March 2013 – Page 4 – Ciaran Laval

March 11, 2013

Open University Events For The Rest Of March

I don’t work for The Open University, I have studied with them in the past but no longer do due to fee increases for coures. However I do still think they are a very worthy organisation. Therefore I am quite happy to promote their events. The following is from a mailing list I’m on, Tori Landau is the contact:

Below are the rest of the events confirmed for March, there might be another event but currently due to RL the person can’t confirm. Hope to see you there and please feel free to pass this on to anyone you think would be interested.

Wed 13th

Drop-in at 2.15pm slt / 9.15pm GMT

Come along to the friendship circle at the Welcome area for 30 mins of support and chat.

Slurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deep%20Think%20East/224/38/32

Mon 18th

Monday Meet at 2pm slt / 9pm GMT

Speaker: Doctor Zeritonga (real life: Chris Hardy)

Chris will be talking about Designing for Navigation and Wayfinding in 3D Virtual Learning Spaces which was the topic of his MSc research for The Open University’s Master of Science Degree in Computing for Commerce and Industry. Chris presented his findings along with his supervisor Dr Shailey Minocha at VWBPE in 2011 and a paper written along with Dr Minocha received the Gitte Lindgaard Award for the best paper at the OZCHI 2011 conference (http://www.ozchi.org/). This talk will be in local chat with optional voice transcription.

Location is inside the communal room on Deep Think West.

SLurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deep%20Think%20West/73/45/24

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March 11, 2013

Is It Time For Seller Registration On The Marketplace?

I’m always wary of discussing issues of malpractice within Second Life commerce, but there are scams out there and it seems the marketplace is one place where they are materialising. Inworld sales can also be an issue of malpractice and most certainly have been in the past.

However it’s the marketplace which seems to see some of the more blatant scams and I’m starting to come round to the idea of a sellers registry for being able to sell on the marketplace. I’m not talking about making it premium members only, there are plenty of leigitimate merchants who have no need to be preimium. There are also alts of premium members or people who have alts of accounts who have a payment history with Linden Lab.

I’m not a fan of restricting merchants inworld, largely because this would require some serious reworking of the systems by Linden Lab to still be able to allow people to transfer items to each other. Passing items around for free has many use cases inworld, from education to simply sharing information.

However the Marketplace is a different beast and it’s probably time for Linden Lab to introduce a system whereby merchants need to be verfied somehow to participate.

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March 9, 2013

Project Viewer Available To Assist Those With Direct Delivery Migration Woes

Since the announcement that magic boxes are to be retired in April for ulimited quantity items, the merchants forum has seen posts from people to migrate. Dakota Linden has been given special dispensation to assist and Jessica Lyon from Firefox has also been offering advice there too.

CommerceTeam Linden (CTL) has also posted a FAQ, with FAQ’s …… I think you could have worked that out for yourselves! This is useful because it links to the direct delivery migration guide, which is a pretty essential source in this case.

However, there’s also a merchant outbox project viewer now available from the alernative viewers page on the wiki. The blurb for this viewer says:

“This viewer resolves remaining issues with the Merchant Outbox as laid out in WEB-4600”

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March 8, 2013

Land Wars Episode IV – No Hope (AKA Five Years On From The Openspace Fiasco)

March 8th 2008, the skies darkened, dark forces were at work, Jack Linden posted a blog entitled: Announcing changes to the Openspace product. This would be a post that would ultimately lead to bloody battles in the forums and blog comments, it would pit resident against resident, Linden against Linden, resident against Linden, it would get ugly, but initially everything looked sunny as Jack (AKA The Land King) made the announcement:

“An Openspace is a type of private island intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).

Openspaces will no longer have to be purchased in sets of four at a time, as they have been so far. They can be bought singly, for a setup fee of USD$415 followed by a fee of USD$75 per month.

All other island services are therefore available for single Openspace regions, at the usual region rates, and Openspaces will no longer have to be placed together on the grid, they can be placed apart.”

Somewhere someone sniggered “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Jack, and will soon see the end of the rebellion.”

The Better Announcement

Another post from Jack appeared on April 10th : Details on the Q2 2008 Island Price Change. In this post Jack informed us that the setup fee for an openspace would be reduced from USD$415 to USD$250. Many people cheered, others scratched their beards and wondered what was going on. However how could we raise our concerns when there were so many happy campers, protest would be futile as someone mused: “What are we going to do? We’ll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel and smashed into who knows what.”

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March 8, 2013March 9, 2013

GayWorld-News TV – The InsyX Show

I’m hoping that some time in the near future I’ll be able to get in touch with some of the people behind GayWorldNews-TV The InsyX show, such as Teno Theriac or Rocky Constantine. There are currently six episodes of this inworld chat show available on the YouTube channel.

I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of this and being a straight male I’m not that familiar with the gay scene in Second Life but this is why having a blog is useful, you get to discover more happenings within Second Life and this show came to my attention due to recent discussions about use of machnima for promotion of Second Life.

These shows are longer than The Drax files, running closer to half an hour rather than the five minutes in The Drax Files and they take a different approach with the show shot entirely inworld, it’s more like Paisley Beebe’s Tonight Live, than The Drax Files but both approaches have merit and the fact that both are available outside of Second Life means they have potential to attract people to Second Life who aren’t currently using Second Life.

I haven’t watched all six episodes of the show, I’ve only watched the interview with Eddi Haskell so far, which I’ll embed at the end of this post.

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