Sue Martin Mahar and Jay Mahar presenting their book
Virtual Worlds such as Second Life enable you to interact in the third and fourth dimensions. Four dimensions? Yes, as is explained so well in the book The Unofficial Guide to Building your Business in the Second Life ™ virtual world, the third dimension is the depth of field while the fourth dimension is the most distinguishing feature: the social connections.
Sue Martin Mahar and Jay Mahar spoke passionately about this fourth dimension at a presentation of their book in San Francisco.
“Online social networks strengthen weak ties”, Jay said. “Facebook does that. But not as well as Second Life.”
So where is Second Life going and where is it now? Sue: “Second Life is somewhere between pubescence and adolescence.”
It is obvious that Sue and Jay are great believers in virtual worlds. Their book explains Second Life well for a broader audience, but it is useful and fun to read for experienced residents as well.
Jay Mahar is a music promotor in Second Life at Molaskey’s Pub (as well as the coordinator of the music track at the Second Life Convention 2009) and he tells the stories of many very active or even famous avatars. It is interesting to read more about their activities in music, the sciences, education, business or the non-profits.
The book gives at lot of concrete information about setting up a Second Life presence. I don’t always agree with the recommendations, like for instance this advice regarding the personal profiles: “don’t announce where you live or use real names until a trust is established in a relationship.”
I think, especially in business, that trust would be established more easily if people would just say who they are, like most people do on their blogs.
However, the book gives tons of good advice about setting up and running businesses in Second Life – aspects such as business plans, hiring people, marketing and PR, legal issues etc.
Jay and Sue are very convinced that virtual worlds will become even bigger business in the following years.
They do admit that in the board rooms of corporations and institutions older people who struggled not that long ago with email don’t make it easy to introduce virtual environments as normal professional tools.
The millions of kids and teens who grow up with virtual worlds, often promoted by big corporations such as McDonald’s or Disney, will expect to use these same possibilities for work and study. Jay thinks that this process will take not even ten years.
This does not have to mean that Second Life will be the compelling solution. Jay referred to AOL: the breakthrough of the web was not exactly the breakthrough of AOL.
Sue and Jay don’t see virtual worlds in isolation from other media. Particularly for music promotion it makes much sense to also use other media such as internet radio and the other social media and streaming services.
My take on this? Whether an eventual second edition will still be that focused on Second Life remains to be seen, but it is rather improbable. Upcoming new worlds and the importance of embedding “virtual” businesses in a broad panoply of internet tools and services will give authors such as Jay and Sue more work than ever before and they will have to expand their coverage.
In the meantime this book is a must read for all those who are interested in the serious use of Second Life – whether it be for profit or for non-profit ventures.
The book is published by Amacom, a division of the American Management Association.
Roland Legrand
