Thursday 23 August 2018

Making More of Google Plus Communities and Blogging

I have been running the Google plus Opensim Virtual community for nearly six years now. It was launched on December 8th 2012 when Google announced the social media platform was about to start. My aim was to build a community to try and bring people together in the Opensim Metaverse and it's been pretty successful at doing that. It has always featured top of the list on Hypergrid Business and the membership has grown to over 2000. Many have said OV is a great sauce of news and information about what is happening and, true enough, I have encouraged all that.

I wanted OV to provide a platform to promote Opensim grids, products and services as well as entertainment venues. Today we get a lot of promotions and I found I had to figure a way to limit some and try to push interesting topics to the top of the page, especially if they were getting a lot of comments. More recently I started removing promotions at advertised entertainment events where the event time and date has passed so it has become much more work to maintain. However, it is still proving popular so I don't see me giving up on it any time soon.

I took on another community several years ago too, The Adult Metaverse but mainly as a way to divert more adult material away from what I deemed was family friendly OV. This community I took over jointly with Nara Malone of the Writers Colony at Nara's Nook Grid and together we have kept its focus on adult themes found in Opensim worlds.

 

As far as blogging goes I will admit I have a love/hate affair with it. I do like to write interesting stuff about the open Metaverse and, as always, I promote Opensim when ever there is something I can go on about. I had been very quite in blogging for the past year but recently important events happened that affects everyone that use these spaces. First, Maria Korolov, editor of Hypergrid Business announced she was winding her coverage of Opensim down and would not be publishing her monthly stats update which had been very popular. Then, just recently, the walled garden grid InWorldz crashed due to financial troubles and there was a great exodus of residents to other Opensim grids. How could I not blog about all of this?

So I have been blogging again as well and I have pretty much kept my readers up to date on the recent events. I have published five articles since mid July and the last one was a "Breaking News" scoop when I got a heads-up about the new Infiniti grid. I don't want to lose the momentum so I will be publishing another article again shortly apart from this one and I intend to keep my ear to the ground looking for important news about the Opensim Metaverse.

I think it is time I started covering other platforms related to VR too. I have done so briefly in the past here and there but so many are now in development or active like High Fidelity, SineSpace and Linden Lab's Sansar that I really should draw on it for new material to blog about to add to my coverage of Opensim. So please stay tuned and watch this space.