Residents Speak: Katt Kongo

When I wrote a story for CNET News.com yesterday about a new National Football League initiative, one of the pieces of source material I used was a full-page ad the NFL had placed in The New York Times.

In the ad, I noticed, the league's copywriter had misspelled a word, using "complimentary" instead of "complementary."

Well, it wasn't that big a deal, but particularly because they made the error in such a prominent place, it made me think about something that Metaverse Messenger publisher Katt Kongo told me when I interviewed her for my book, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life.

As you may know, the Messenger is one of the more popular Second Life publications, coming out each week and reaching a fairly wide audience. Big enough that Katt is able to live off of the money she makes from it.

And when I asked her for some suggestions that anyone wanting to run an SL blog as a business should be sure to follow, she had several to offer that covered a number of different bases.

But the one that the NFL's gaffe reminded me of was this: "Try to proofread carefully. You lose credibility when words are spelled wrong, etc."

Now, some may reject that notion out of hand as elitism, but I think Katt is spot-on. It's just like what my adviser in journalism school told us once: That encountering misspellings or egregious grammatical or punctuation errors in a story arrests your attention and pulls you away from the subject at hand in much the same way as when you spot something like a microphone sticking out of the top of the screen in a film.

I cite that wisdom often because I think it's such a great analogy, and because I find dumb errors in stories all the time. And the other day, when I was watching Richard Linklater's terrific film, Slacker, I even noticed at one point exactly the offending microphone out of the top of the screen that my adviser was referring to. And indeed, it grabbed my attention, just as he said it would.

The point here is that if you're trying to be a Second Life blogger, you really want to put as much emphasis on writing clean as you can. Your readers aren't reading your work for clean copy. They're reading it for good information. But believe me, they notice if you can't spell or if you consistently misuse commas or semicolons or apostrophes. They might not think they notice, but they do. And in spite of themselves, the more errors they find, the less they take the writer seriously.

So, with that, let me just conclude by opining on perhaps the most frequent such mistake that I find in the written word: the mistakenly used apostrophe in "its" or "it's." For some reason, writers of all stripes seem to be unable to get it right. Let me plead with you, if you're going to try to make a go of it as a blogger, to avoid the mistake. Study up on the proper usage. Your readers will appreciate you for it, even if they don't know they do.

Residents Speak: DJ Nexeus Fatale

If one thing has been made clear over the four years since Second Life launched, it's that residents like music. And they like music at events.

That means, of course, that while it's possible to pipe in Internet radio or some other canned type of music, there's something a lot more compelling and personal about having a DJ to spin tunes at clubs, parties or other events.

And if you're the DJ, and you have a regular series of gigs and people you spin for, you can make a decent amount of money, all without needing some of the technical skills--PhotoShop, 3D modeling, etc.--that are required in many of the other Second Life businesses.

Of course, however, DJing has its own set of required skills and techniques, and so for the corresponding section in my book, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life--which arrives in the warehouse on Oct. 22, just 13 days from now--I turned to one of the most prolific DJs there are, Nexeus Fatale, for expert advice.

Nexeus, as you might imagine, was full of great suggestions and ideas. And here, I thought I'd cover one of them, and discuss it a little bit:

"Interact with the crowd at your events. Every DJ should make their listeners feel as if they are paying attention and interacting with them. This means talking inbetween every song or every two songs (not talking OVER songs)."

If you think about it, this is great advice. It kind of goes to the core of what makes Second Life such an interesting and interactive environment: The idea that the content that is entertaining you doesn't have to be static; It can be a person spinning tunes interacting with and responding to cues from the audience.

Think about it for a second. Imagine you go out to a club in the real world and dance the evening away. Think about how much fun it is to lock eyes with the DJ, letting him or her know how much you enjoy the song they're playing. Or maybe that you don't. There's a feedback loop going on there, made up of watching the DJ bobbing his or her head while playing the tunes, responding to requests and basically being an active participant in the audience's experience.

The same holds in Second Life. If you're at an event and the DJ is just silently spinning tracks and not talking, not answering questions, he or she might as well be an Internet radio station. But on the other hand, if the DJ is talking, commenting on how some avatar is dancing or what someone is wearing, it makes it feel so much more dynamic and exciting. It makes it feel two-way, and makes it more likely that you're going to stay and continue dancing.

And the more the DJ can keep up that kind of interaction, the better. As long as it doesn't interfere with the music. That's why Nexeus added the caveat, "...this means talking in between every song or every two songs (not talking OVER songs)."

If this is something you can master as a DJ, if you have a good and wide taste in music, if you can commit to regular gigs and if you are responsible, you can make good money as a DJ. But success starts with mastering the little things, like how to get your audience on your side and feeling like you're as much a part of their experience as they are.