Fellow Residents! I want to talk- with YOU!

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Part of our support structure here at Linden Lab is a dedicated customer team called I-World. This team answers support tickets and live chats from residents who are experiencing some difficulties or looking for guidance with in-world issues. Some of you may be aware of us from your contact via the Support page but most of you will probably never have heard about us.

We help to ensure that your in-world experience goes as smoothly as possible by providing answers where we can and getting our technical colleagues to perform their magic where we can’t. We know there are things that sometimes don’t work so well in SL…things that get you down. We’re sorry that they happen, they get us down too and we want to get them resolved as quickly as you do.

So, we’ve been thinking about what more our team can do and part of our efforts is to establish I-World Island, a place where we will try to offer additional signposting and guidance for some of the in-world issues that occur.

The island will have a number of areas that you are most welcome to visit and perhaps find some additional information that you weren’t aware of before. One particular section of this island will be driven by you, our fantastic residents whose creativity and support for Second Life make it the exciting place it is today. We are setting aside an area for an I-World Expo, allowing YOU to submit items to pass on free to other residents that you feel make a positive impact to the in-world resident experience. This item might be a skin, an interesting piece of furniture, a guide to locations in-world or even a tutorial pack that you have put together that can help a resident learn something new about Second Life. Anything that is PG-rated.

In return, we will offer you a small shop area to place information about your in-world business or activities and a landmark for residents to follow. These spaces will be offered on a rotating, short-term basis so that residents coming back to the island can see a variety of content.

Hopefully you are getting a sense of what we are trying to do here; find a small way of focusing residents on some of the positive and exciting things that make SL a good place to visit and remain

All you need to do is to log in to the Support Portal and submit a ticket to us, using the “Special Questions - Basic Account or Guest Login” ticket type then choose the category “Submissions for I-World Expo“. Leave as much detail as you can of the item you want to highlight to other residents.

Once this ticket has been reviewed someone will get back in touch with you about placing this on our island. Please note that this might take some time depending on the level of submissions received. We really look forward to hearing about the fantastic ideas you come up with.

In addition to the I-World Expo we will have a number of other areas for you to visit but we want to keep them under wraps and not spoil all of the surprises!

To officially unveil the island, on Saturday 5th April, we are hosting the I-World Music Festival and want to offer you the opportunity to tune in to our broadcast (stream details to follow) or to drop in on us at I-World Island and enjoy some live music over the course of 24 hours from Midnight PST until Midnight PST Sunday 6th April. We’ll follow up with some more details later in the week but you can be assured there are some fantastic live musicians gearing up to perform for you on the day!

Naturally we won’t be able to host everyone on one island but don’t forget you can tune in and hopefully be able to pop in for a wee while at another time during the day.

Thanks for everything you do to make Second Life a great experience for each other and, indeed, for us who work here. We hope that we can give you a wee bit more back via I-World Island.

Best Wishes

Originally created in October of 2005 as a resource for Educators, The Second Life Educators (SLED) community is growing strong and now contains over 4700+ members! Educators from around the world are using SLED to help newcomers, exchange resources, network, collaborate on projects, and share best practices.

In order to continue to serve the Educator community and to make the benefits of SLED more accessible, we are pleased to announce the creation of the SLED Blog. A doorway to the engaging dialogue on the SLED list, the blog will feature and highlight EDU-oriented events, tools, bright ideas, awesome groups and locations, expert opinions, pointers to tutorials and papers, and insider views on life in Teen Second Life.

To kick off the project, we’ve invited Second Life resident educator Intellagirl Tully - aka Sarah Robbins - to edit the SLED Blog. In first life, Sarah Robbins is an instructor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She teaches undergraduate English composition classes in Second Life, presents on Second Life at conferences, blogs prolifically, and co-authored the book Second Life for Dummies. Sarah will manage the blog and has invited several active members of the SLED community to contribute regularly to the SLED Blog.

Drop by the SLED Blog regularly to discover what’s happening in K-20 Education Using the Second Life(R) World.

For quite a while now Second Life has been home to a variety of jumbo-sized prims, megaprims, and other larger than the usual ten-meters-maximum prims. The original “megaprims” were produced by Residents’ manipulation of the client last year; “new” ones cannot be made, but the existing supply can be (and are) copied and distributed. Linden Lab doesn’t support or encourage the use of these prims, but our policy up until now has been ‘live and let live’.

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Have you got the downtime blues? View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out what Sabin Linden says about Het-Grid, get information on SLCC, learn about AjaxLife in our interview with Katharine Berry, read up on Stephany Linden’s voice tips and tricks, check out our view on the new features vs. bug fixes debate … and more!

Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.

[UPDATE] Thank you for your comments. We greatly appreciate your continued patience during downtime. Please note that in the near future, and thanks to Het-Grid, downtime will occur less frequently. Don’t know about Het-Grid? Check out Breaking News in this month’s newsletter.

View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out about the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society’s first fundraiser in Second Life, discover JIRA tips and tricks, read our view on voice in As We See It … and more!

Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.

In an effort to provide new and existing residents more information about how to create things in Second Life, I have produced a trial video, “Introduction to Textures,” released today on Youtube.com

This is the first of what may become a series of videos produced by Linden Lab, aimed at improving everyone’s experience.  In this video, I cover some fundamentals on creating and using textures, and provide some ideas for texture optimization that should improve system performance.  It is available in both English and Japanese, with more language translations planned.

Each video in the series should run no more than 7 minutes, and future titles may include:

• Modeling Efficiently
• Alpha Channels
• Scripting for Interactivity
• Scripting for Effects
• Avatar Customization
• Advanced Texturing Techniques
• Estate Management
• …and many more

Resident feedback is welcome!

First, let’s get the bad news out of the way…Pathfinder is leaving the community team! Yeah, I really can’t believe it myself. He’s been a crucial part of our little group, and instrumental in helping educators, non-profits and volunteers create innovative, welcoming and helpful spaces and communities in Second Life for a couple of years now. We’ll miss his virtual self at our Monday meetings.

The GOOD news is that Path is charged with very exciting task of setting up a satellite office in the Boston Area! (So if you’ve been considering applying to Linden Lab, but didn’t want to leave The Hub, please re-consider!) As a New-Englander myself I can say, with an accent and without a doubt, that he’s the guy for the job. Luckily, he’ll still be the evangelist and general resource for Education in SL as we expand, which continues to be highly appropriate considering the abundance of educators in the Boston area.

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I thought I’d slip in my introduction before the new year begins and initiate the education category of the Linden Lab blog. I’m on the Community Development team and have been responding to the flood of requests from educational organizations to start projects on the Teen Grid of Second Life. Over the past year, a very energetic educator community has developed on the Main Grid. Pathfinder Linden set up the Second Life Educators List (SLED) in October, 2005. Today, the SLED list is an effective vehicle for 1200+ members to share knowledge gained working with undergraduate and graduate students in Second Life.

The Teen Grid is… (more…)