I hung out on Second Life a little more on Tuesday night. I’m getting a little better with the navigation, though I did jump off the roof of the library at one point.

I met a few more people and am now officially Second Life “friends” with Planetneutral Fackler and Max Batra (or my avatar, Hatchibombotar Stein, is
friends with them, anyway). I still don’t think I can devote much time to Second Life, but nobody told my brain that: my sleep was broken Tuesday night, and it seemed that every time I woke up, my brain was churning through something or other on Second Life.

So here is a little brain dump to try to avoid that fate again (not playing right before bed will probably help, too):

• The main ice-breaker conversation seems to be a chat about your avatar: “Hey, nice wings,” or “where did you get the texture for that kitten-fur coat?”

• I’m reasonably comfortable communicating with strangers via IM, but the chat on SL is pretty slow for me. So I’m afraid I come off as slow myself.

• I think it is nice that when people see my avatar they say “Hi, Hatch.”

• It ain’t the Metaverse, to be sure, but it is pretty interesting to walk around SL and see all the various creative and commercial efforts. The atmosphere–people in crazy costumes very busy doing strange things–feels like walking through Lollapalooza or something.

• I had posited “2L-L2″ for Second Life Library 2.0. But people don’t say 2L, they say SL. So SLL2?

• I gather there are questions about what the SLL2 collection will consist of. I hope they concentrate at first on information and literature created in SL. I know so little about this, but is there already a place in the game to go for information on how to make a great avatar or build cool stuff? Is there a collection of SL folklore yet?

• This might have a “you-had-to-be-virtually-there” quality to it, but my favorite chat exchange of last night went something like this (the game doesn’t seem to keep the chat history from session to session, so I can’t quote exactly.):

  Green-haired female avatar in cyberpunk getup: “What kind of books are here? Just the ones near the front door?”

  Four male avatars w/relatively “straight” appearance: [dead silence for a full minute. Avatars shuffle their feet, look at the sky.]

  Green-haired female avatar: Um, did I come at a bad time?

  Finally, Planetneutral Fackler (or PF) spoke up and said that the silence was mainly due to the fact that the library was so new that we didn’t really know what to say yet. Whew! Felt like junior high there for a minute!

• Luke Rosenberger and Michael Stephens have also weighed in on Second Life, but the Second Life Library 2.0 blog is really the place to go.

Even if you aren’t likely to be a real “regular” there, you can think of the Second Life Library 2.0 as a librarian hangout. In short, if you are interested in libraries and have been curious about Second Life, this is a great time to jump in and see what the heck this is all about.

Tags:
library, second_life