On hearing about Linden Lab’s Second Life , many professional people dismiss it as pointless. After all, with enough going on in their first life, why on earth would they want a second? A visit to the site usually confirms their suspicions. Who wants to spend time creating an avatar – a 3D caricature – and then trundle around a strange, virtual world bumping into peculiar-looking characters who sometimes do and say odd things?

The question is usually rhetorical, but the true answer is that if Second Life makes life better for an individual or an organisation – however they choose to measure ‘better’ – then they will adopt it.

You may recall the early days of the web: geeks ruled and it was full of nonsense. Anyone trying to engage with that world found it strange and intimidating. It contained a lot of good stuff, but it wasn’t easy to find for the average user. Yet as time went by, the web was transformed into a richly informative world offering serious and valuable services. The geeks are still there and the nonsense too, but they’ve been buried under mountains of good stuff.

Second Life is beginning to undergo a similar transformation. Businesses such as IBM and Cisco , for example, have stupendous presences there. You could be cynical and say that they have much to gain from the creation of an online world – both are into the underpinning infrastructure – but that would be to miss the point. They have found interesting ways to inform, educate, entertain and engage with their clients, prospects and staff. In IBM’s case, it wants to enable customers to transact business there.

NETg, the company that Thomson sold to SkillSoft , has a significant and high-quality training presence on Second Life at the Academy of Second Learning. Students can engage in two-way dialogue with tutors, listen to recordings, watch movies, meet up, and even dance, with fellow students.

Thomson itself, by contrast, has a 13-storey double-fronted building out by the Montserrat Beach Club; at the time of writing, it had only one properly furnished room plus a robot that offers a virtual drink on arrival. You can watch a movie about the early days of indexing or dive over to a website to watch a company presentation and that’s about it. Quite what movie you’re going to see is unclear, you have to click Play and hope for something interesting. Like so many Second Life sites at the moment, Thomson’s still appears to be finding its feet.

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

A number of libraries and galleries have found their way into this virtual world, some of which are pretty impressive in an architectural sense. The volunteer-run Alliance Second Life Library on Info Island provides armchairs and reading material. You can ‘buy’, for $0, out-of-copyright books such as Little Women or Dracula and read them as plain-text in a resizable window.

Or you can visit the reference section to consult a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopaedia and so on. Each takes you to the appropriate website. And, of course, to its advertisements. In fact, the link to the dictionary server doesn’t work. The idea of hooking Second Life to the web and vice versa (through Slurl links on web pages) is a good one but requires diligent maintenance of the hyperlinks.

Back in the library, you can also pick up magazines which can be read in situ or transferred as Acrobat files to your browser. Some libraries hang paintings and photographs, exhibit sculptures and hold book readings. The trick is to get people to attend. And this is where an Second Life presence, as an extension of a real world or web presence, could pay dividends for an organisation.

Before plunging into further detail, let’s say that Second Life is embryonic today but offers potential. Given a fairly up-to-date personal computer or laptop to render the graphics, it can provide an easily navigable source of information. It is much more natural to move around a virtual room or a virtual building than it is to navigate web menus or click on hyperlinks. You can walk, run or fly, depending on your patience and the distance to be travelled. And you can teleport from one place to another in moments.

You can create private as well as public areas, providing meeting spaces and experimental areas beyond the public’s gaze. Many companies are cutting their Second Life teeth in this way. Some have come a long way; others need help.

Locations that marry the skills of the information professional with those of the virtual world architect will be able to make the most of this new domain – always assuming that the exercise delivers value to the organisation, of course.

The main benefits of Second Life are that you can access and share information and communicate with others in real-time but independently of geography. Audio and video can be streamed in and hyperlinks work both ways between the web and Second Life.

Sure, if you take the 3D out of the equation, you could do the same with a suitable mix of Skype, videoconferencing and the web, say. But Second Life’s visualisation is taking place in front of you and at low cost.

Without the expense of a videoconferencing system, you get a similar experience, even if you are typing rather than talking, and are represented by an avatar rather than a moving image of yourself. But do you know what? It doesn’t matter that much. Not for everyday discussions, anyway. Plus, you get a transcript of your conversations.

You can make your avatar reflect whatever aspect of your personality you want. If you’ve always fancied green hair, a beard or earrings, go right ahead. Your avatar (which can be changed as easily as your clothes) will probably reflect the nature of your business and the sort of people you’re likely to meet.

One odd aspect of Second Life is that, unless you pay extra, you cannot use your real name. This, together with the avatar, diminishes authenticity and presents a small, but surmountable, barrier to business communications.

Perhaps most importantly, you are meeting people in an agreed context. It’s not like email, instant messaging or phone calls which can be intrusive. Whether by accident or design, you will find people at your destination who share your interests. Assuming there is anyone there. Even though Second Life says it has over 2.5 million residents, in early 2007 only around 20,000 of them would be online at any time. But a tiny fraction of them were in the ‘serious’ venues – you can find plenty of distractions if you want them.

Communication is usually by typing, although there’s nothing to stop you having an accompanying Skype conversation. Integrated voice communication is very much on Linden Lab’s mind. It will come. At the moment, if someone’s typing, you can see their hands tapping away on an invisible keyboard (unless they’ve bought a virtual computer). This is a useful cue to hold off hitting your own Enter key.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

You can display messages interleaved chat-style, or in the form of speech bubbles – or both. Art Fossett (not his real name) at Eduserv has created an experimental gathering space inside a floating bubble for meetings where you raise your hand when you want to contribute and an electronic chairman ensures you get your turn. This seems like a good idea, to try and stop people ‘speaking’ over each other, even if it is reminiscent of school. Second Life also lets you communicate one-on-one through its instant messaging function.

IBM calls its Second Life activities “ v-business ” – an echo of its e-business activities. The company has six islands and 230 employees ‘in-world’, to use the vernacular. It is working hard on improving the transfer of information between Second Life and the real world, and speaks of patent applications for its so far secret innovations. With so much selfless volunteering going on in Second Life, a strictly commercial approach comes as a bit of a shock.

But then, volunteer fatigue sets in, as the people at the Second Life Library have already discovered. A regular complaint is that the library is often empty with no staff to help out. It simply isn’t possible to man something 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the off-chance that someone will stop by.

Fossett has installed a big red button in reception to summon help. Hit the button and an email is automatically fired off. If Fossett or a colleague is available, one of them will turn up quickly.

Information can be presented in a number of ways, including straightforward posters on the wall, objects which display a scrolling text box when clicked, links out to web URLs, streamed audio and video. Depending on bandwidth, the power of the client machine and performance of the server, video can be jerky or smooth. Everything travels over the public internet and, while this doesn’t much affect the rendering of the virtual world, it certainly affects streamed information.

FREE ENTRY

Anyone can participate in Second Life for free, although if they want to build a presence, buy land or create objects, there’s a monthly fee, unless they can find a landlord willing to let or give away space. For example, Talis bought a parcel of land, called it Cybrary City, and handed it over to the Alliance Library System which, at the time of writing, has given small buildings to over 30 libraries, each of which is building its own presence. It costs them nothing apart from a donation of two hours a week to the Alliance Second Life Library. Talis, of course, is more than happy to help residents incorporate components of its own information platform into their Second Life presence.

Normally, space costs $1,675 for 65,536 square metres, and there’s a monthly maintenance fee of $295. Academic organisations and non-profits pay substantially less.

Neville Hobson, a business communicator and technology enthusiast, is vice-president of a new marketing company called Crayon, which specialises in social media. A few months ago, he and his colleagues, set up a Second Life island called Crayonville, with a main office, an office block, a diner, an amphitheatre and a cinema.

Hobson is unusual in that he paid for his avatar to be crafted rather than taking one off the peg and adapting it himself. He told IWR that “a realistic tailor-made avatar could cost thousands of real dollars [as opposed to Linden dollars, Second Life’s currency, which floats at about 267 to the real dollar]”.

He won’t say what Crayon has spent so far, but claims: “It’s not unusual for a company to spend $40,000 to make their island look reasonably good.”

Linden Lab has created a platform where clients are experimenting with virtual reality. Those experiments are a mixed bag, but Second Life will evolve, just as the web did as developers found their feet.

The company has recently made the viewer, the part that runs on your computer, open source, to encourage more new development while Linden Lab focuses on the platform and the software and services needed to support it.

ESSENTIAL IMPROVEMENTS

Search is an area which is ripe for improvement. It is not easy to find locations of interest unless you are pointed there by a third party. This, and speech empowerment for the typing-averse, are areas that need to be looked at as a matter of urgency.

It’s up to information professionals to figure out how to use Second Life to augment rather than just mirror real life. A small investment of time and effort right now will help you understand the potential and then choose from a position of knowledge whether it will, one day, be right for you and your organisation.