Sunday, March 04, 2007

1 life, 2 lives! Ha ha ha! 2 lives! (ala the Count from Sesame Street)

WARNING: This post contains lots of parenthetical phrases. Proceed with caution.

In the interest of, um, exploring social networking possibilities for, um, museums, I created a Second Life account. (read: I was procrastinating.)

My computer is too slow. Apparently. I can move around fine, but the colors and texture never match up. My avatar's body is usually the texture of whatever is around it. Not the blue jeans and red shirt I customized. Which is very frustrating, since avatar customization is what I was interested in playing with (it's very difficult to create a plus size avatar, aside from the South Park Charater Generator (and my South Park avatar rather looks like me, here, look.) and Yahoo! avatars
which has a very limited selection of plus size options (plus it won't let me make my hair blue. (grrr...))).

From what I've seen (I'm only hanging out on Help Island, after the Orientation Island), it's pretty neat. It's like the Sims, but with agency. And social networking (I suppose Sims online might be the same thing, but I've never played with that).

Anyway, my second life name is Froggy Helgerund (everywhere else online I go by froggy_dear, and I think it's a fairly unique nickname), if you're into that kind of thing. I might play it a little more to see how it goes, but the texturing issues are really annoying.

Thesis: I am sending out invitations to my SURVEY tomorrow. So if you're a museum blogger, look out! Or, if I don't send you one (contact info is an issue on museum blogs, very interestingly), please help me out by following my links here. I'm going to keep mentioning this!

I also wrote up my research synopsis for MW2007 and found a couple more jobs to apply for. I have another phone interview on Thursday, which is exciting! It's all that gunninga business. :D

2 comments:

Allyson Lazar said...

Hi, I work with museums, not in them currently, and mostly I read blogs rather than write them (I like to soak up information like a sponge) so I thought I'd share a couple of things I have seen recently in terms of both museums and social networking and Second Life.

I have been personally very pleased to see some museums and museum organizations embracing the idea of online social networking through a variety of sites, including myspace and ning. Granted, so far I myself have seen only about 40 or so museums on myspace, but I think the numbers are growing. I know that the Mountain-Plains Museums Association is on myspace (myspace.com/mountainplains) and that the Western Museums Association is thinking about getting themselves a profile. Incidentally, I'm sure either one would welcome a museum studies student from anywhere in the country as a friend...

There is a brand new museum social networking group on ning.com, though I don't know how successful it will be...

Now, when it comes to 2Life, apparently there is quite a bit going on there regarding non-profit organizations, as evidenced by this post from Philanthropy 2173, another blog. Actually that blog has talked quite a bit about non-profits on 2Life.

I'm sure you've already seen this post as well from a long time ago.

Finally, recently I read about a museum that was established in 2Life.

Cheers!

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.