For those interested, I’ve provided notes on last week’s Second Life presentation by Adam Pasick at the Ann Arbor IT Zone.
Background Information
- 1.5 million users
- 40% of users are outside the United States, equally split between men and women
- users are considered to be young and rich
- $600K is exchanged daily
- Linden dollars (the currency used on Second Life) is exchangeable with US dollars
- users create their own homes or islands
- islands cost $1700
Community
- users can make an island private, or open to all
- word about products and services are passed throughout the Second Life community by word of mouth
- search functionality is not good
- traditional websites are linking to their Second Life sites through slurls (Second Life urls)
- close knit community
- currently only 50 people can gather in one place in Second Life
Interaction
- users interact with each other through avatars
- to talk with another user, use text or a phone call at the same time (many people use Skype)
- currently no audio capabilities
Companies/Organization on Second Life
- IBM - a place to hold meetings (They also have this years Wimbledon video available in some form, on a private island)
- Dell - you can buy a computer on Second Life
- Amazon - you can buy a book from Amazon
- Nissan
Development companies are charging between $20-$100K to create Second Life communities.
Comments (2)
At last night’s meeting I mentioned the free four-day pass for Web Directions North for the first place entry in their snowboard design contest.
Well, there are a whole lotta prizes, including
- 50% off Media Temple’s new Grid Server
- Adobe’s Studio 8 (which includes Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks and Contribute)
- books
- training videos
- more items
The contest ends Monday, December 4th. Great opportunity to show off your design talents and win a ticket or some great prizes.
New Book Coming “HTML Mastery”
November 27, 2006
There’s a new book coming out that looks promising–HTML Mastery: Semantics, Standards and Styling by Paul Haine. It’s due to release in the next month or so. The book describes in detail how to use semantic XHTML for a usable and accessible web site. Not a new concept (dare I say trendy?) but very valid and relevant as this is what we should all be developing for. The web site for the book states:
it’s aimed at web designers and developers who have already mastered the basics of HTML and web design, but want to take their markup further, making it leaner and more semantically rich, for a more efficient, more usable/accessible web site
Mobile Web Best Practices - Webinar
November 12, 2006
The W3C is offering a free one-hour webinar on Monday, November 20, 2006 at 11am Paris time (5am New York time) on the best practices in mobile web development. The presenter is Dominique Hazael-Massieux.
This webinar is perfect for those developers with XHTML/CSS experience and good markup methods for website development who want to learn more about designing for mobile devices.
From the abstract:
“This presentation will briefly introduce the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, before diving into the documents produced by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, with a specific focus on the Best Practices themselves, the accompanying techniques, and the plans for the future mobile OK mark. This will be illustrated with examples and demonstrations of the Mobile Web Best Practices checker.”
I attended Cameron Moll’s W3C Mobile Web presentation (PDF: 7.6M) earlier this year. If this seminar is anything like Cameron’s, it’s not to be missed! The only problem for me is the time–it’s hard to get up at 5AM…
Interested? Sign up online.
World’s largest online card sort
November 2, 2006
Just checking who might be interested in participating in STC’s “world’s largest online card sort”. I know little about the event other than what’s posted on the STC website. I signed up to be an organizer; hopefully I’ll find out soon what that means! If you’re interested in participating, signup online.
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