Animoto: Second Life Music Videos

Location: Animoto Web site

Though not intended for SLers in particular, Animoto provides a wonderful way to have some fun with one's avatars. It's free for videos of 30 seconds--longer ones are for premium members only.

Tenchi Morigi has already done a nice mashup of images and music at this site; she gets credit for telling me about it.

Given my love for the bluegrass clasic "Old Slewfoot." The uncertain fate of Pappy Enoch, I decided to mash up a tribute to the po' alien-abducted boy.

Enjoy...I'm not a great music editor, and the process is slow, so the images and sound do not synch as well as I'd like. Visit Animoto and give it a try today.

While I'm cranking some backwoods classics, Pappy's pick for a "classic" version of the tune, by Jim & Jesse in 1976, can be found on YouTube. As Pap says "If'n this hear vershun don't make yu run out tu git a pompy-door hairdoo n' a suede soot, yu mite as well bee dead."



Some more Info from Tenchi:

Animoto got my heart from the spot. The handling is quite easy and the professionalism comes with the encoding by itself.

Basically everything you have to do is add pictures, add text if you like and some music.
I have noticed some things you might want to take care of:

• Rather choose electronic music then anything else. Animoto likes to look for a baseline to use as a metronome in my eyes. I got the best results using electronic music.
• Take care on how many pictures you add. Adding more pictures then can be displayed during the running time of the soundtrack they will not be displayed. Try using normal speed or half speed for displaying the images. This makes the the presentation more relaxed. Higher speed will make it rather hectic sometimes.
• Count at least 5 seconds for each picture or textslide
• One click remixing can greatly change the video and give it a whole new look. So give it a try when you are not satisfied.
• Once the encoding starts you can safely shut down the website. Animoto will inform you once your video is ready.

The free version of Animoto gives you 30 Seconds of Video. If you want a longer Video you will have to purchase a credit for a full video which costs you 3USD or an unlimited number of full videos subscription for 30USD.

For playing around with the tool I bought one credit for a full video for 3USD which is quite ok with me. For those slideshow maniacs you might rather want to try out the big package. If so entering the referral code "ytnxzuwo" (without "") will save 5USD on the purchase of the full pack.

This video is the result of about 30 minutes of arranging,uploading and adding text:

Same Old "Second Life is Sex" Story: Why We Should Worry

Location: About to get a drink

Last year, a BBC documentary covered the lives of two Second Life couples who came together in real life. It did not purport to give a balanced view of SL, instead focusing on infidelity, geek-love, and a few tame SL sex scenes--more comic than lurid, truth be told. Still, it was enjoyable and not likely to start an anti-SL firestorm.

Now the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has re-cut parts of the documentary and dropped the British accents. They re-packaged it in a manner that is as sleazy as a one-night stand in a cheap motel, after too many bad gin fizzes.

Shame on the CBC. Here we are, getting this body-blow at the end of the Educational Support Faire in SL, with its presentations, educational displays, and promise of interactivity for intellectual work.

I might as well piss into a hurricane, trying to convince people not in SL that it serves education, business, and the non-profit sector well. Each time a major media outlet reduces SL to copulating pixels, a lot of our work is undone.

At the same time, to be honest, shame on us.

Not for permitting sex in SL, but for not admitting a striking difference between our virtual world and many others. Sex has become, like it or not, a signature part of the Linden Lab "brand." Yes, IMVU's Bratz dolls are usually shown hanging about in hootchie-wear, but "Second Life," a term redolent of a "hidden life," may become the definitive term for avatar-based realities.

And in our particular little universe, there are many clever individuals selling kinky goods for various avatarian subcultures.

For these reasons, I've been stewing since I read Tenchi's remark about academics who leave sexually explicit groups in their avatar's profiles. I don't really care if my colleagues have cybersex, but by leaving evidence in their profiles they debase the hard work in education and business settings. And they feed the gaping maw of the "infotainment" industry, always hungry for sex or blood to grab the eyeballs of those who consume passive media. Worse still, such coverage fires up the would-be censors of the Internet, the moral crusaders who wish to have us all do things their way.

Now that I've warmed you all up, so you simply must see the documentary, I don't recommend reading the misinformed "commentary" at CBC's site unless you have taken your blood-pressure medicine. The venom goes beyond the usual "read a book, get a life" remarks, though it's amusing to be flamed by people who still have not figured out how to use a spell checker:

Shame, shame, shame on these dispicable people for "loosing reality" and losing their family over such a rediculous, childish "game". I think kids have more common sense than these "adults". ANYONE who particpates in this needs to have their head examined and get a grip on "LIFE".

We stake-holders in virtual worlds had best hope that the terminally indignant do not discover the Goreans, the BDSM crowd, or the "forced capture" fans in-world. I fear the day that one of those subcultures--and not merely "normal" sex between avatars--become the focus of a major documentary and gets aired in the US Congress. Our work to bring SL into education and business will be doomed because, unlike the broader Internet, Linden Lab is the site where all the content gets hosted. The lab may try to position itself as a mere ISP for 3D content, but to people like the moron quoted above, such nuances won't matter.

Some morons wear judges' robes. A lot more have been elected to office. Unless we take on the "all about sex" issue directly, Linden Lab--and everyone with an SL avatar--gets tarred by the same brush.

Okay--here's the damned CBC video.

FREE Money...but wait.

Just received in e-mail: wouldn't be so bad except there was a week, long ago, when NONE of us got our stipends. That's me back then, dumpster-diving.

We'll count it as fair this time, but just don't short-change an Enoch, Linden Lab!

Ignatius Onomatopoeia

On 27 January our overnight L$ transaction settlement process was instructed to initiate twice. We quickly caught it and halted the activity, but for a limited number of Residents, we paid weekly stipends twice. In order to remedy this overpayment, we will regard your stipend of 3 February to be paid early. Stipend payments will resume as normal for you on 10 February. If you find things don't look right upon review of your account records, please contact us via support, and we'll take a look. On behalf of all of us at Linden Lab, we apologise for this error. The Linden Lab Billing Team

Second Life Education Support Faire: Through the eyes of a visitor

Location: Several Spots on the Faire

Since Iggy managed to drag me into SL supported education it is no wonder that I spent the last days wandering the SL education faire like Iggy. Since I am neither an academic nor a faculty member I think that I have a rather different perspective on the faire and especially its visitors.

To quote Iggy there were of course quite some "fashionally challenged" people around. This is surely not the nicest sight to see but generally not an unsolvable problem. The amazing fact behind academic clothing habits is rather that those academics that have been longer on the grid already tend to mix geeky habits with the stereotype "coolness" of the typical avatar. So seeing a bodybuilder surfer guy with wild hair and three day beard wearing a tux shirt not only made me smile but almost die laughing.

It is not really what you wear, its rather the way how you wear it. Combining the pieces of your avatar (I am not only talking clothing here) is essential because body language goes even a step further in SL then it does in RL. And this is important since the visual is still the most developed sense on the grid and so the visual will be the first thing students encounter when they first enter the grid. Keeping in mind that it is still a widespread prejudice that people using SL regularly must be some kind of social failure, how will the picture of such a teacher avatar remain in the students heads? There is nothing wrong with a pimped up or original avatar, but it always depends on how this avatar connects to the RL picture since the teacher is most likely the one that is constantly compared with his/her avatar.

While this fashionissue is surely worth a note and sometimes a good laugh, two things struck my eye while i nicely blended into the background and observed what was going on.

As Iggy already pointed out a good deal of the people on the faire are actually newbies. Being new to a surrounding like the grid can be confusing, I am not going to argue that since it is true. Nevertheless I think that members of schools, universities and other educational bodies should be in an age where they know how to behave. This includes basic knowledge of proper behaviour and codes of conduct. Sadly I have noticed that a newbie in SL seems to be a newbie regardless of age and profession. Shouting avatars, no sense of politeness and a latent rudeness within some visitors of the faire were quite disturbing in my eyes. It became even more disturbing when I noticed a university professor (he was first rezzed about a year ago) who was actually talking to a newbie colleague simply walked away in the middle of the conversation leaving his colleague helpless in the middle of changing his appearance. I think that especially those teaching a class have to have a flawless behavior to transfer that onto their students.

The last thing I noticed is that also academics are human beings. Denying that SL has a sexual component which is frequented by quite a big part of the users doesn´t make any sense because it is not hidden and easy to find. Yet I think one should think what kind of groups they join with an avatar that also is used for teaching. I had quite a good laugh when I found sexual content usergroups within user profiles. In general I don´t think that this is a reason for an uproar and the proclamation of the end of the world as we know it (great song by REM by the way), I think that displaying the membership of a group that is centered around forced and non-consensual BDSM might not be the smartest choice. You could of course hide the group from public display, yet I think an alt would be the smarter choice since it might avoid the embarrassment of your student finding you while on some "research project" tied up in a bondage being whipped by some rubberdolls (sorry for the graphics here but I think everyone should get the point now).

I think the general reception of SL as a game is probably the reason why these people are having a hard time on the grid. Starting to see SL as what it is ... an extension of RL, will solve that situation. As in RL codes of conduct, proper behaviour and politeness are values that should be obeyed (even though in certain situations they might not apply fully).

Of course this is not true for every visitor of the faire (thank god) in fact the most people who dared talking to me were polite and eager to learn. Yet it cannot be denied that the cases I described above happened more then once in the last two days while I was there. This might seem like a misuse of rather striking examples, yet I think that events like these should be considered in preparation of own explorations on the grid and in preparation of classes that are going to make use of SL.