Second Nature’s first birthday came and went quietly at the end of last year, and we are now officially into our second year of being.

Second Nature Cafe: Photo by Hiro Sheridan

The first year was a bit of a baptism of fire: in our very first week as landlords, we came back in after the weekend to find our entire island covered in the most beautiful forest, with buildings, sandy beaches, tropical plants of all kind – and we had no idea who had put it there or why. It was almost a shame to destroy it, but we had no such compulsions about our second group of squatters: they built several houses on our land and when we politely asked them to leave, they became agressive and rude. “Oh, well”, we thought, “at least we’ve seen the back of them”. All was quiet for a few weeks, until we hired a freelancer with a jet-pack and considerably more knowledge than us. He took one look at the island and reported that the same squatters had immediately recognised us as complete newbies and built an entire city in the sky just out of sight above the clouds! We promptly returned the foreign objects and stood by as several angry avatars fell to earth around us…

Anyway, since then, we have learned a lot as landowners, expanded to three islands, hosted meetings, displays and research projects and launched the Second Nature lecture series. All of these things will continue this year: the events will re-commence in February and more details on those and other projects will follow shortly. We will also be relaunching Second Nature to make it much easier to navigate and creating a dedicated website for all our SL information.

Just for now, though, two things: firstly, I would like to say thank you very much to everyone who has visited Second Nature, who has attended an event, built an exhibit or just shown an interest in any way. After technical catastrophes, my biggest fear was that we were totally wasting our time, so I’m glad at least some people think we’re doing something worthwhile!

Secondly, if anyone has any feedback, comments, questions, whatever, please do send it my way, in the comments or by email to j.scott@nature.com. I really want to know what you think is worthwhile and what isn’t, what you’d like us to do in 2008, any suggestions for people you’d like to see speak, any volunteers to speak themselves! We can only really guess at whether what we’re doing is worthwhile so any feedback welcome: no comment too trivial or too critical.