I'm regularly in the blogs.secondlife.com forums, not just helping where I have knowledge, but staying in touch with our culture and encouraging you HOW to share info easier.

I keep seeing "OMG HELP ME!" questions where the original poster seems at a loss for how to describe something in words, and there's a big gap between what they saw and how they're struggling to explain it. Also consider language barriers: instead of trying to tell, simply SHOW!

Well, that's where we need to go beyond words: whether techy terminology confuses you or you wanna be a more effective, vivid communicator, consider adding pictures and videos to your posts to make it clear what you mean!

It takes a little bit of patience to get started, but hey, so did learning how to read, how to use a computer, and Second Life itself. I have faith in your smartosity!

I've attached multimedia thousands of times, and have seen what a positive difference it makes to have this skill, whether you're asking or answering on SL Answers, reporting a bug, giving a product demo for the Marketplace, and so on! SUPER-USEFUL.

I highly recommend watching this video tutorial, which shows how to take a snapshot in Second Life and put it into a forum post. It's terribly easy.

For further details with tips and tools,

see the "Visual communication" help page

which you can add to. (Please do.)

I'm continuing to be out and about in the forums, promoting these opportunities so you can help others help you. (Clichéd but true, hehe.)

Feel free to ask in the comments if you have process/workflow questions about spicing up your text with pics and vids.

Over the past few years I’ve taken quite a number of pictures of my avatar with her eyes closed and I’ve always gotten a lot of questions asking how I go about doing that. I’ve tried my best to explain it to everyone that has asked, but I’m not sure if I was clear enough so I thought I would just bite the bullet and go ahead and make a video tutorial outlining the procedure I use.

Here it is, if you have trouble viewing it here you can visit my youtube page:

This was my first time doing a video tutorial so I would love some feedback. Please let me know if I went too fast or didn’t give enough details because I am planning to do more video tutorials in the future so your feedback will be very helpful. After listening to myself I’ve already discovered that I say ummmmm a lot and plurked about it! LOL So definitely going to try not to do that in future tutorials.

This procedure that I use I actually learned from a video tutorial by Ryker Beck a few years ago which you can view here. I encourage you to do that because she has a lot more detail in her video that might be helpful.

EDIT: I just realized that it may be difficult for some people to either view or hear the video and I deeply apologize about that. I did not think of it before and I promise I will do my best to also write out the steps in my blog posts as well.

This is what I do when taking a picture with my eyes closed:

1. Remove any prim lashes.
2. Choose an eye makeup that has a lighter lid so when the eyes are closed they don’t look all black.
3. Hit the snapshot button and look for the freeze frame option (and select it) at the bottom of the snapshot preview box.
4. Reposition your image by using your mouse while you are still in freeze frame mode.
5. Select and deselect the freeze frame option continuously by using your mouse (or the space-bar on the keyboard) until you catch yourself in the middle of a blink. It takes a lot of patience but most of the time I get it within the first few tries.
6. Hit save to save your snapshot to disk :)

» You can view all of my current tutorials on my tutorials page.

Credits:
*Skin: :: DUTCH TOUCH ::Yri:: Coffee – Dreamy HBBrown CL1 by Iki Ikarus
Hair: !lamb. Lost – Kit Kat by Lamb Bellic
Top: MichaMi: Kat (top) in Golden Brown by Milla Michinaga
Ring: MIEL MIA RING by Mika Nieuport
*Pose: Diesel Works by Rogan Diesel (From the Berrylicious Pose Set) :D

*Promotional copies

Also because I am SURE someone will ask me HOW I did this video tutorial, I used Camtasia Studio 7. :P

Setting up shop in Second Life has many nuances: some best practices are universal and adopted from the real world, such as delightful customer service, while others are specific to the inworld experience — brick-and-mortar stores are concerned with navigation, yes, but fly-friendly layout and teleporter placement go beyond. For example, this pic by way of Rhonda Huntress shows Argrace's simple and clean map:

Alas, the tough thing is: where do you go to learn these best store practices early on? There's scattered info I'm compiling, with your guidance, into the Marketplace Seller's Guide that can expand over time (as has been useful for many other topics, to name a few).

Including...

Recently, I was very grateful to hear — and see — what a number of Residents feel is vital in

this forum thread

Especially pictures and SLurls to help you effectively understand "as-it-is". I was both curious to learn how far things had evolved from the early SL days, and shared that thread with some of our Experience Design gurus because WE NEED TO KNOW. The whole process of "finding an item -> using it" is in our sights.

Shortly thereafter, Suella Ember — who you may recognize as a very helpful face on the forums, cheese is to her what watermelon is to me — sent me an exceptionally lucid letter containing many annotated pictures. I encouraged her to post it on her blog, and here it is:

DeliciouSLy Delightful Shopping Experiences! (15 Tips for Merchants!)

One of my fave parts (friendly greetings back atcha, Suella) is "make your decor interesting and relevant". Time and time again, I've seen adding personality and character distinguish a store from "the rest" by making it a memorable visit, even giving visiting friends something to talk about. Infact, it's a cultural funnysadtrue joke that while boxes can be a pain to open, a few go the extra distance of making boxes look amazing, like these from NOTsoBAD:

Bottom line: if you sell stuff in Second Life, please give the Seller's Guide and Suella's post a read. Then, in the comments, share what's worked well from your firsthand experiences — that other sellers should know. What do your customers repeatedly laud you for? And if you already have a blog post out there I and your fellow Residents should learn from, promote yourself!

(I realize that this info can be hard to come by since competitive forces hoard secrets and many practices are passed from one trusted friend to another, but if you're like me and believe that there are lots of "commerce tropes" that can be shared for the greater community benefit of buyers and sellers alike, I'd <3 to hear from you. Don't hold back.)