Corinne's IST 110H Blog

There is not much about Second Life that I understand. I don’t know why people would spend so much of their recreational time fiddling with it or why it is important to construct the perfect avatar or even why some insist that it is in no way a game. However, there is one aspect of Second Life that I understand and even have a respect for, and that is businesses using the site for practical uses. IBM uses the site in many different ways. One way that it uses it is to give more information about the company to consumers, potential employees, and even other businesses. IBM also uses SL as a way to hold meetings with its employees, which I thought to be slightly dysfunctional until our class help a similar meeting. I thought that if the members of the meeting had things like their jobs on the line they would be less inclined to take off all of their clothes and drop down on their colleagues at inappropriate times. I think that without this little defect our class meeting could have been fairly effective.

The things that IBM has on their island, well the one that I explored, as IBM has many, are conference rooms, theaters, and even media centers. As a person who is still inept at SL workings I found the island fairly easy to navigate and it helped that there were people to ask if I wanted to find something interesting to look at.

“The Sales Center Reception area of the business center is staffed 24 hours per day, 5 days per week, with global access from Los Angeles to Paris to Sydney.” –cnet.com IBM makes it very clear that they are user friendly and I liked this quote that I found on cnet.com and I did not find anything like this on the Sun Microsystems site which is the next one that I explored.

I think I would recommend this space to a friend if I thought that they had a particular interest in the business. It was well organized and there are a lot of websites online that reference this particular presence on SL so it was easy for me to find outside information.

The other island that I decided to visit was one from Sun Microsystems. I thought I would go back and explore more with this company because I did this particular one when examining the blogging policies and I wanted to make a link of sorts. The Second Life space for Sun Microsystems did not seem to be as developed as that of IBM. I also found that there weren’t many people to ask questions so I had a hard time navigating the island and I had a hard time finding things that would be of particular interest to me and that would prove interesting to mention in my blog entry. Also there were several islands of Sun Microsystems but many of them would not let me go there. There was only one that I found that would allow me access in the first place and once I got there I was disappointed with the lack of interaction that I experienced when exploring IBM.