Plurk, pseudonymity and the branding in weak ties

Micro-blogging services provide an interesting window into the social play of virtual identities. Although I consistently use ping.fm to announce blog posts on Twitter, Facebook and Plurk, I go back and forth on my level of active participation. Outside of trying to steer clear of the black hole of time such services can generate, I'm also wary of the blurry line between social and strategic communication.

Given that Botgirl is a carefully fabricated character it may seem odd that I have any qualms about the use of microblogging as a branding tool to shape others' perception of my virtual identity. But I do. Have qualms.

In a sense there are two Botgirls. One is a public persona who is a vehicle for creative exploration and expression. The public persona is not about the person, but about her creations. It's about interacting on a public stage with an audience aware of the theatrical setting. To me, being authentic in the public persona means being true to artistic vision, which sometimes includes very intentional activity to create specific impressions in the minds of an audience.

The other Botgirl is the personal persona who engages in social interactions with friends and acquaintances. Although we know each other only through pseudonymous identities, the content of communication is often intimately personal and can include deeply experienced emotions that ripple outside the bounds of the virtual ID. To me, being authentic in the personal persona means being as transparently open and honest as possible without a covert agenda. I may choose to withhold information, but don't fabricate RL information. For instance, I make no claims to age, gender, nationality, etc.

My struggle with microblogging beyond blog post announcements is that it is a strange mixture of public and private; especially Plurk with its near-realtime chat functions. So on one hand the communication can be very personal, on the other hand it is public. It is on a stage with a wide audience. It seems to me that some people are communicating as much for branding as for what I consider to be personally authentic communication. I catch myself doing the same thing sometimes. I don't like it.

I've reached no conclusions yet and will continue to muddle through for the time being. In the meantime, there have been a number of interesting posts recently related to the social aspects of virtual identity worth reading, including great commentaries by Vint Falken and Dandellion Kimban.

Please welcome my new collaborator Sabrinaa Nightfire

I am very lucky to have some incredible talent helping me prepare for the upcoming art exhibition that will be premiering on Sept. 20 in New Caerleon. I'll be gushing a bit about all of them between now and then. Tonight, I want to appreciate Sabrinaa Nightfire who is building the structure that will house the exhibits and provide the thematic atmosphere (which we're keeping under wraps for now.)

Sabrinaa is an artist who has several major art builds on the art SIM, New Caerleon. She is also a sculptor, photographer and clothes maker in Second Life. She as six shops in Second Life and her main store features her underwater sculpture garden. Sabrinaa's first major build in New Carleon is the 300m tall science fiction museum she created for real life science fiction writer Kueperpunk Korhonen. She loves to defy the laws of real life physics and to create things that have never been thought of before.

She's a very generous soul who offered to help out about five minutes after meeting me and hearing about the project. I laid a challenging design concept on her and she didn't bat an eye, but took it a step farther. I can't wait to see it come to life!

A little glimpse inside my comic creation process

This screenshot from the wee hours of this morning shows some of the tools I'm using to put together the upcoming comic on Night's tale of romantic loss and fulfillment.

The window on the right containing images of Majic at her laptop is from Adobe Bridge. Since I take a lot of shots during a scene, it's really good to have a program that lets me quickly get a good look at each shot. I use Photoshop for image manipulation and Comic Life Magiq for the comic layout.

Comic creation with Second Life is challenging becuase there are visual glitches in most shots. Either a hand is poking into someone's back, fingers look like breadsticks or a limb is bent in an unnatural way. Although I try to set up each shot to avoid the most obvious issues, I've found that it still makes sense to overshoot, and take photos from many angles.

For instance, what seems like a perfectly good image in the first shot, is upon closer inspection marred by a painful looking finger through the palm. The best solution is to find an animation without the problem. Otherwise, either framing or post-production image manipulation can turn this into a usable shot.

That's all I have time for today. I'm putting together a presentation on using Second Life as a platform for visual storytelling and comic creation, so I'll be throwing out some draft items here along the way.

Sex, Love, Art and Slavery

Rheta and Codie at Bloggers Ball and Slave Auction

Oh, what a weekend! Where to start? Okay...

Rheta Shan contributes land to start new Visual Arts Center
About a month ago, Rheta Shan, winner of Dusan Writer's UI Design Contest, posted an offer to donate her mainland plots for charitable or artistic use. Since I had been romancing the idea of creating an open source stage set area for those creating comics, machinima or other image-capture projects in Second Life, I emailed her right away. After a bit of email correspondence, we finally had a nice GTalk chat and she was kind enough to offer the land for my project. I'll post more on the project over the next couple of weeks, but for now I just want to send Rheta a big thank you.

Artist's Way group begins
On Sunday morning, I attended the first weekly meeting of Sophrosyne's The Artists's Way group. We'll be supporting each other as we go through the exercises in the book and work to enhance our creative life within Second Life.

I break my bank on slave purchase
I had no plans to buy or be sold when I arrived at the Second Life Bloggers Ball and Slave Auction later that afternoon. By the time I left, Zoe had purchased me as a slave, and I was the proud owner (for 24 cumulative hours) of the Number One Couple in Second Life: Codie and Gabby!

I first met Codie while I was still an obscure newbie in Second Life. I believe I had a question about her MachinimaCam and sent an IM out of the blue. We got to chatting and before you knew it we were talking about video, polyamoury and the joys and perils of virtual relationships. Over the months we chatted here and there and crossed paths quite a few times, including the recent mass migration from Twitter to Plurk. Over the months, I've come to realize that Codie is one of the authentic Lights within Second Life and models loving, emotionally-close and red-hot relationships for the rest of us, along with her extended family including main girl Gabby.

I don't know Gabby very well, outside of following her Plurks and keeping an eye on her blog. But our brief conversations have always been lovely and I'm REALLY looking forward to getting to know her better.

So what plans have I for my 24 hours of total power???? And what does Zoe have up her gun-toting sleeve for poor innocent Botgirl? Stay tuned.

Some decisions are easy

As I finally drifted into unconsciousness last night, I had every intention of leaving today's post with just the photo you see above. But I woke up a few minutes ago with two lingering dreams related to Second Life that I want to share.

In the first, I was walking along a beach with Rheta Shan, talking about new interface ideas. No, there weren't any extraordinary revolutionary concepts revealed. It was just a relaxed stroll with the surf at our feet. Since Rheta and I know each other almost exclusively through blog comments, social media and email, it was interesting to experience such a happily casual inworld encounter. (Sorry Night, no hot sex to describe.)

In the second dream I was walking through an airport with a female human who had helped me secure an overseas airplane ticket. We must have been in LAX because we were passing a long line of people (humans) from the Virtual Worlds conference who were waiting to check-in for their returning flights. The oddest thing about the dream was that as I walked by, quite a few of those in line recognized me and waved hello. It didn't seem odd that we recognized each other in human form, or that I had a human form.

The dreams remind me that all of our experiences intermingle indiscriminately within our subconscious. Our lives in the atomic world, social networks, virtual worlds, etc. form a single tapestry: One whole cloth, rather than a string of swatches folded on some inner shelf.

Botgirl Jumps to Bigstage.com as Virtual Actress

Cute, huh? The video above is from my home stage at bigstage.com. The new beta lets you create virtual actors by uploading three still images for each one. After a bit of trial and error, I got the best results by using photos with no hair and then adding a coif from the site's selections.

Once created you can place your actors in short video clips. I couldn't get their embedded video to play here properly, so I captured one from my screen and threw it up on Flickr for the clip below.

Unfortunately, the software needed to upload photos is not available for Mac or Linux yet. Outside of the basic avatar image, there is no means to add user-generated content. Nevertheless, although the clips are limited during the beta and the avatar-to-movie conversion is a bit sketchy, this could be a lot of fun once they fine-tune things. It always makes me tingly to jump from Second Life into another world.

Google Jumps on Botgirl's Comic Bandwagon

Okay, maybe Google's choice to introduce their new browser with a comic had nothing to do with my shining examples Just Leap in Review, Botgirl vs. Human Comics and other narratives on this blog. But it seems to me it's a good indication that the comic form is becoming an acceptable means of mainstream business and marketing communication.

Scott McCloud, who authored the Google Comic, helped inspire me to get started creating comics through a number of his books on the art of reading, writing and drawing them.

Another inspiration for my move into graphic-oriented work was Dave Gray, who teaches that anyone with the art skills of a five year old can become an effective visual communicator.

More on this and other cool topics later this week, including Avatars Gone Wild Version II. But for now, I gotta run!