August 2006

Caledon 95,29,29 - Well, this is a post from my back patio…

Caledon 146,78,73 - and this is one from just beside Mr Gould’s rock

Caledon 191,188,23 - and this is from the Caledon telehub - I’m bored now, post this already!

As soon as I had made my entry regarding Slurlblogging, I noticed a post on Second Life Insider mentioning BlogHUD - an attractive device allowing wearers to post slurled posts to a central blog. (A “slurled” thing here indicates a piece of information produced from the Grid and tagged with the location of its production - the equivalent of geotagged.)

This is an interesting service and looks far nicer than my hacked-together effort - really, Ordinal, affixing a texture to a plywood cube is not presentation - but performs a different service. BlogHUD works via a central site and allows many people to post to one blog. I am interested more in allowing many people to post to their own Journals, wherever they are.

Ideally I would like to have a device which allows automatic posting to Journals of all stripes. This is something of a long-term project however, as many are very different. From what I can see, there are two main protocols to crack - Blogger and Movable Type. These should allow one to post to Journals on Blogger, Movable Type (including Typepad), Wordpress, and many others, as many systems support these two. This should not be an insurmountable issue at all; such things as Lev Kamenev’s Blogger gadget already exist, it is mostly a question of getting one’s act together to actually sit down and do the work. It may be complicated by the fact that there are three different versions of posting to Blogger - original, Atom and Google - though while the first two are deprecated or soon to be deprecated, this does not mean that they cannot be used.

I have written a simple script which posts to Livejournal, the interface itself being rather simple, but an issue here is that not that many people actually use Livejournal.

Reading a piece by the esteemed Mr Prokofy Neva this afternoon, I was reminded of certain previous efforts that I undertook to produce such devices as the Slurlchatter. Whilst it is useful to be immediately told the Slurl for a particular location, it strikes me that to produce a proper travelogue, a device which records notes, reformats them into language more friendly for the Aethernet, and then sends them to the prospective author all at once, might be more useful.

I therefore have produced the “Slurlblogger”. This is a HUD device of unfortunately rather primitive appearance, which lurks upon one’s screen, listening for any comments. Saying something on channel 910 (for instance, “/910 This is where I am right now”) will make a note at one’s current location. Then saying “/910 email” will send all of the notes so far collected to a particular email address, defined via a notecard within the device.

I would provide an example here: I took a short tour around Caledon, making comments on channel 910 as I went. I then said “/910 email” as one does, copied the code that was sent to me, and pasted it into this document - and between the lines, one can see the result.

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Caledon 94,33,29 - The rear terrace of Ordinal Enterprises - an occasionally dangerous place, but usually most pleasant.

Caledon 161,73,99 - Professor Jefferson Gould has lifted an entire building using the marvellous substance Cavorite! It must be tethered by a heavy steel anchor, but surely this is the wave of the future.

Caledon II 41,186,23 - The “silentsparrow” emporium is where I spend most of my currency. (Sparrows, though, in my experience, are rarely silent, and in fact usually very noisy. I suppose the silence is a further factor to mark this establishment out.)

Caledon Tamrannoch 102,49,27 - Here, at Elsewhen Tower, one might see the mysterious copper and glass “TM-08″ by Dyne Talamasca.

Caledon Tamrannoch 36,178,23 - At the Tamrannoch Public Community Garden, one may sit amongst exotic blooms, very few of which will cause allergic responses!

Caledon Highlands 155,211,39 - One should most definitely visit the Caledon Academy of Virtual Wizardry - go, House Malaprop!

Caledon Highlands 152,150,37 - And of course while one is in the area, one should also visit the Observatory opposite, a most wonderful place.

Port Caledon 112,211,44 - Anyone wondering how it is that Caledon remains so unspoilt in the face of a troubled world might care to see the fearsome coastal cannonry to be found in Port Caledon.

Port Caledon 140,157,26 - And finally, before my patience and fingers both expire, the trading ship “Venture” sits here by the harbour, carrying fine products to native peoples across the Grid.

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For each entry here, I simply said “/910 (whatever nonsense)” when I was at the place concerned. No touching of devices, reformatting or insertion of links was necessary.

Hopefully this device will be of some use to travel writers, journalists and others who wish to detail their exploration of the Grid for the Aethernet consumption of others. It is limited to the taking of twenty notes at this time, but really, that should be enough for anyone, and one can always clear the list and record more. I shall put the prototype version in my free box as soon as I am able, and also place it upon SLX and SLB, for convenience’s sake.

Edit:
The SL Boutique listing
The SL Exchange listing
All free, of course.

My monocle fell into my tea just recently, upon my opening my copy of the evening edition of the Linden Times and seeing this piece announcing the demise of the (discursive sections of the) Forums. In the past I have expressed some scorn at the idea that this might happen, but I now take every word back.

In about a month we’ll be shutting down the following forums: “Bulletin Board”, “General Topics”, “The Sandbox”, “Land and Economy” and “In-world Political Science”. We’ll leave them as ‘read only’ so they can be searched for history.

In subsequent months we’ll continue to close Linden forums, including:

* Announcements along with Press and Events, both of which will be replaced by the Linden blog,
* Known Issues & Development Updates to be replaced by Support > Known Issues, and
* References and Policies, to be replaced by the knowledge base as it is expanded

Long Term Changes

* The knowledge base and blog will take on some of the responsibilities of many of the feedback and content creation forums.
* The Classifieds will be closed in favor of Resident advertising and portal sites such as those listed on http://secondlife.com/landing fashion/, the In-World Classifieds (which can also be found on the secondlife.com website).
* Inactive group sites have been culled as time goes by; we expect groups will have better asynchronous communication options within Second Life with the release of v1.12, so the groups forums will be closed within the next three months.

Fishing it out again and drying it on a napkin, I reflected that of course there were certain issues that one might consider that made the forum format, as it were, not ideal. The one which seems to be concerning the Linden Family the most, according to the piece in question, is that of scalability, whether it is practical to have one set of forums which can entertain the whole of the community of Second Life as it grows. For myself I thought that the Forums were doing reasonably well on that front, as well as could be expected given that very few people actually bother to read forums, but hey ho, I don’t make these decisions.

The issue is of course that, once the closure of the discursive areas is complete (and I suspect that extraneous discussion in the remaining areas will be curtailed) there will be no central area for residents of Second Life to discuss matters beyond the technical. Relatively little-travelled they might have been, but I can assure anyone that they were more travelled than any other forums related to Second Life on the Aethernet. Long exposure to and experience of the “blogosphere” (dread word!) has taught me that, without sufficient common functionality such as trackback, which is still not possessed across the board, communication and grouping is very difficult, and it never, ever reaches the same level as on an actual forum, where one person’s post is as prominent as another’s. Certain people’s journals become dominant, and others find it very hard to be noticed. Community is decidedly lacking. The best blending of individual journalising and community discussion that I have seen is on Livejournal, but not everyone will wish to become part of that, and it is still hardly perfect.

I am not entirely sure of course what kind of further developments we can expect from Laboratoire Linden - some were hinted at in the article, such as the “asynchronous communication options” mentioned above - but clearly in this state of ignorance it behooves us as residents to make the best of matters. I would, for a start, encourage anyone not in possession of some sort of RSS reader to become acquainted with one immediately, be it an Aethernet service such as Bloglines or Google Reader, or something along the lines of Firefox’s Live Bookmarks or perhaps a separate program altogether. Should I have any further thoughts I shall of course record them here.

The tram has been lost at Caledon (1, 190) - a routine sim-border-crossing mishap, I am sure - and it appears that someone has left the pieces out on the chessboard by the Caledon II telehub again. This, I might say, is where the tram rezzer is. Under the new Harsh Prim Limit Reign, the multiplicity of pieces means that the tram rezzer is unable to rez trams, a fact which it sees fit to contact me concerning every two minutes.

I would be obliged (as already stated here) if any gentle soul reading this in the near future who is able would pop over to Caledon II and put away the pieces. The chessboard is right by the telehub and there is a large button marked… something or other to do with clearing the board, I cannot for the life of me remember exactly what it says but it is quite straightforward. As promised on the mentioned thread, as payment I will write you a limerick.

You know, it would be most useful if scripts were able to detect the current prim allowance at a particular point. And while I am shouting suggestions into the void, I might also say that it would be handy if scripts could detect the parcel name, not that that issue has any connection to this one whatsoever, just a thought.

P.S. Serra Anansi reminds me that if I had not removed my Aetherial Telephone I would be able to contact somebody already there and make the request! Dash it.

P.P.S. All fixed now!