It took me awhile, but I finally found a good SecondLife island to critique. Reuters News Corp. has a great setup for their island in SecondLife. To complement its presence in SecondLife, Reuters has also established a website dedicated to news about SecondLife and the company’s role in SecondLife. I found it to be very interesting and quite easy to use. While there were a few things that were frustrating, it was a pleasant experience overall. This is quite a compliment coming from me, considering my newfound disgust for SecondLife (I’ll talk about the disgust in another blog entry). After comparing and contrasting the island with SkyNews’s island, I still found Reuters to have a superior system.
The first thing that I found to be pretty cool about this island is a bridge that you can walk across to get to the island. The interesting thing here is that the bridge is lined with signs (similar to ones you see on a highway) that give you a tutorial-like walk.
For example, one of the signs tells you how to move. Another one describes how to fly. Further down the bridge, there is a Reuters HUD available for the users. One can put this HUD (heads-up display) and get news about SecondLife stories as well as real-world events. 
Another interesting thing that is offered is through Reuters partner on the island, Acura. There is actually an Acura RDX car available for you to drive around in SecondLife. 
The coolest thing about Reuters’ island was their video. One could watch, among other thing, an interview with Desmond Tutu. In addition, there were videos that one could watch about top news, technology, etc.
As cool as all these features are, they each had a downside to them. For example, the bridge was a great experience. In fact, it could probably be used for a really, really simple replacement of Orientation Island. However, the problem is that the player does not start at the beginning of this bridge; he starts at the end. To get the effect of walking across the bridge, I had to fly to the beginning of the bridge and walk across. The HUD was actually a little bit difficult to setup because it was very slow. For example, I would touch the sign that gave me the HUD, but nothing would happen. I touched it again and again; still, nothing happened. About two minutes later, I got about seven messages asking me whether or not to keep the HUD. Next, it was not explained on how to establish the HUD so it took me sometime to figure that out. Actually, the first time I tried it, I attached it to my arm. The downside with the car is that you are not allowed to drive it on the island. They say that this done so that pedestrians are kept safe. You have to find somewhere else to drive it. Finally the videos about news and technology are cool, but I am not able to view them because my computer / internet connection is too slow.
As with many of the islands in SecondLife, there is much room for improvement. The first of which is setting the default teleport location to be the beginning of the bridge so that users may walk across it and get the full “tutorial” experience. Second, the HUD should be easier to establish. For example, they could call the object that you download something like: “right click and select attach to HUD for news updates.” Concerning the car, they should have teleports to other islands where one can drive the car. As far as the problems with the videos, I do not know what Reuters can do. To make streaming video work, the computer and internet connection must be fast. Perhaps Reuters can change its format to be more YouTube-like so that things will be faster. However, I am really unsure if this is possible.
To get a sense of just how good (or possibly, how bad) Reuters’ island was, I compared to another news organization’s island: SkyNews. I can definitely say that although I dislike SecondLife because I think much of it is slow and difficult to use, Reuters is way ahead of the game. SkyNews is a lot different than Reuters’ island. Their main purpose is not necessarily to share the news. Instead, they have recreated the SkyNews newsroom. This is done so that users (and probably viewers of SkyNews) can see more than just what they see on a regular news broadcast. From what I found, there is no way to actually get the news in a HUD like Reuters. Also, while I think it is possible to watch SkyNews, it was way too hard to find on the island. They had a SkyNews TV that one could add to his inventory, but you had to be on an island where you were allowed to place the object so that you could watch it. Like attempting to place other objects on islands, this proved to be pretty much impossible.
Concluding, I have to say that I really enjoyed my experience on Reuters’ island. Although I believe that SecondLife is not the greatest thing in the world, I have found that Reuters has a great presence in it. For now though, I will still get my news by more traditional means like newspapers, TV, and the internet. So while Reuters has not got me as a frequent visitor to its island in SecondLife, it does have me as a visitor to its site and viewer of its news.