Sloog Gets its Tags Up in Second Life
I’m going to go ahead and call Sloog the best Web 2.0-style site for the virtual world of Second Life that I’ve seen yet. Sloog lets you tag locations in Second Life, storing them in the Sloog system so you can access them later on the Web. It’s a bit like del.icio.us tagging or Digg-ing virtual places, and it’s not a new function for SL users, but this is the best implementation of it I’ve seen yet.
Sloog is competing mainly with two established SL apps, Koz Farina’s BlogHUD and the SLurlMarker system, built by several SL residents, that lets you post SL locations to del.icio.us. Both are great apps, but for location-tagging I think Sloog takes the cake. BlogHUD is, of course, more of a blogging system than anything else, although residents often use it to note interesting locations in SL. SLurlMarker is good at posting locations to del.icio.us, but isn’t as good as Sloog at knowing when two different people have tagged the same location. Sloog seems to do this by tagging not specific X/Y/Z coordinates, as SLurlMarker does, but by tagging plots of land instead. For instance, Sloog knows that six different people (including myself) have tagged the Sloog HQ in Brannon. There’s no way we could all have been standing in exactly the same place when we made those tags. Sloog also provides direct teleport links to the locations that have been tagged — along with a cute little Sloog button that would be great for a code snippet for people to put on their Web pages.
I got the chance to chat briefly with SL resident Atomo Hosho, the man behind the Sloog team, before Second Life went down for maintenance this morning. (That’s him in the black, with me, at the Sloog HQ.) Sloog is a creation of hip Barcelona-based media and design firm Mosi-Mosi, and the Sloog offices are hung with nice examples of Mosi-Mosi’s work. Part of the offices will eventually become a gallery for SL and RL graffiti artists, photographers and illustrators that dovetail with Mosi-Mosi’s cool aesthetic. The firm has been experimenting in Second Life for about 6 months, and Sloog is their first offering to the virtual world.
Sloog is still in “beta0.1,” to be sure, and some things about it could stand improvement. But I really had only two complaints of any substance, one unknown, plus two quibbles:
• The search function doesn’t search across the names of SL regions
• Something more needs to be communicated when no search results are returned
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to see a list of all the people who have tagged a location. Sloog HQ, for instance, has been tagged by six people, but only three of them show up.
• The FAQ page needs a darker font
• The banner at the top of the page needs to be an active link to Sloog.org
None of that is particularly damning, though. Even better, Atomo said Mosi-Mosi is considering developing a friendship system for Sloog, one that would match users by affinity based on what they’ve tagged. This reminds me of the way last.fm creates “neighbors” for you based on the music you listen to. So, for example, if you favor the “nightclub” tag, you’d be matched with other users who are heavy taggers of nightclubs. You could then browse the locations they’d tagged to see if there was a nightclub you’d missed, etc. That is, of course, a crude example, but the potential of that kind of system isn’t hard to envision.
Part of what makes Sloog my favorite Web 2.0-style site for SL, though, is just the look of it. The pages are clean, the fonts are easy (with the exception of the FAQ page), the instructions are mostly clear (though they could be slightly more so), and, most importantly, it’s immediately apparent what’s going on as soon as you hit the front page.
Of course, there could easily be a site I’m forgetting about, or one I just haven’t seen. So of course I’m considering using this as an opportunity to launch a “best of the SL Web” contest. Feel free to nominate sites in the comments thread below.
Feeds
To be fair to Slurlmarker, it has only recently become possible to actually get parcel details via LSL (using the llGetParcelDetails function, appropriately enough). There would be issues if they are relying just on that - parcels don’t remain constant, they are bought and sold and altered and change name.
Hi there! Thanks for the article, it was nice to meet you today.
We appreciate your complaints/comments and have just resolved a few of them, such as the font color, a brief explanation that only users how saved that place as “public” are shown, and the link to the home page on the logo. The other two will take just a little more time, as soon as our php coder can put his fingers on it.
Regarding Ordinal comment, we store both exact coordinates, parcel name, and region name. We group bookmarks by parcel name, as we think this is the more useful unit, however we still get the exact position each user tagged a place, so as soon as our database is full enough we can provide more accurate information.
True that parcels can be bought and sold or renamed, and it’s the first big issue we discussed about here. However, we finally decided that it’s similar to how the web works, that is, you still get 404 errors sometimes for old sites, but they tend to be quickly replaced by newer ones. Anyway, we’d like to hear your oppinions or suggestions on this, we think ourl tool is flexible enough as to be tweaked as necessary.
Cheers!
WOW, Sloog is cool. Thank you Mark for being on top of these things!
-G
I agree that it makes more logical sense to tag parcels rather than positions - people are interested in places, not points. This has been something I’ve been thinking about myself in my various tagging, blogging and sim mapping projects.
On the mainland it is possible to have a system which sends out a sensor probe using WarpPos every now and then to check all of the tagged locations and update their parcel names, which would help if people change the names of their parcels slightly (which they often do) and also be able to tell whether the owner has changed. A tag should be persistent across name changes, but probably not across owners.
On islands this is not practical unfortunately, not with pure LSL. A client bot could perhaps do it.
>it has only recently become possible to actually get parcel details via LSL (using the llGetParcelDetails function, appropriately enough).
Wow, they just slipped that in, without any community discussion, as usual.
I remember when some hacker type provocative put this in the “Linden Answers” column and it was deliberately ignored; it was understood that it was controversial.
It makes it possible for people to scrape everyone else’s business data essentially, especially in an economy so dependent on land sales and rentals. It’s what some past hackers were doing when they sniffed packets to get a leg up in the land baron business.
It means that all kinds of information can be aggregated and exploited, just as with SL Stats, remember?
Now we’ll get any number of lectures from codesters about how “information wants to be free” and all the rest but in an environment where those who are able to code get to grab everybody’s information and exploit it for profit, what are the checks and balances?
I suppose llGetParcelDetails is what enables landbots to function to swoop.
And it really is an unfair disadvantage for mainland owners, that they are vulnerable to scraping, but islands aren’t — you can buy your way out of a scrape.
As for tagging, for years, all kinds of boneheaded hackers have been going aruond littering their singleton prims on other people’s parcels in the name of “science”. If you object, they tell you that it is “temp on rez” — as if that makes it ok (and it would be endlessly parsed whether in fact this did or did not lag sims). Often they were nothing of the sort, as you could see the person’s name and that prim for days. It would force you to put land on autoreturn which was inconvenient for newbies and/or weed out open groups because these prim scanners were constantly trying to use everybody else’s land for their personal networking sandboxes. This also sparked the movement of 16m2 parcel griefing as well.
This is a cool idea… but I am still concerned about the SL version of link rot… parcels change way faster than websites do, in my experience.
I’m interested in using this more in my regular adventures; I’d like to see a service take on the mantle of ROAM Search, which was formerly located @ http://www.roamsearch.com (looking through the Internet Archive could net you some vintage snapshots).
The Sloog “mascot” really reminds me of a Futurama brainslug. I’m so tempted to wear it. (I remember when Oz Spade made one and we walked around for days…)
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