LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

I think this week's assignment was probably the most frustrating one for me.  Apparently, gaming and virtual worlds are not my thing.  I started in SecondLife.  I've tried it once before, and I didn't have enough RAM to even install it.  I have the same computer as I had then, but I have installed more RAM since.  This time, I went through with the install and entered the world.  Almost as soon as I entered, however, I started getting warning messages saying that I didn't have enough memory to handle the program, and would need to delete files.  I exited t

Gaming does a lot of "people training" and they do it well.  Okay, so they use a lot of intuitive mechanics to get us to do something while giving us goals to strive for.  It's not practical to give patrons goals like "the more xp/books you earn/check out, the faster you get your new flaming sword/library card."  It would be nice if libraries would apply the intuitive mechanics more often though.  Some libraries do, but some libraries just don't.

Second Life has definitely been in the news a lot over the past couple of years. Companies are marketing virtual representations of their brands in Second Life. Rock bands are having concerts in Second Life. Educational institutions (like SJSU!) are holding classes in Second Life. This week, Congress conducted a hearing on virtual worlds inside of Second Life.

I am quite skeptical about the benefits of Second Life. All the applications we have talked about so far--RSS, tagging, mashups, widgets--are all about users taking bits and pieces of larger things and reorganizing them to better fit their needs. These applications are small and can be accessed on everything from a full-powered desktop computer to smartphones. They are all about being simple, accessible, and mobile. Second Life is none of this. You have to meet Second Life on its terms. And those terms are fairly unbending.