Clearly there is interest in adult-related MMO and MMORPG. It’s not an area we cover that much around here, but when we do search engine users seem to be digging it. Let’s give Age of Conan and Runescape props for making the top 5 through the first half of the year.

My post back in February 2006 on Pear computers the virtual computer inside Second Life is getting some search engine love too. SL citizens you can still find the Pear Store (SLurl: Watarrka Park 7,5,32).

Still curious what Steve Jobs would think about the Pear? Sort of a nice tribute to Apple, but the lawyer types might not be as open-minded.

Coming full circle to the search engine users landing here looking for more information on adult MMOs? Perhaps someday we’ll add that kind of coverage at a separate location. A place that’s adult-focused. I’m thinking the date 9-6-9 would be a good launch date, what do you think?

During my testing I found that within a minute or two my test message on Twitter was shown in the Tweet Scan search. Before going to publish I see Suezanne made a Wiki compiling helpful information for SL land owners.

If you’re looking for the official Twitter tracking tool, all you need to do is type in the Twitter message window: track KEYWORD(s)

And to untrack type: untrack KEYWORD(s). Then you’ll get real time updates when somebody is talking about they chosen keywords. This doesn’t have to be only Second Life you could use World of Warcraft, Kaneva, Lord of the Rings, whatever you want.

Try it and see if you can find some new Twitter friends to follow talking about your favorite MMO.

If this works, this could be a good resource to dynamically grow a specialized Google search engine based on links presented on this website as well as readers looking to find more information about a given topic. Try a search query below.

Try using this for keywords of interest in the virtual worlds / MMO space. If this turns out to be a useful tool we’ll add it to our search results page or some other obvious area so it can more easily be used. You can also access this search from the main Google search bar.

Note to fellow VTOR authors: if there are additional sites you’d like to add to the search, please let me know and I’ll drop you an invite to be able to add sites directly to the search.

CNN writes about Keotag:

from Reddit to Ice Rocket. Keotag will also do the heavy lifting of generating the folksonomy tags for a blog post, or submitting a bookmark to multiple sites. Created by founder and sole employee Eric Jally, Keotag is an example of a website you don’t know you need until you begin using it.

There isn’t anything fancy or complicated about Keotag, but sometimes the simplicity of a service is useful. It uses AJAX to load the results so you don’t have to click over and over again. Features that would be nice is the ability to combine the search results from all the services rather than having to click them one at a time to see the results. Still as a single page for bloggers and those interested in covering the virtual scene across many different sites, it’s a handy tool.

VTOR readers and SL residents familiar with the popular tagging service del.icio.us might want to stop by the Mosi Mosi sim (pictured above) and get your free Sloog HUD. With this HUD, you’ll be able to tag places and have them aggregated to your own page. You can also tag items privately so they aren’t shared with others.

The commands to tag separated by spaces and multiple words enclosed in quotes:

/7 tag: example “multiple keywords”

I tagged a few different places for an example. These were all moved to my page which you can see here. It was nice not having to register on the website, the HUD builds your page automatically after you tag your first item. An error message will appear if you try to visit your page if you haven’t tagged a location yet. You can click on a lock graphic and make your tagged entries private, unlocked means it’s shared with everybody. Pages are created in the format of:

sloog.org/users/SL_NAME

From the web, potential visitors can see where the place is in a mini-map that looks like this for our VTOReality.com location:

What else can you do at Sloog?
Search for tags and/or avatars either in world or from the sloog.org website. The format in world is:

/7 search: keyword

An example search of: /7 search: td returns:

[16:35] Sloog HUD v0.2: Searching for “TD”
[16:35] Sloog HUD v0.2: Your query returned the following results:
1) TD Scripts ::: secondlife://Monti/137/178
2) Musashi Motorsports Test Drive Yard and Satellite Shop ::: secondlife://Bruin/17/104
3) South Steam Hill – Old Millhouse and openair cinema ::: secondlife://Sunrise/22/107

The Sloog HUD by default is in the top left but can be placed anywhere.

This has me wondering if only the Universities with large computer science departments are able to spider the web that quickly? If that is the case I would assume the larger better known schools such as Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, The University of Southern California, Stanford University, University of California Los Angeles, Harvard, New York University,Yale University, and Princeton University will spider and find this article in an hour or so.

What about the other colleges and universities who’s computer science departments are not so well known? Auburn University, Florida State, Louisiana State University, Arkansas State University, Mississippi State University, University Of Mississippi, Iowa State University, and the list goes on. Are these schools going to be able to search the entire web and find these references to their schools, and if so how long will it take?

Now just for curiosity’s sake how about the smaller even lesser known local colleges and universities such as the one I attended; University of Louisiana Monroe, Louisiana Tech, Alcorn State University, Mississippi College, Xavier University Of Louisiana, Middle Tennessee State University, Tennessee Technological University, University Of Bridgeport, Brandeis University,Central Connecticut State University; just to name a few. Will these computer science departments spider the web and find this reference to their departments?>

I will be very interested in seeing the results of these schools ability to find this post, and how long it takes them to do so.

Yes, I realize I haven’t really made this post about virtual worlds, but sometimes a man simply wants to satisfy his curiosity.

This week Yahoo released a new service called Yahoo Pipes that allows anybody, especially non-programmer types, to be able to create mashups of feeds and services into a single pipe that generates RSS feeds. This allows all sorts of feed mashups that can be cloned by others, modified further and then shared so others can come along and clone your modifications. Y! Pipes has been on my list of things to check out this week when I had a few minutes and this evening after the radio show I finally got enough time.

One of the first things I did was conduct a search for “second life” and sure enough someone named silentium had already created a pipe for Second Life created from several different sources. I made a copy of the pipe and added VTOR to the list of fetched sources.

The pipe result can be seen here and the RSS feed is here if you want to add to your RSS reader.

This could be especially useful to other VTOR authors or SL residents wanting to scan many sources about Second Life news in one dynamic feed rather than pouring through multiple ones. You can clone the application, change the sources and/or modify to check out other virtual world news. In fact do a search first, maybe somebody else has already created something for WoW or MMO/MMORPG in general and you could clone that.

There’s a site called Ning that tried to do somthing vaguely similar (purists will forgive me for comparing the two, but they do share some conceptual similarities) but with full fledged applications like hotornot type PHP scripts and to date Ning hasn’t really taken off. Because Y! Pipes generates RSS feeds that can be consumed in other applications and could present some very interesting possibilities.

After the time his performance was to end, I instant messaged him to congratulate him on drawing a sim capacity crowd and just happened to mention I would be interested in including a story about him on this blog. Louis was kind enough to invite me over for a conversation. What follows is the fruit of that time spent with Louis.

After brief greeting formalities, I dove right into shooting questions at him. The first being would he share information about his world tours. I now imagine that he smiled and rolled his eyes, but answered, “Probably the best way to go about you getting info like that is to go to louislandon.com It’s all there.”

photos property of Louis Landon used with permission

Louis began playing the piano at an early age and continued until his early teens. At which time he picked up the electric guitar, started imitating such greats as Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, and Eric Clapton, playing the blues and rock and roll. When he turned twenty, he entered Berklee College of Music to study jazz and switched back to piano as his prime instrument. Eventually he met a saxophone player, John Payne, and headed out on a three year tour.

In the late seventies, Louis joined The John Hall Band who opened on tour for “Little Feat”, toured with Rupert ‘Pina Colada’ Holmes, worked with Ross Enterprises producing music for commercials, films, and videos. Oh, least I forget, during the summers he toured both nationally and internationally with the great Russian dancer, choreographer, and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The late eighties brought Louis into contact with the National Basketball Association producing music for their television commercials. In 1991, Louis officially opened his own music production and record company… Landon Music Company. In 2000, he joined Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers on tours to Malaysia, Istanbul, Turkey, and South America.

“I know it sounds glorious, but it was a job. My problem was I wasn’t doing what I really wanted to do – play my own music.” Louis once said in a quote to The Times Herald Record.

Asked how he came to Second Life, Louis answered, “I was on MySpace, and someone I met there turned me onto a guy who was promoting her. He actually promoted my CD in RL. Anyway, I came here and saw it as a tremendous marketing opportunity and it’s a lot of fun. It hooks me into a great audience. Plus, I can play concerts for 50 to 60 people every night from the comfort of my own home. It’s great practice for me. I also have been doing a lot of improv and everyone seems to love it.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if hundreds of people are now very aware of my music for the first time. If people hear my music and like it, and perhaps buy the CD. Then I have gained a fan. And everyone who buys my new CD, UNWIND, loves it People have been, for the most part, very supportive and very happy to have me perform here.”

Asked if he regularly fills sims, his response was,” I definitely have a following now. I started a fan club and I have a CEO who runs it and a VP who takes care of my Euro concerts. I am looking to put together a street team of strong fans who will go out there and find people to join my club and come to my concerts. Trying to build a buzz here (in Second Life) that will hopefully carry over in RL. I think this place is absolutely amazing. Eventually it will probably get like MySpace, but right now there are quality people on it who know what’s going on. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I hadn’t found really good fans who want to help me make it happen. So, this has been really great so far. I only see it getting better.”

I asked Louis if he spent much time in Second Life other than his concerts and promotions… “Not really. I have no time. I mean I like flying around and socializing with people I meet, but I’ve got a very busy, time consuming life. It’s not easy being an independent recording artist who can support a family.”

To my statement: Your talent should very well afford you that! His response was, “Thank you, but talent without proper business doesn’t afford very much at all. There are a lot of talented people out there. I am a late bloomer. It took me a long time to find my niche and really go for it. I have been all over the place musically. And I have come back to playing solo piano. I love it. I also love to sing, but I think my strength is more in my piano playing.”

After taking up more than my fair share of Louis “Volare” Landon’s valuable time, I was able to leave with the feeling I had met with an educated gentle/businessman with a true passion for his music who cares about creating “a more peaceful world by writing and performing music from the heart.” It was a pleasure to meet you Louis! You may not be taking a Limo to the Gulf Stream to get your music to the people, but you are getting your music to the people around the world… maybe only 40 to 60 at a time… but your music is definitely getting there!

Other Live Performer Reviews

Wow, Google is fast updating moved sites. As VTOR readers know, a week ago we moved the website to its own domain and we haven’t even gotten our sitemap in place yet, but Google already bumped the prior location (as they should have) in the search results. They also think VTOR stands as a misspelling for ‘victor’ so does this mean they want our group to be victorious? Ok, cheesy stretch. How are the other search engines doing with the move?

Yahoo search for VTOR (not updated yet):

Live.com search for VTOR (Microsoft, not updated yet):

Ask.com search for VTOR (they didn’t even have the nearly one year old site listed as the top result)