Second Life

The assignment of this week was about Second Life. We did not necessarily have to create an account but we did it because it is the best way to understand how it works. 

So, Second Life is a virtual world, both a game and a social network. The purpose of the game is to create oneself a second life (as the title indicates). Anyone can create an account and have his own avatar. All the avatars in the game are in fact players from all over the world (this may be the main difference with The Sims: here Second Life is an online community). The player can choose what will be the appearance of his avatar. Everything is possible, it is not supposed to represent the player the real life. There are few communities of non-human people, but mainly, people who play want to have a human appearance. 

Do you want to be blond? Or dark haired? Do you want to wear an elegant suit or to be provocative? 

You can be everything you want.

People who log on Second Life can find a job, get a house and meet other people by guiding their avatar. The place in this game was created by Linden Lab but it can be modified by the users. Places truly represent places in the real life. It is a whole world of creation, that is what make the place and the characters unique. All what is in Second Life is brought by people, they create the contents of the game: for example clothes, buildings, objects... The only things that are needed are creativity and imagination!

About what people do in Second Life: it is easy, they can do what they want and create themselves a new virtual life. They can meet, interact with other people and even find a job. Money in Second Life can be changed into real money in the real world. So, people in it can find a job they do not have in their real life, maybe to change from everyday routine. Each person has a particular purpose: it can be to meet new people, get money or create communities. 

Second Life can be considered as a social virtual community. There are relationships between people: it can stay virtual but if they want, they can communicate through vocal chat, talk privately or publicly and why not, meet in real life. In Second Life, people bring their own personality and they find what they were looking for. 

Who are you, in the real life?

A.D.

Imaginary travel company

For this week's assigment, we took the role of a travel company. Since everyone likes vacations, we didn't feel the need to specify who our potential customers would be.

More specifically, we would send people on vacations like just about every other travel company in existence, but we would market them as a type of "dream vacation". At the end of the vacation, we would interview our customers about their vacations and use these interviews as commercials, possibly with pictures that our customers had taken (with permission, of course).

"What was your dream vacation like?"
"I saw a pigeon. It was awesome."

Seeing these normal people talk about their experiences would seem a lot more trustworthy than regular commercials.

These commercials would be available on content communities, with focus on websites that produce videos. We would also have a social networking site through which we could share these videos with other people, possibly in some way that would catch their interest.

Well, this was a blast. Thank you all for taking the time to read this. (Picture mine.)

-T.H.

Trustworthy and untrustworthy websites about travelling

The goal of our fifth assignment was to find a trustworthy and an untrustworthy website that relates to travelling. The Internet is full of credible and very interesting websites about travelling but we chose site lastminute.com. It offers a lot of information about deals on hotels, city breaks, spas, restaurants, theatre and getaways. The company that operates that page is leading travel retailer in UK and the site gets more than 1.65 million visitors a week [1]. Moreover, the website was voted as one of the UK's Superbrands for 2015. Considering that, this is the site which offers services and advertise product, the persuasive means used in the website is Pathos: “It's never too early to start thinking about the perfect gift. Treat mum to a luxury spa day, an afternoon tea at a 5* London hotel, or a night out at a popular West End theatre show.“ or “Footie mad? Manchester’s newest hotel might be the perfect place for your next getaway.“

Arguments for the trustworthy website lastminute.com

•          Website has a professional appearance
•          We can find information easily and fast
•          High quality pictures
•          Text is grammatically correct
•          Website gives us enough information
•          Information about website are easily to find
•          Organization behind website is a big company

The second part finding the untrustworthy website was more complicated task. However, it is very hard to find this kind of website now days. After long time searching the Internet we finally find the website - euromost.info. This website provides 38 European city guides, 30 European country profiles, travel guides with business and tourist information for central eastern, northern southern and western Europe, the Baltic states, Scandinavia and Russia. The site offers information mostly about cities and countries. The website uses Logos as the persuasive means: "The earliest known documentation of this city is 1147 AD. Since then it has been an integral part of Russian society.”

Arguments for the untrustworthy website euromost.info

• Website doesn't have a professional apperance
• There is no search provided to search for specific information
• Website is badly designed
• Low quality pictures
• The website is not easy to use (site is no transparent)
• The site fails to meet with customers' requirements -> we can't trust the website
• There is only weak contact information mentioned on the website
• The link "sitemap" doesn't work correctly

[1] The Independent. The Independent [online]. August 2013 [cit. 2015-03-03]. Retrieved from:  http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/travel/the-10-best-lastminute-travel-websites-8786559.html

- M.M