Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Second Life® Home Page

We’ve all laughed at how awful the default avatars could be in Second Life. Their dreadful appearance probably contributed to the low retention rate of first-time users (Wager James Au, in New World Notes, often cites that only 10% of us stick around after our first log-in).  As a recent blog from Linden Lab® admits in its title, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.“

I’m very pleased that Linden Lab has teamed up with some very good skin and clothing designers to produce a line of avatars for newcomers.  These pictures cannot lie; the old avatars look awful in any photo, and these will provide much better starting points.

Good job, Linden Lab! Now if you could only make other aspects of the first hours in-world more rewarding.  Then get the roads to work better…or maybe not.  I like the challenges of surreal driving. 
Back to Tenchi’s and my racing adventures, in the next post for the week ahead…

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts