Second Life

1. How have you chosen to represent yourself?

In Second Life you can:

Go Abroad. Amsterdam is one of the leading destinations in Second Life, because it's extremely well-done. It's a beautiful re-creation of real-life Amsterdam. It is also one of the most popular sex businesses in Second Life. 

Talk to other people.

Dancing. There's music playing -- it's streaming audio that plays over your PC speakers. Everybody hears the same music. You click on a "dance ball," and away you go -- your avatar starts dancing, with all the other dancing avatars.  And while you're dancing, you're engaged in text chat with the other dancers around you.

Listen to live music and attend other live events. One of the most popular activities in Second Life. Real-life musicians and DJs use streaming audio to send their sounds into SL, and avatars gather to listen. You can find just about every genre and era of music, from jazz to hip-hop. 

Building and creating things. People spend huge amounts of time in Second Life building and scripting houses and furniture and especially clothing and avatars. Users write scripts to control haw the avatars move. They create vehicles to drive or fly around or through Second Life. They give a lot of this stuff away and sell a lot of it, too. 

Doing business. You can make real-world money in Second Life. Most of the people in business in Second Life aren't making any significant amounts of money at all. Business is a game in Second Life. Doing business in Second Life has many of the same benefits that it has in the real world. 

Shopping. With all those people building clothes and avatars and vehicles and things, Second Life has plenty of shops, and you can while away many pleasant hours committing SL retail. Shopping is cheap in Second Life. 

Role-playing games: The Second Life variety of RPG is half improvisational theater, and half re-enactment. Players behave and move in character, and interact with each other. 

Other kinds of games. WoW/Everquest-style fantasy games are all on SL, as well as shoot-em-ups, and even quidditch, from the Harry Potter novels. 

See the sights.  Explore and look at all the beautiful things users have built. The SL search tool, which is part of the software client, has a list of popular places, along with their coordinates. You can also search on keywords.

Sailing. The Nantucket Yacht Club and other in-game venues offer sailing in Second Life.

Surfing. You can get a virtual surfboard in Second Life

Linden Lab own Second Life and has the majority of its funding from Globespan Capital Partners. also with global brand owners such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor as well as companies such as  the Omidyar Network and Catamount Ventures helping with funding.

Although Second Life was produced by Linden Lab it enable its consumers to become the producers. It is a good example of online media being produced by the public.

Web 2.0

Wikis - a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser

Six Degrees - A Facebook platform application named “Six Degrees" was developed by Karl Bunyan, which calculates the degrees of separation between different people. The average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees, whereas the maximum degree of separation is 12. The application has a "Search for Connections" window to input any name of a Facebook user, to which it then shows the chain of connections.

Perpetual Beta - a term used to describe software or a system which remains at the beta-development stage for an extended or even indefinite period of time

FOAF - an acronym of Friend of a friend is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

User Centered - an application that is specifically centered around the users needs

Joy of Use -

Usability - a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

Widgets -In computing a web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

Simplicity -

Browser - a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.

AJAX - a group of techniques for creating interactive web applications, in which applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.

Design -

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets  is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

Pay Per Click - an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. 

Social Software - encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics like  the ability to upload data and media.