After a week of trying and failing to compose a suitably witty, compelling and informative opening blog post, I’ve abandoned the effort and decided to leave great literature for future posts. All this needs is to say who I am for future reference, so here it is:

_ Joanna Wombat. Photo by Hiro Sheridan _

I work for Nature in the Web Publishing department, and my main role is to look after everything Nature is doing in the virtual world of Second Life. That means over-seeing our archipelago of Second Nature, organising our soon-to-begin speaker series within Second Life and generally trying to work out how it can be useful for scientists.

Some history: Second Nature is about six months old, and consists of three islands. There are some large exhibits of which more later: the other main purpose is to provide land to allow scientists of any type to experiment with what SL can do. Visit Second Nature and you’ll see all sorts of exhibits, displays and works-in-progress already there and we’re always happy to welcome new people. If you have an idea and need some free land, drop me a line.

_ Second Nature cafe. Photo by Hiro Sheridan _

In the meantime, I’ve set up this blog so I can talk about interesting things in SL to my heart’s content, and not be threatened with eviction if I mention volcanoes, virtual friends and my pleasing L$ balance one more time…! I also want to hear about other things going on in Second Life: please do feel free to email me at j.scott@nature.com, message me in SL as Joanna Wombat or join the NN Second Life group.