I’ll be attending the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in New York next week. So, if you’re there during that time, look me up. You can reach me via the contact form on our Tretiak Media site. I’ll be checking email periodically.
Archive for the 'Second Life' Category
New Virtual Survey HUD Provides Real-life Measurements
Published February 19, 2007 SL Businesses , Second Life , Tretiak Media 0 Comments
A Marketing First
Tretiak Media, LLC, in collaboration with the Social Research Foundation (SRF) have created the First Opinions PanelTM HUD for the Second Life environment.
First Opinions will be the first representative standing panel in Second Life with over 1000 members profiled for over 33 demographic attributes. It is designed to provide Fortune 500 companies with resident insight and feedback on new products, services and policies. They are looking for virtual residents who spend at least one hour a week inside Second Life and are willing to provide Real Life information such as age, income, geographic location, and education levels as well as Second Life information such as length of residency, land ownership, purchase patterns, and virtual business activities.
Andrew Mallon, Executive Director of the Social Research Foundation, says “The key question is: How does a company find real value in a virtual environment?” To be studied are the advantages with virtual focus groups over live ones, web- and mail-based surveys. “One obvious answer” says Mallon, “is we can observe peer group interaction, something you cannot do in a web- or mail-based survey.”
Tretiak Media designed and developed the First Opinions Panel HUD (heads up display) for exclusive use within the Second Life environment. This allows all elements of the survey process to be completed inside the virtual world from sign up to completion. Tretiak Media will also manage the capturing and maintenance of data for SRF during the sign up process.
Patrick Ward (aka Damek Tretiak), President and CEO of Tretiak Media, LLC, says “We’re extremely excited to be a part of this growing effort to understand Second Life and it’s residents. Our collaboration with SRF provides us with additional opportunities to explore the integration of Real Life and Second Life information. We believe these surveys can foster a much needed understanding of how to build and maintain value inside a virtual world.”
Technical Specifications
Key features of the HUD include:
- Simple and automatic sign-up for the First Opinions Panel
- Clean, fast loading design
- Randomly created private chat channels for capturing text-based information
- Dynamic question builders with multiple question types and choices
- Ability to move backwards and forward throughout the entire survey
- Conditional logic to allow for sections within the survey such as Yes/No answers and intermissions
- Secure and stable data collection
The HUD will be available via First Opinion Panel kiosks throughout the Second Life grid.
About The Social Research Foundation
The Social Research Foundation (http://www.socialresearchfoundation.org) was incorporated in the Fall of 2003 with the initial purpose to research online educational solutions for vulnerable groups in society, e.g. children/youth, immigrants, seniors. Their first project was Investingame, the first comprehensive, web-based interactive instruction on stock market investing basics.
About Tretiak Media
Tretiak Media, LLC (http://tretiakmedia.com/) integrates Real Life with Second Life to create immersive, interactive, and elegant user experiences. Our team consists of proven leaders and professionals in the fields of marketing, design, development, networking, and publishing. As a result, our global consulting engagements include Fortune 500 companies and have spanned the globe from North and South America to Europe and the Pacific Rim.
I’m very proud to announce the latest round of updates to the slquery.com product line. This is a big update and comes with some exciting new features on our previous products, plus the introduction of a new search billboard called the SLQ infoStation.
SLQuery.com is continuing to expand and gain more exposure, so expect more enhancements and performance improvements in the coming months. You may also notice the new kiosks and posters that are being placed throughout the grid. This a new campaign we’re unveiling to gain even more interest in SLQ products and services.
Introducing the SLQ infoStation
New to this release is the SLQ infoStation, a free public kiosk for Second Life that links to a web-based instant message system. Jump into chat or invite your friends from either RL or SL.
Plus, it includes all the power of the SLQ infoHUD unplugged. You can walk right up to an infoStation and search for items, news, blog entries, the web, amazon.com and more! View images for items submitted to the site or see what the latest SL news is directly from slquery.com.
This version also comes with a direct link to search the Second Life Library 2.0 via a focused search against all the Info Island projects.
SLQ infoBox v2.4 Release Notes
The infoBox (previously infoKit) has been updated with some significant performance improvments. A new buffer system has been developed to manage memory issues and speed up transfers to the site.
This release also introduces the new notecard module, which let’s you add entries to the site by simply filling out a notecard. You can now include descriptions, tags, and image keys when uploading to the site.
A new cloaking feature has been added to the infoBox, which let’s you make the box completely invisible. In addition, the box prims are changed to a phantom state so that you can walk through the box without worrying about tripping over invisible prims.
Finally, a new progress bar has been added, which shows you how far along in the process the box is during uploads to the site.
Unfortunately, there is no upgrade path to the v2.4 series. Future updates will include the option to use an upgrade disc. But due to some of the changes in this release you will need to transfer your items to the new boxes manually.
SLQ infoHUD v2.4 Release Notes
The infoHUD has had quite a few performance improvements added to it along with some bug fixes.
- Removed the word “teleport” from item results
- When opening a teleport map, the HUD will now move out of the way automatically
- Fixed flight script not setting correctly on rez
- Image now closes when main HUD window closes
- Image now clears and closes when clicking on a new item
- When an in-world texture image is available, the “more…” button now shows an image icon
- Changed the teleport icon to a lightning bolt, which better describes it’s purpose
- Adjusted the positioning of instructional text
- Other minor bug fixes and texture adjustments
Please note that our in-world update server recently crashed and so you will not be able to automatically update the infoHUD from previous versions.
This is a great release and is starting to show the power of the SLQ engine, so I’m excited to see how far it will go.
Update to SLQ Web Tab Profiles
Published December 11, 2006 General , SLQuery.com , Second Life 0 CommentsI’ve updated the web tab profiles available through slquery.com so that they now include navigational buttons such as back, forward, home, and refresh.
In addition, clicking on images for items now shows correctly sized within the web tab browser.
And finally, clicking on an item’s more information link also shows correctly sized within the web tab browser.
I’m confident these changes will make using the SLQ profiles much nicer in the long run.
Enjoy!
Damek
Top 15 Suggestions for finding places when Search is down
Published December 4, 2006 Second Life 10 CommentsThese are the top 15 suggestions I’ve found, in no particular order, for searching when SL search is down.
Most of the suggestions I saw in the “search is down” thread on the Second Life blog seemed to get lost in the usual chatter about how bad Linden Labs is handling the updates. I won’t comment on that, it’s been said enough. I was more interested in what suggestions people did have. And while these won’t solve the problems that are occurring I thought it would be useful to list the suggestions that were made without the angry babble around them.
I’ll throw my site in at the top. OK, it’s a blatant plug, but it is my blog! 
- Browse my site, www.SLQuery.com, which has searching against products and various places throughout the grid. It’s a growing resource for both merchants and shoppers. Full text searching along with social tagging, comments, blogs, and news are available. I have an in-world utility called the infoHUD that let’s you search not only Second Life but also Amazon.com, the web, various reference resources, the Second Life Library 2.0 as well as business resources such as SL Business Magazine.
- You can click on the Friends button, select a Friend, then select “Profile”. Click the “Picks” tab, they may have landmarked some cool spots to check out. You can also use Search > People tab and look up random people or people you know, and it’ll also show profiles.
- Look at the new “Web Tab” in your friends or other’s profiles. There are a lot of interesting projects based around that and many of them have links to products, places, or other resources for information.
- If you look in your Inventory > Landmarks folder, you may find some places you want to visit, or revisit. Also, many content creators include landmarks to their stores in packages you buy, so check those too. TIP: you can right-click a landmark and select ‘Teleport To Landmark” to get there more directly.
- If you’re at a place you want to revisit, use World menu > Create Landmark Here. It’s like a web browser “Favorite” or “Bookmark”.
- Map button on the toolbar is another way to get around, if you remember the region, or just double-click any accessible part of the World Map to teleport there. For a web version of this, go to SLurl.com.
- You can also, if you are searching for a store that you’ve bought something from before, right click on the rezzed item, or right click in your inventory and select the creator’s profile. Or if you like something another person has rezzed in world, right click to get the creator from there as well, but make sure you have ’select only my objects’ disabled.
- Use eventful.com to find events: http://eventful.com/events?q=tag%3Asecondlife.
- Use the map with classifieds and event markers shown, which let’s you browse the map and view what’s available in a particular region. For sale markers often have the for sale price attached as well.
- Use SLExchange to search for products. There are often teleport links to the products you’re looking for. This goes for SLBoutique as well.
- Google it! Second Life residents often have their products listed on the internet or on other resident sites.
- Look for classifieds in the various resident site forums, there are often a lot of specials in there as well.
- Search a blog search engine like blogsearch.google.com or technorati.com for blogs and information related to Second Life residents. The interaction between the web and SL is growing and blogs are a big part of that.
- Ask your friends or send a group notice asking for information. More often than not, someone will know what you’re looking for and where to find it.
- Take a break! It doesn’t help sales and it doesn’t get you to where you need to go, but sometimes stepping away is more powerful than you think. I find if I step away from the screen and do something completely different I’ll often come up with a better idea or give my brain that much needed reboot it craves every now and then.
Additional Suggestions
These were made on the blog or via email. I’ll list them hear as addendums to the original post.
- It’s possible to use the search on http://www.SecondLife.com and search for things same as Places. Same keywords are used and all, it just doesnt have fancy pictures and viewable descriptions. As long as the place has “publish listing on web” in about land, it will be listed there. (takes a while to update if you’ve just set it).
- If you’re looking for a club, a casino or some similar public place, it’s very likely that they have a group with the same name. Group search still works, so in that case you can browse among the group members in search of a pick and subsequent teleport. Much easier than relay over chance.
- There is a new seller directory available. Still sparsely populated, but it’s something: http://slinfodex.com
The SLQuery.com site continues to improve! Last week I released version 2.3 of the infoHUD with some great new features including a dedicated library button, a new SL Business button, enhanced reference searches, and the new SLQ Flight assistance utility.
Today, I released the mini profiles available to be used in the Web Tab profile of the Second Life client.
To show your profile, simply set your mini profile URL to **http://www.slquery.com/<yourname>/profile.**
Make sure that you replace **<yourname>** with your Second Life name minus any spaces. For example, my profile can be found at http://www.slquery.com/damektretiak/profile.
This will show you the most recent items, news, and blog entries you have made to the site.
Please note, that you must be a member of the SLQuery.com site to use this feature. Joining is easy though, just find a kiosk location on our registration page and teleport to it.
I have released the latest version of the Info HUDs to coincide with the release of some very exciting changes to the site.
You’ll notice that the name has been changed to Info HUD (previously known as Search HUDs). This is due to the growing number of functions available on the HUD. I felt the Info HUD described the use and features a little better, since it’s not just related to searching anymore.
Major highlights for the new HUDs include:
- New Search Types: SLQ Items, SLQ News, SLQ Blogs
- New Blogging Feature - blog or bookmark wherever you are in Second Life
- New In-World images available - Adding an in-world UUID to the site form provides a view of this texture on the hud when user’s request additional information via the Info button.
- New External Links available - Adding an external URL provides the ability to click to that web location from in-world
- Lots of important bug fixes
- New Options button which also allows you to register and/or change your password right from your HUD
Major highlights for the website:
- News Section added, which is a growing collection of on-going news stories about Second Life from around the web
- Blogs Section added, which catalogues blogs made from users in-world
- Comments can be made on all items, news, and blog articles.
- You can now post up to 3 images per item entry or blog entry
- RSS Subscription Feeds have been added for all sections of the site, including by author, which means you can subscribe to a specific author’s items, news, or blogs using your favorite RSS reader.
- Tags! All items, news, and blogs can now be tagged as well. Which means you can use the normal search features or browse via a tag-based url to get to items you’re looking for. A tag cloud is available for each main area of the items, news, and blog sections.
- Author profiles available. If you’ve chosen to add a picture, url, and/or description of your profile, it can now be viewed whenever someone clicks on your username.
- New image viewer. I’ve added Lightbox functionality when viewing images, to make it a little nicer interface.
Major Highlights for the new Item Kits:
- Completely rewritten boxes have been bug-tested and proven to be effective for hundreds of items at a time
- There are now 2 versions of the box: 1) a basic model which lets you update items on the site, and 2) an SLExchange.com integrated box which lets you add your items to both SLExchange.com and SLQuery.com at the same time.
- New interface improvements to let you know what’s going on when a box is working
- Updated tracking features that no longer require keeping the old UUID of the box somewhere in the description areas.
- Use as many boxes as you need and make as many copies as you need.
I’ll be explaining each of these in more detail over the coming days.
For now, enjoy!
~ Damek
slxmlhttp.rb - Ruby API for the Second Life Web Services
Published October 5, 2006 Ruby , Second Life 0 CommentsI saw this blog entry the other day on the Second Life Blog concerning homepage and Lindex stats, so I went about creating a small Ruby API for retrieving that data. I’ll probably be adding these stats to the SLQuery.com site at some point.
In the meantime, the code is free for all to use. It’s an early attempt and some code is there as a template for possible future use. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or corrections. I’ll probably also create a RubyForge project for it along with a gem.
For now, though, you can obtain the code via this file: slxmlhttp.zip
It’s very simple to use, the test file included shows each of the available fields as well as general usage.
