If you build it, will they find it?

Firstly, I should point out that I haven't finished building -- I've barely started. That said, the issue of discovery is not insignificant. The Hypergrid is making inter-grid travel somewhat easier and that raises the issue of knowing where to go. The Welcome region on New World Grid showcases some of the best sims, several of which are intended, like mine, for educational use. Likewise I am sure there are regions on jokaydiaGRID and ReactionGrid that are of interest to educators and their students, if only to illustrate the range of pedagogic approaches that are being used. In all likelihood there are many more grids and sims of which I know little or nothing at all (I have not been to the regions owned by the universities and colleges hosted on the New Zealand Virtual World Grid, for example).

Putting together a search engine to help find content was very simple as it used only web sites, not inworld content. By comparison, finding educational grids and regions addressing particular subjects is much harder. Maria Korolov at Hypergrid Business has compiled the invaluable Hyperica directory and there is a list of grids at opensimulator.org as well. The inevitable lack of detail, however, is discouraging and my guess is that both represent a small fraction of educational use of OpenSim. Moreover, as many people build for their own use and interest, there is little incentive to rectify matters.

With a view to kindling a degree of enlightened self-interest, I have put together a region map gadget as shown in the image. If you put landmarks for the featured areas in your region into the map inventory and reset scripts, it will display the region map tile and generate pins with hovertext and sit teleports. If you add brief descriptions, these will be chatted to the user on touch. However, if the owner touches the pin, it also creates a notecard with appropriate wiki-formatted text for TiddlySpace. At the moment there is no connection between the inworld gadget and the web but I expect this to change in the future. Incorporation of http-in functionality going in the other direction is also a possibility.

Will this idea catch on or will we see the incorporation of hooks for more conventional search engines? Are the HyperGate networks and hgurl indicator boards all that are required? For that matter, would TiddlySpace scale? Finally, if our future experiences are to be increasingly based on HTML5, then maybe it will be the associated web-based text that makes sims discoverable. Time will tell.

(Thanks to Miley for her cam skills in generating the region map which I used in place of the default map tile)