available through Marketplace Search Beta. We’ve made infrastructure changes to improve the relevance of search results – making it easier for you to find what you’re looking for! We have also made changes for search to scale better as more content and categories are added to the Marketplace – and that means the newest creations and additions are at your fingertips.

Search in Second Life, be it inworld or on The Marketplace, will always be a bone of contention. There are many reasons for this, a lot of them human. For example items may not be listed with keywords people are using as a search term for those sort of items. People may act in an unscrupulous fashion and use strategies that poison the well in the hope of people stumbling across their listing and the search engine itself may not contain enough tools to help people refine their search terms to find that special item. There’s only so much Linden Lab or any other search provider can do to mitigate these sort of circumstances.

However with the launch of Marketplace Search Beta Linden Lab are trying to provide an improved search experience for merchants and customers. Therefore they need feedback and they are seeking feedback in a couple of locations.

One place is the Jira, which is an avenue if you want to report a bug. However many people find the Jira a tad cumbersome, shall we say, so another location where feedback can be left is on the official forum and this is a very useful forum where some questions may well be answered, indeed one question has already been answered. Some people have observed that search results are slow on Marketplace Search Beta, Grumpity Linden has already provided an answer on that score :

This may seem counterintuitive, but Beta Search will be slow at first because it’s not getting enough traffic. The web servers spin down if they’re not getting requests. The speed in beta is not representative of what you will see once it’s in production.

This is good information to take forward, the more traffic that Marketplace Search Beta gets, the better it should perform in terms of the speed of returning results.

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November 11, 2015

You’d Better Find a Way out, Hey Kick Down The Door, It’s a Lab Chat and You’ve Been Caught

Linden Lab blogged yesterday; Introducing Lab Chat – A New Q&A Show in Second Life :

In the spirit of the open Q&A sessions held at inworld events like the VWBPE conference and the Meet the Lindens series, we’re pleased to participate in a new Resident-driven initiative called “Lab Chat.”

Lab Chat is an opportunity for you to ask Lindens your questions during a live taping that will be recorded and archived for everyone to view.

The first Lab Chat will be Thursday, November 19th, at 10:30am SLT at the Linden Endowment for the Arts Theatre – with guest Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.

Now this won’t be a session where anybody from the audience can ask any question they want and get an answer. Questions will be curated. The Lab chat production team will pick questions from a forum thread. That’s the link to the forum thread if you have any questions you want to ask, go post them and see if they get picked. Please also pay attention to this part of the blog post :

so be sure to get your questions into the thread no later than Friday November 13th, 2015. Authors of selected questions will be invited to ask their question live at the inworld show. Time permitting – additional questions from the audience will be answered.

Questions are already appearing in that thread ranging from questions about abuse reports, technical questions, community gateways, Marketplace issues and much more. Ebbe won’t be in a position to answer all of them so don’t be disappointed if your question isn’t answered. However you have a far better chance of your question being answered if you visit the forum thread and post a question.

Continue reading “You’d Better Find a Way out, Hey Kick Down The Door, It’s a Lab Chat and You’ve Been Caught”

November 10, 2015

Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet

“Betamax? Is that still around?” I pondered today as I read news on The Guardian that Sony are going to stop creating Betamax cassettes in March 2016. The main reason that Betamax appears have continued long after many felt it had departed is due to the use of Micro MV cameras, which use Micro MV cassettes in Betamax format. However all good things come to an end and over 40 years after its release and almost thirty years since Betamax lost the video format wars, Betamax finally seems to be going beneath the technical waters.

Which brings us on to Second Life. Daniel Voyager recently reported; Second Life regions drop under the 25, 000 mark. Daniel’s blog post was based on a report by Tyche “Statto” Shepherd over at SLUniverse, where Tyche announced :

Well as I predicted , a milestone of sorts was passed this week as the Grid dipped below 25,000 regions for the first time since June 2008.

The scores on the doors on November 8th were :

24,985 Regions
17,888 private estates
7097 Linden owned

The net loss of private regions for this year stood at 712 on November 8th. However let’s compare this to some previous years to try and get a picture of what’s going on.

11/11/2012 – Total Private Regions 21,334. Year to date loss of 2,523 private regions (-10.58%)
10/11/2013 – Total Private Regions 19,462 . Year to date loss of 1,530 private regions (-7.29%)
09/11/2014 – Total Private Regions 18,735. Year to date loss of 538 private regions (-2.8%)
08/11/2015 – Total Private Regions 17,888. Year to date loss of 712 private regions (-3.8%)

Therefore we can see that this year we’re seeing an increase in the rate of net losses of private regions compared to last year, but the rate of losses is still a lot lower than in 2012 and 2013. Let’s play about with some more figures.

Continue reading “Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet”

November 6, 2015

Daden Awarded Grant For Virtual Field Trips, Second Life Is Good For Your Health & Bigger Than You May Think

I’m having a busy week with birthdays and visitors from the emerald isle, so I’m a bit behind on virtual world news but I will highlight a few interesting looking stories that are doing the rounds.

Hypergrid Business report : Daden awarded £230,000 for virtual field trips. I might need to acknowledge some bias here. I come from the same city as Daden. However I won’t allow that to cloud my judgement. The Hypergrid Business report article informs us :

Daden Limited – a virtual reality specialist based at the Innovation Birmingham Campus – has been awarded nearly £230,000 by Innovate UK for its Virtual Field Trips as a Service initiative.

The funding has been awarded in phase two of Innovate UK’s Design for Impact Competition, which aims to identify and then support innovative technology that has been proven in pilot projects in education, but is yet to have a national impact. Daden, working with The Open University (OU), the Field Studies Council and Birmingham-based Design Thinkers UK, has been awarded the funding to develop its Virtual Field Trips as a Service concept as a national service for schools and universities.

The article further states :

From November 2014 to April 2015, Daden worked with teachers and students at Washwood Heath Academy in Birmingham, virtual world educators in Second Life, university lecturers at a Royal Geological Society workshop, and a range of other stakeholders to understand the potential, challenges and key features of any virtual field trip service.

David Burden added: “Virtual Field Trips as a Service is intended to support, not replace, physical field trips. It will help students and staff better prepare for a field trip, can provide additional context and gives a focus for post-field trip data analysis, revision, virtual visits to comparative sites, and provides a catch-up for those who may have missed the physical trip. Whilst this funded project is focused on UK education there are obvious opportunities overseas, particularly for virtual ‘exchange’ field trips.”

The issue of virtual field trips keeps coming up. Field trips are certainly seen as a good use case for virtual worlds and virtual reality so it’s encouraging to see a company who are embracing the concept.

Continue reading “Daden Awarded Grant For Virtual Field Trips, Second Life Is Good For Your Health & Bigger Than You May Think”

November 6, 2015

Can Virtual World Ventures Learn Anything From Blizzcon?

Blizzcon 2015 has started, a celebration of all things Blizzard related, including games and a movie. The opening ceremony was broadcast free to watch, although you wouldn’t have got caught up in the atmosphere like those in the Anaheim Convention Centre if you watched it via a stream. This means that many people who haven’t even got a virtual ticket have been able to view part of Blizzcon.

Blizzcon gives fans the chance to meet developers, artists, voice actors, view cinematics, engage in sports, cosplay and apparently there’s a tavern there too. Linkin Park will be making an appearance too, so it’s a costly affair to put together and I can’t think of a virtual world conference that would even scratch the costs of Blizzcon. However that doesn’t mean that virtual worlds can’t pick up some tips from Blizzcon.

The first point to note came to me whilst I was watching the opening ceremony via a Twitch stream. As noted earlier, the opening ceremony was a free to view affair, so it wasn’t a dodgy stream. As we all know, when it comes to Second Life, Twitch are the bad guys. However Twitch does have a rival in the shape and form of YouTube Gaming. Second Life has an auto generated channel there, but there’s also an official Linden Lab channel too, although I’m yet to see any live streaming from that quarter, but there is potential.

So why would you want to stream a virtual world conference via an external service? Well for a start, as much as we love being in the virtual world, watching a virtual world conference via a stream is likely to be more comfortable and less crashtastic than trying to cam in from a neighbouring region because the region where the conference is taking place is full. This should also leave room for me in said conference region to take photos as part of my role as the seeker of truth and justice!

Alternatively a live stream could be viewable on YouTube Gaming and also in other regions via media on a prim type solutions, so regions could share the load but have more people inworld watching the event.

Continue reading “Can Virtual World Ventures Learn Anything From Blizzcon?”