Now this one got a chuckle out of me. Tony Walsh over on Clickable Culture reports (Link) on the release of a new web application from Second Life developer Linden Lab called SLurl. From Linden Lab employee Reuben Steiger’s web post regarding this new tool (Link):

SLurl solves a big problem we’ve had — how can I tell someone where I am in Second Life so that they can find me in an easy and contextualized way, just by clicking? In the past, I’d create a location that looked like this secondlife://simname/x/y/z . This worked just fine provided you had Second Life installed, but it made completely failed for people without Second Life. Hence one could only “preach to the converted”. Not any more.

This will definitely get some use. Be sure to go see the creative(!) way Tony used it to address an issue about which he often posts (hey, is that a hotlink to a Brands in Games blog image?). In the meantime, I’m going to have to go figure out how to use this so I can show my mother where on the map my virtual home is located. That way she no longer has to wander aimlessly around the website’s map (Link). I suppose this will speed her upgrade.

SLurl as viral advertising vehicle. This really could be interesting.

{Image’s sources: Linden Lab and Brands in Games}

{Update: There are a couple of comments in Reuben Steiger’s post which are worth noting. The first is that the Virtual Suburbia weblog is updating to the new SLurl system (that might be nice for a future State of Play virtual architecture competition); and SL resident Ordinal Malaprop has created the “SlurlBuilder” to make this all even easier – Link}