I really don’t get the Lab’s Facebook fascination.

In particular, the latest contest is rather odd. Firstly, why hold a photography contest at Facebook? Is this not why there’s an Official Flickr group for Second Life? Why not bring in Koinup or SLBuzz, which is specifically aimed at virtual world photography?

And then there’s the fact that the Facebook people don’t want you creating profiles for your avatars. So to be in this contest, you should technically be doing it as your real life identity – and not everyone wants their entire friends’ list knowing they’re a Second Life resident.

So perhaps they’re using this contest to attract new users? But then it’s hardly an attractive contest – how much would a newbie know about SL photography? Sure, the 10,000L$ sounds lucrative, but when they find out it’s about USD$40, they’re hardly going to come rushing through the virtual floodgates.

If Linden Labs is going to use Facebook as a marketing tool, then perhaps they should be look at attracting people who aren’t already registered. Holding odd contests like these in places where they make little sense just baffles me as to what exactly Second Life’s marketing strategy is.

At the start of the year, I predicted Second Life’s concurrency to top 150,000 but on last year, it doesn’t seem to have improved much. Second Life needs new users coming into the world, and social web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and Twitter can help them if they used them properly.

The media have got bored of trashing Second Life too, to the point where there’s few stories around now – they need to reinvent themselves, polish off the label (and possibly produce a website homepage which doesn’t baffle us) and get some publicity going that isn’t aimed at current residents.

Because we’re already in Second Life, and we’re not going anywhere fast.. just fix things which need fixing, bring in new people, and let us handle the rest.

Custom projects form a large part of what I do in Second Life, and I’ve learnt a lot of lessons along the way. Designing and building a sim in Second Life, in my eyes, is no different to designing a website for a client. It’s the same sort of process – aesthetics, functionality, ease of use and stability.

But with a custom job, it’s important you cover your own back and don’t leave yourself open to exploitation.

Firstly – always have a contract. It doesn’t matter if it’s your best friend’s  granny – you should always have a contract. It should be clear cut and state the terms of the agreement. Clarification of the following is essential:

• Milestones and Deadlines
• Specific Objectives
• Payment
• Intellectual Property

In most cases, the client will hold the IP rights, but it’s important for both sides to be very clear on where they stand with each step of the project.

I tend to get any project which pays a substantial amount covered by a contract which has been reviewed by a lawyer – you can draw up the legal agreement yourself though. Check this link for advice on that.

Secondly, make chat logs of everything. I tend to avoid voice as much as I can when discussing projects with a client on the simple basis that I can just keep chat logs of what has been said.

Oftentimes, things like timelines, revisions and briefs can be changed mid-project, and in the case of dispute, chat logs will help to remind you of them. As well as reminding the client too! Again, in bigger projects, I’ll ask the client to email me the specifications as proof of the amendments being requested.

Thirdly, always know your capabilities. Don’t agree to something if you can’t do it. Or if you know you’ll run out of motivation part way through – designing 15 sims can be a fun project, but it can last several months to build and it’s easy for people to get sidetracked in that time. If you’re not 100% sure you can deliver the product on time, just say no.

Finally, some clients can be companies and if they’re not organised, you can find yourself having to deal with several people at once. That’s a bad call – always deal with one point of contact, and one only. When you start dealing with more than one person, you find that they may not have communicated clearly with each other at the office, and as a result you’ve spent hours on something they didn’t actually want. Stick to a single point of contact so all the information and feedback is channelled through the same person to avoid confusions.

STOP PRESS:

1. You keep hitting “Delete” instead of “Take” when selecting an object.

2. You send your bitchy IM to the person you’re bitching about, instead of your gossip buddy.

3. You crash when you’re naked and upon logging back in, you rez surrounded by newbies in Ahern instead of your own home.

4. You keep buying copiable-items multiple times.

5. Everytime you try to check Chat History, you end up clicking “Release Keys”.

6. When returning junk to a spammer on your land, you return all your own objects back to yourself.

7. Instead of “Detach”, you hit “Detach all” and become a bald freak in public view.

8. You retexture your bedroom floor with an old snapshot picture, and don’t have the original texture to fix it.

9. Your mic is left on and voice is active while you’re having a belching fit.

10. You’re making typos, and still making typos when you’re trying to correct your original typo.

Be vary of several variants of viruses which are currently infecting the grid.

OPENSPACES VIRUS: Leads you to believe you have more space on your hard drive than you really do, and then starts billing your credit card a premium to use the “extra space”.

ANSHE CHUNG VIRUS: Infects your hard drive, sector by sector and then lies dormant as it transfers to other computers and concentrates on those instead.

KRANGEL VIRUS: Scans your entire hard drive. Gives you a report on the non-essential areas and withholds information on bad sectors until a month after the scan, and skews the data report.

TORLEY VIRUS: Takes a form of a small window, akin to Microsoft Office’s Paperclip assistant, and constantly pops up to ask you if you need assistance, offering a slew of tutorials and tips. On clicking “Go Away!” too many times, this virus turns your screen shades of hot pink and lime green.

NOT-A-REAL-VIRUS VIRUS: Portrays itself as a scam item in world which steals your money when you allow it to. This virus causes infected avatars to IM everyone on their friend’s list and all of their groups to warn everyone of this item, and to pass on the message so everyone gets the message about 27735 times. Just in case you missed it the first time.

NEKO VIRUS: Makes your computer play a purring sound every few minutes, and adds a “=^.^=” to the end of all sentences.

LINDEN LAB VIRUS: Installs new updates automatically and reboots your system. Then decides to make you suffer with a slower performance until it feels guilty and rolls back to the way things were. Repeats when bored.

LL PUBLIC RELATIONS VIRUS: Nothing works, but all your diagnostic software says everything is fine.

ARMIDI VIRUS: Infects the machines of top programmers and rebrands their work under their own name, and distributes at a premium price.

PARTNER VIRUS: Notifies your partner everytime you teleport to Hard Alley.

ENCORE VIRUS: Lists all the people you have a grievance with from your Mute List and publishes them using a colour code developed from complex algorithms with no comprehensible meaning.

BLOODLINES VIRUS: Keeps popping up with annoying messages, and doesn’t stop unless you agree to pay for its firewall software.

NOOB VIRUS: Stops your computer every few minutes to ask for money or sex.

METAVERSALLY SPEAKING VIRUS: Starts as a slightly humourous list, which is then passed from avatar to avatar, and cross posted on several blogs before turning into something of a cult movement, eventually putting a large strain on grid resources and causing lengthy downtime.

If you think you may have been infected with a virus, then leave your contact name and one of our trained professionals will be in touch to administer treatment at the next available appointment.

Please do come along if you so wish to =)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vehicle/163/106/22

********

The sixth and final night of The Photo Institute’s Speakers Series concludes with Second Life builder and photographer Prad Prathivi who will talk about his work and answer your questions.

We will also be announcing the winners of the Koinup.com’s Quintessence Contest.

The Photo Institute is Second Life’s premiere photography instruction school. From beginner to advanced, TPI can teach you to take better pictures. We’ll help you to better understand the nature of and intricacies of Second Life’s unique photo-taking system, to learn more about such subjects as composition and lighting, and expand your knowledge and understanding of photography in general.

As of this date, TPI is entering it’s fourth semester of teaching. We’ve already helped dozens of students become better photographers in Second Life. Our classes run the gamut from beginners’ courses for those who want to learn the basics of the SL camera functions and capabilities, to advanced classes in composition, lighting and other technical issues, and intensive workshops in subjects such as portrait photography, landscapes, and shooting the nude.

We offer several types of classes and workshops to meet every student’s needs: From semester-long classes of six weeks each, meeting twice a week, to one-hour lectures featuring some of SL’s finest photographers, and short-term workshops that can take as little as one to three hours, or sometimes an hour a week for two to four weeks.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vehicle/163/106/22

I actually admit that I have very little in the sense of style – I know what I like, and I tend to stick with it. That said, I do appear to have developed some sort of style though – when I look back at my old pictures, I cringe at how awful I looked. But then I never really took my avatar’s appearance all that seriously.

Well, I did to a certain extent – don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t the ‘muscles? 100!” sort of guy. I didn’t wear ridiculously greasy body oil that you could slide along an airport runway with. And I didn’t have a disproportional head:torso ratio.

My problem was mainly clothing and hair. I guess I put this down to a lack of knowing where to shop – it was a good 6 months before I actually bought a photo-realistic skin, and a further 3 months before I found SL men’s fashion blogs and started working out where I should be shopping.

I guess if it was me in the said silohette, I would have a unique style? Evidently I appear to have become a sheep, although I was recently on the cover of a magazine, and the featured interview in another – in both cases, I got compliments for being “the best looking male avatar” they’d seen. Which is a pretty big compliment to someone who has about as much sense of fashion style as a hobo.

So where did I pick this one up? I guess I have a lot to thank to other people – although I refuse to ever let anyone to take me shopping, I have a whole host of friends who subtly suggest changing this and that. Over the course of months, it seems to have created a pretty decent looking avatar, and means I can wander around not looking like such a schmuck.

I tend to get stuck in my ways, so my style doesn’t change much though – and it’s based very closely on my real life shape and style. Tanned, brown eyes, mi-long hair, athletic build and predominantly darker clothing..

Except a lot of other guys in SL seem to look like me too..

Damn.

MyHeritage: Family tree – Genealogy – Celebrity – Collage – Morph

We well all have to learn somewhere, right? Looking at other people put things together is often a good way of learning how to build and “prim-torture” things to the way you want them to look.

But consider how the original designer might feel if they came across it? Well that sort of happened recently when Charlotte Bartlett dropped in on a sim and saw someone had copied one of her early prefabs that she makes.

In this particular case, I think a copybot tool was probably used, as the textures matched hers too.. so that’s a big “no-no” in itself. But the person in question isn’t selling the design (as far as I know). The question remains though, that is this ethical?

Charlotte’s and indeed my own designs too are all original and not copies taken from the real world, which makes them our own intellectual property. In the real world, an architect can’t copy another architect’s design without finding themselves in hot water over it. Surely the same ethics should apply in Second Life?

But then, how would people learn if they can’t practice using examples that aren’t already in SL? Prims can be difficult to manipulate to make them do what you want, after all. And in some cases, people just don’t believe in paying so much for an item, and will just make it themselves.. maybe that’s just bruising the designer’s ego?

This is a huge gray area for me, as there are two sides of the argument. Personally, I don’t think people should make direct copies of someone else’s content – adapt it. And no – that doesn’t mean just using a different wood texture.. change the shape, the materials, and manipulate it to make it your own. There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from someone else, and if you credit them, they’ll be flattered. On the other hand, designers should encourage creativity in SL – the more creators there are, the better the Second Life experience is for all of us.

I always help people to design and create whenever I can – be it through classes, tips and tricks that I offer on my Flickr stream, or even by giving financial donations to people who need tools but can’t afford them. As a designer who has had a lot of help from a lot of people in SL, I feel it’s my duty to give back to the community, and I hope that that would generate a respect for my work so people would feel the need to support me back, rather than to breach my Intellectual Property rights.

Is it ethical to copy someone elses design with a non-profit intent? No, it’s not ethical as the design came from the designer’s imagination. Is it ethical to take influence from another design and make your own work from their concepts? Yes, that is ethical.. the moreso if you credit them as an inspiration.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources ~ Albert Einstein.

Well, no – Luna Bliss has been doing a similar thing for much longer, and appears to have gotten a little irked, when it was said otherwise on the SLNN article. So the comments section of the said article portrays a rather ugly trading of words in a very public forum. For an article which was supposed to be promotional and good publicity for Liquid Heat Designs, it seems to have turned badly against them as they refuse to recognise that Luna’s system did indeed come before theirs, and by trying to spin the story, they’ve done nothing but dig a hole for themselves.

But does it matter who came first? Well, yes.. it kinda does. I don’t specifically claim this in my store, but I was one of the very first, if not the first furniture designer to implement sculpty duvets to beds in Second Life. And I got pretty irked when a larger furniture store released their beds with sculpty duvets a month after me, and then had the audacity to claim that they were actually the first.. ummm, no. You weren’t.

But as a designer, I just sucked it up and got on with the job at hand.. no point creating a fuss over something as trivial as that.

I mean, all that matters is that at the end of the day, my beds are better than theirs..

Treehugger, originally uploaded by ::Prad Prathivi @ Amodica Studio::.

I’ve opened my new exhibition at the ground of Southsea – The Keys are gone for now, and replaced with The Will to Live. An artistic contribution from me to Second Life residents to enjoy and experience.

Press release:

The New Exhibition at the ground of Southsea is open!

I’ve been feeling very good this past month, and there’s been a strong feeling of hope.

I felt this strongly from a recent photograph by Joshua Morane. I took influence from this in creating the exhibition at the base of the Southsea sim, which is now open for everyone to enjoy.

This month, we’ll be running a competition for the best photograph taken from this Southsea exhibition. Joshua has very generously donated L$5000 as a prize, and Amodica will be matching that in gift vouchers to spend on our wide range of clothing and modern furniture in store.

Be sure to submit your entries to the Second Life ® – Southsea group! Closing date is 1st August 2008!

slurl.com/secondlife/Southsea/124/134/24

We look forward to seeing your artwork! =)

I’m also working on a side direction for this blog, which will be to post up Photoshop and building tutorials here, so keep an eye out!

Anyways, what’s been bugging me the last week is people who insistently refuse to move on and leave me alone. And also people who seem to think that they own a piece of me and hence are automatically entitled to have a say in how I live my life.

I don’t quite understand that. Why not just accept that someone else is moving on and let them go their own way, and stop hassling them and greifing them? It’s hardly going to give them a good impression of you.

Methinks they should grow up a little, kthxbai.