ivantohelpyou

After a Northern Voice presentation about Second Life, I thought to give it a try. I joined the "Furries" by making my avatar a dog, a choice which I assure you is merely part of my ALM thesis research on the topic of talking dogs.

In Second Life, communication occurs on several parallel levels. First, there's the real-time interaction between avatars on kinesthetic (through movements), visual (appearance) and textual (instant messaging) levels. Second, there's the communication between visitors and "landowners," who have the ability to create a 3D version of a home page in virtual space. The same way somone can work on a home page to add various layers of content, structure, style and behavior, someone in Second Life does the exact same thing using a different set of tools.

A well-constructed Web page will present the content (plain text) no matter the access device, whether a screenreader, a text-only browser, a browser with CSS turned off, a browser with JavaScript turned off, and so on. This concept is called progressive enhancement, but it works much differently in Second Life than it does on the HTML Web.

First, you need structure, which is the land. If you don't have land, you can't build, and so this is the foundational layer. But just having land won't get anyone to visit, and so the next phase is style. You have to put something on your land, from SL primitives (trees, boxes) to promore complex constructions. Once you have a styled or themed property, you can add behaviors to your objects. Finally, as people interact with your property, you build community. Technically, you could hold a rave on an empty lot in Second Life, or in a public area as a "flash mob." But for the most part, you need structure at a minimum, style in most cases, and behaviors to stand apart in order to attract community -- which in the final analysis, is the content.

• Content: Community
  
• Structure: Land + Location
  
• Style: Appearance, images-video-sound, objects
  
• Behavior: Linden Scripting Language (LSL)

Compare to the Web equivalent:

• Content: Text
• Structure: HTML
• Style: CSS
• Behavior: JavaScript, DOM scripting, AJAX
  

To summarize:
On the textual Web, content comes first. In Second Life, the content arrives only when the audience does.

Key takeaway:
In Second Life, nobody knows that you're not a dog.

Labels: northern voice, NV07, second life, talking dogs