Business and Technology in Second Life

There seems to be so much I have to do these days, that blogging has been really on the backburner…

I’ve decided to post here a new article just to make sure people know that we’re alive and kicking “We”, in this case, being Beta Technologies, of course.

Aye, it’s another year with a financial crisis going on. But, surprisingly, so far, 2011 has been our best year so far — even better than the glorious “Golden Era” days of 2007! This might come as a surprise for many, who thought that Metaverse Development Companies working in Second Life have been wiped out of the face of the earth. Not so. There is a big focus switch, though — projects are long-term, not the kind of ultra-short ones that marketeers, journalists, and PR people love: start them one week, finish the next, put some pictures and information about it on the website, go on to the next project, show what we’re doing!

One thing that bothered me was that the little-updated Beta Technologies pages were hard to navigate and had a different theme from the blogs (where I managed to be a little more creative…). There was good reason to do some minor tweaks and unify the themes…

Last week I got an email from WordPress.org to say that 3.0 was now on its second Beta. Well, I usually don’t try the betas out — Automattic, the company behind WordPress, tends to innovate little, making sure that as most backwards compatibility is preserved — and just do a “blind update”, crossing my fingers, when the new version comes out.

After some thinking about this, from now on, I have split my usual posting between my other blog (Gwyn’s Home) and the corporate blogs here at Beta Technologies.

When I started blogging about Second Life®, my original purpose was quite naive: create a place where starting residents (newbies!) could find some information about Second Life. It was supposed to be a sort of “guide” — but a guide written by someone who was actually also starting her first steps in Second Life! Each time I figured something out, I would immediately blog about it (well, I had far more free time for blogging, that’s the simple truth!).

Soon, however, I found out that there were far too many “beginners’ guides” out there (my personal blog still gets lots of queries for “tutorials” or “free scripts” or “clothing templates!”), and I should just turn to something else: discussing the implications of living and working in a virtual environment.

That did, indeed, capture my attention for the past five years.