Recently I was reminded that Second Life …

Recently I was reminded that Second Life is still the best first experience for any teen or adult coming to virtual worlds for the first time. It came after speaking with new virtual worlders who came to OpenSim before Second Life. From their description I realized OpenSim is still far from being suitable for anyone’s first virtual world experience, unless of course that person is too young to participate in Second Life.

As long as it remains free, Second Life, even with its steep learning curve, offers more return on a beginner’s time and learning investment. Both offer about the same in terms of creativity. But Second Life offers more potential for most to make that essential connection with a real life community or interest that will hold their interest. Second Life is the yard-stick against which everything else is measured. Anyone becoming involved with virtual worlds must understand and participate in Second Life and so might as well start there.

Combine these realities with a personal goal to help the most people get the most out of their first virtual world experience and a recent influx of newcomers to SL, from work and elsewhere, as well as word of Nebraska and Linden Lab’s renewed efforts to connect with and help beginners and you will understand my decision to redirect my limited free and volunteer time from OpenSim to Second Life initiatives, more to VUC greeting, mentoring, community building, and development. Introduce Second Life first then OpenSim later for those who are ready for it.

OpenSim remains my favorite way to preview content from my desktop and participating with my kids, but Second Life has already given me years of creative outlet, real friendship, and community involvement any OpenSim could not match for some time to come, perhaps in the next few years, but even then SL will remain the best experience for any beginner provided it is a guided entry, which happens to be the focus of the renewed VUC Greeters effort.

Releasing my very humble animations unde …

Releasing my very humble animations under CC BY to help OpenSim and others. Some of these made it into stock OpenSim inventory in other forms, but until we have a better way to layer content packages over default inventory libraries for OpenSim instances I just can’t go with cluttering stock inventory with my stuff. Best to make available to people to put where they would like (freebie boxes, startup av inventories, their world default inv).

My Second Life income is just for fun, promoting OpenSim and other content creator contributions is more important. I’ll probably lose the piddly SL income I get from stuff made from these as people make their own and put them in freebies, blah, blah. But I’ll just keeping making more new stuff. Morgaine convinced me the only way to make money on digital content is to build a reputation of good fresh stuff and be ahead of the copiers. Besides, CC BY content can be used in anything, commercial or otherwise, which includes business virtual worlds.

If you do put my stuff in your commercial product a little attribution and encouragement would be nice–especially when I finally get good at making this stuff.