I'm continuing to do research within Second Life (SL). Although I've yet to become convinced of the business value, the concept of simulations and virtual realities where business application scenarios may be explored and analyzed is appealing. After all, ten years ago, who would have thought that the web would have grown to it's pervasive presence?

Thus, here is a Second Life tutorial / overview I created with screenshots and narrative from my travels through SL. My goal is to help the viewer understand SL from a potential business perspective, starting with Orientation Island and then progressing through islands that demonstrate potential business applications, with a final stop for recreation (motorcycle racing)! The tutorial may take a moment to load; please be patient.

• A Second Life Tutorial / Overview
  (the first slide has no audio … by design!)
  • Breeze Module Notes: Total running time – 17 minutes
    (or enter the tutorial and skip forward to any of these way points)
    .
  • Slide #1: Intro
  • Slide #9: Thomson NETg Virtual Training Center
  • Slide #18: BMW
  • Slide #21: Abbott's Aerodrome
  • Slide #31: Space & Science Museum
  • Slide #37: Reuters
  • Slide #41: Second Life Search Commands
  • Slide #49: PA Consulting
  • Slide #55: PA Consulting: Smart House
  • Slide #61: PA Consulting: Demo Island
  • Slide #66: PA Consulting: Security Demo
  • Slide #70: PA Consulting: Boom!
  • Slide #78: PA Consulting: Lufthansa 747
  • Slide #85: Mooz Raceway
  • Slide #91: Good-Bye!

I owe a great debt of gratitude to three individuals who without their kind assistance, I would not have been able create this tutorial. They are:

• Doug Bassett, a software engineer from Thomson NETg
   
• Claus Nehmzow and Marco Tippmer from PA Consulting

Both organizations have heavy presences within SL, and personally helped tutor me. The links I've given are not actually to their companies; rather they are to Web 2.0 descriptions of their efforts. Take a look!

Here are links to some of my other Second Life postings:

• June 19, 2008: Visualization Engineering
• April 13, 2006: Nerdcast – Take 06: A Second Life
• April 03, 2007: Creating Second Life Content
• February 26, 2007: Panel Discussion in Second Life
• January 23, 2007: Second Life Training (get a life)
• November 07, 2006: Blogs, Wikis and Bears … Oh My!

If you've read this far, and still are wondering what this Second Life stuff is all about, I invite you to either click upon the two attached images which give a quick SL executive overview, or link to the full article in BaseLine. Baseline is a magazine which specifically focuses upon "where leadership meets technology".  The publisher, Ziff Davis, is a leading publisher of technology related magazines.

Finally, I hope you've noticed that my blog does not have advertisements. My blog is a professional endeavor, and I'm not trying to sell you, the reader, anything. My commitment to education is deep, and personal. Please read about my "Run for China's Children", and help me build a school in rural China. Thank you.
.

From my daughter who is a senior in college, Dancing On Treadmills. When I was a kid, all we had was Twister!

Welcome to Nerdcast – Take 05: The Tagging Twins Reprise

Earlier, in Nerdcast – Take 03, we determined that although Rafael Sidi and Puneet Gupta were NOT separated at birth, they are two forward thinking individuals who both play in the engineering knowledge management space. In this second installment of the Tagging Twins, I interview Rafael Sidi … VP of Web Publishing for Elsevier. A major focus of this podcast is his firm’s engineering research / tagging tool (eiVillage / Compendex).

• Nerdcast – Take 05: Rafael Sidi
  (right click to download)

Follow this link to Rafael’s initial blog posting about the tagging feature release.
.
 

Crash! Bang! … a shot rang out!

Okay, I admit this beautiful prose is not original. Snoopy taught me everything I know. However, unlike Snoopy who never got one of his novels accepted for publication, you have 24 hours left to become part of the first Great American Wiki Novel (or Czech … or Chinese). Penguin Books has challenged the social network to write a novel, by wiki!

• A Million Penguins.Com – the Novel

Even if you read this after March 7th, have some fun and visit the site.  From an intellectual vantage point, this is an intriguing experiment. Here is the first paragraph:

Before the Fall
As always, with a word, it begins… The sound of clicking keys and the smell of wet fur fill the room. Möbius strips made from banana peels are scattered haphazardly across the floor. The chief monkey, careful not to slip and fall, ambles from desk to desk collecting papers before pasting them slowly and deliberately into a gigantic scrapbook. He scratches himself slowly, enjoying the sensation. If he had been able to read, as he once had been, he would have read something similar, or perhaps completely different, to the following…..
.

This is really funny (answer from a math exam)! (via the Distant Librarian): Find X (maximize the graphic!). What could be better than a Pythagorean joke?!
.