More on Bakersfield in Second Life
It's been a couple weeks since I've said anything about our Second Life experiment -- which is largely an evening/weekend personal project on top of a bunch of other serious stuff we've been working on with Bakomatic.
We're still learning and figuring out what we want to do, but we have learned how to pull headlines and photos into a wall using something called Second View. Here's a picture of my avatar Eusebio Holt sitting on a park bench reading the day's news from Bakersfield.com:
We also have two beach houses, some palm trees, waves, fish and a nice fountain. If you want to check it out, download Second Life and register for a free user ID. Then click here to teleport there.
Now that the land is set up, we're thinking about how best to use it to engage people at a local level. We have a few ideas, such as inviting Bakotopia bands in to "play" on a virtual stage (accomplished by pulling Shoutcast streams into the land, which is easy to do once you have a Shoutcast station to point to), or having fireside chats with people of importance. We even have a virtual firepit for the occasion! In the spirit of community, we're also asking our Bakersfield.com community to chime in with their ideas.
Since this is just a side project and not a full product, there's no rush to do anything. It's more of a tool to drive other goals. I'm interested to talk to other media people who have ideas for what we could do, or may have their own experiments underway.
I will say that I have spent quite a bit of time at the Reuters building, and I'm disappointed to often find myself the only one there. So far I'm not convinced that news is the way to engage people in a virtual world, although I do read every single story that Adam Reuters writes about the Second Life world. If we can get local people interested in news using Second Life, that's great. I just think the environment is more about meeting people, connecting and shopping than it is about getting headlines.
Technorati Tags: Second Life, Virtual Bakersfield, Bakotopia
We're still learning and figuring out what we want to do, but we have learned how to pull headlines and photos into a wall using something called Second View. Here's a picture of my avatar Eusebio Holt sitting on a park bench reading the day's news from Bakersfield.com:
We also have two beach houses, some palm trees, waves, fish and a nice fountain. If you want to check it out, download Second Life and register for a free user ID. Then click here to teleport there.
Now that the land is set up, we're thinking about how best to use it to engage people at a local level. We have a few ideas, such as inviting Bakotopia bands in to "play" on a virtual stage (accomplished by pulling Shoutcast streams into the land, which is easy to do once you have a Shoutcast station to point to), or having fireside chats with people of importance. We even have a virtual firepit for the occasion! In the spirit of community, we're also asking our Bakersfield.com community to chime in with their ideas.
Since this is just a side project and not a full product, there's no rush to do anything. It's more of a tool to drive other goals. I'm interested to talk to other media people who have ideas for what we could do, or may have their own experiments underway.
I will say that I have spent quite a bit of time at the Reuters building, and I'm disappointed to often find myself the only one there. So far I'm not convinced that news is the way to engage people in a virtual world, although I do read every single story that Adam Reuters writes about the Second Life world. If we can get local people interested in news using Second Life, that's great. I just think the environment is more about meeting people, connecting and shopping than it is about getting headlines.
Technorati Tags: Second Life, Virtual Bakersfield, Bakotopia
posted by Dan at
12/12/2006 08:07:00 AM
<< Home