Sloog HUD Improves Second Life Exploration

Although I am a big fan of Second Life, I will readily admit that some of the features aren’t very usable yet. The Search feature is almost useless, and since Landmarks are both private and inaccessible outside Second Life, it’s hard to share interesting places you’ve found with your friends.

Frustrated by the unwieldy Search and Landmark tools, a group of Second Life users created a bookmarking system called Sloog. Sloog allows users to bookmark locations and avatars using a free in-world Heads-up Display (HUD), identify them using custom tags, and save them to an online profile. Each Sloog contains the Second Life URL (SLURL) to the location and the list of descriptive tags added by the user.

Although there is a setting to make bookmarks private, the best feature of Sloog is the ability to share and explore public bookmarks (or “Sloogs”). The Sloog tagging system, as Katrina pointed out, is very similar to the one used by del.icio.us, and is much easier to use than the in-world Second Life search tool. Plus, you can access your bookmarked locations from your online profile without having to log into SL.

I would also like to point out that in the list of popular tags on Sloog‘s website, “Education” is one of the largest! Clicking on the tag will take you to a list of all locations in Second Life that have been tagged as educational — a great way to find and share new places or promote your own educational space.

2 thoughts on “Sloog HUD Improves Second Life Exploration

  1. This is really exciting! A great example of a mashup of Web 2.0 (tagging) and virtual worlds (SL). And it makes such complete sense — what better way to find interesting locations than to see what other educators are tagging.

  2. Sloog is only in its beta phase, so there are some issues and missing features. Currently, it will only accept single-word tags (as I discovered when I entered “The University of Texas At Dallas” and each word became a separate tag). Also, once added, there does not appear to be a way to remove Sloogs or change and delete tags. Hopefully those features will be added soon.

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