Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

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Graham Mills
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Graham Mills »

@Ohn I think you will find many educators have taken advantage of the free island but failed to put down roots in Kitely for reasons we can debate elsewhere.

I don't object to the 'fun' aspects being listed but if the aim is to succeed where LL failed, then recreating the SL Marketplace experience is not going to help win converts among educators who are not already SL-hardened. Maybe it is a hopeless quest anyway.

As things stand, Kitely trades on virtual worlds for "training, education, collaboration and fun". I wonder if that is still the case or whether it is mainly 'fun' from now on.
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ohn Lang »

Graham Mills wrote:...Maybe it is a hopeless quest anyway...I wonder ... whether it is mainly 'fun' from now on.
I believe that Kitely is striving very hard to make the marketplace focus-agnostic, for lack of a better phrase in my imagination. The Kitely platform is suitable for all types of activities, from education to pure fun to pure business. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that there is a Business Tools section in the Marketplace because the marketplace itself is about making money, so a section devoted to how to make money in that marketplace isn't really so very odd. (I only questioned it because of Ilan's statement.)

I fervently hope that educators in general do not look at the absence of a separate "Education Only" top-level category in the marketplace as a rebuff of the education community. Instead rather, look at the marketplace and see that it is agnostic and educational tools are welcomed with equal enthusiasm as other products.

Whether Kitely supports the educational community, indeed all communities, IMO cannot be inferred solely from the absence of an Education category in the marketplace. Instead, everything should be considered, including forums where educators share resources, worlds devoted to education, resources that are provided free specifically to the education community and so forth. Not to mention the level of control educational world owners have to ensure safe and nurturing environments for their clients. Simply being guaranteed total control of entire regions for exceptionally inexpensive subscription costs should be a very significant advantage to educators.
Graham Mills
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Graham Mills »

If the marketplace is "focus agnostic" then I would not want to put education content there. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't purchase there but I will look to alternative channels for dissemination. Accordingly, I have more or less decided to withdraw from this thread and you are free to ignore my earlier comments.

Points of information:

Unless I'm mistaken, Kitely makes content freely available to educators that is freely available to any grid.

The current absence of controls preventing student avatars leaving educational areas for other non-educational regions is actually a rather severe limitation. The inability to specify avatar appearance at registration is also an issue and at odds with the situation on New World Grid and Dreamland Metaverse, for example.
Last edited by Graham Mills on Mon Feb 11, 2013 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Graham,

What differentiates a chemistry set from alchemists tools is not their form (both the real scientist and the role playing one could use the same types of beakers) but rather how people use these items and, potentially, how those items are scripted. Just as a crown can be used in both an historic reconstruction or and as part of a Halloween custom (the prims, textures, meshes, etc. can be the same in both cases).

In order to use virtual worlds as immersive courseware most educators will need to have premade worlds that are set up for the lesson and sold as an educational unit (a virtual world SCORM if you will). Forcing teachers to need to start building or laying out items they have bought will limit usage to the few people who have the time and willingness to do so. The Complete Worlds category is where such ready-for-use environments will be found. From my many talks with educators it seems that this type of education-unit-based content consumption is the preferred option for most teachers.

The categories and attributes we have now are based on a lot of research of what content is currently sold for virtual worlds. If there were many items sold for learning/doing chemistry inside virtual labs then these types of items could have justified their own set of attributes. If we get to a point where people create a lot of education-specific content then we will gladly add attributes to help organize it. However, at this time there are very few simulation scripts or other education-specific items being sold in any of the marketplaces we could find. What we did find were various props that could as easily be used in both real world simulations and role playing. Having said that, the lack of an attribute doesn't prevent people from placing education-related terminology in their items description. If someone uses the search field for finding chemistry equipment, apparel etc. then all the items that have that term in their description will be returned (potentially filtered using selected categories and attributes). If we see that many people search for and buy such items then, even if the number of items is still small, they'll be justification for adding education-specific attributes.

As Ohn correctly stated, we are trying to create a marketplace that isn't targeted at one type of user but rather enables any user to find what he or she is looking to buy. The content that will be sold in this marketplace will be provided by third parties. If those content creators don't see potential in selling education-specific content then there won't be a lot of such content to choose from and there wouldn't be justification to create specific ways to organize the few items that can be found. Considering the fact that hardly any education-specific content (as opposed to items, such as presentation tools, that can be used for many things) can be found in the SL Marketplace it is logical to assume that demand for buying such education-specific content one item at a time is not very high. We believe that being able to use complete worlds as templates for on-demand virtual world usage may make using virtual worlds for education a lot more attractive.
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Graham Mills »

It's your marketplace, Ilan, you can do what you want with it -- it is pointless my arguing with you as you have already made your decision. And it is SCORM, not SCROM.
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Ohn,

We create categories and attributes for types of items that are commonly sold in other marketplaces. You can see, for example, that there are subcategories for many things in the Clothing category. We added those sub categories because the amount of content that people sell in those categories justified making a finer distinction between the various types of shirts and pants. The Business Tools category is present as it contains sought after tools for doing business that have no logical place in any of the other categories. It doesn't contain virtual items such as offices and business attire that can be found in the Structures and Clothing categories respectively.

In general we want there to be a single place where you know you'll be able to find all items of a particular type. Having lab coats in both an education category and in a fantasy category would have created ambiguity regarding where merchants should list such items and made it more difficult for buyers to find and compare such items.
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ohn Lang »

Thanks Ilan. Makes plenty of sense, except maybe about the Pose stands, LOL. Those are really non-business specific gadgets.
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Graham,

My mistake, I mistyped (now corrected).

Please see my explanation above for why we think it will be counter productive to categorize items based on how they are used. Adding a feature (attribute in this case) that will hardly be used complicates the selection process for merchants and buyers without empirical justification. The more options there are the longer it takes to decide how to achieve your goal, so we only want to add an option if the additional complexity is justified by the "weighted-average user" being able to find what they are looking for faster because of that addition.

The marketplace design philosophy may have been made but the actual marketplace category/attributes structure is very much open to discussion (you may have noticed that your input has already helped us realize that we are missing a subcategoy in the Structures category). Please continue contributing to this discussion, your input is valued.
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Ohn,

We already have Posing Animations in the Avatar Animations category. Where do you suggest we place the Pose Stands (items you can step on to assume a pose, you can see such items in the Second Life Marketplace here: Business > Retail > Pose Stands).
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Re: Kitely Market Categories and Attributes

Post by Ohn Lang »

Ah :) Didn't know that was where it was in the SL marketplace :D I have always made or had mine come as part of a package.

They are scripted objects, that's why I was suggesting that they go in the Gadgets. The most typical pose stands are between 1 and 4 prims, one prim for the the little platform, optionally a left and right cycling button prim, and optionally a prim between the buttons that displays a texture.

Depending on how involved the scripting is, the pose stand may display floating text of the pose title, adjust height of individual poses depending on pose type. The 'animations' are often just 1-frame static poses so you can see how your outfit looks in different positions, or so you can take photo of your new dress/skin/etc. and send to friends. also optionally, it might even rez appropriate furniture for the associated pose.

Anyway, yeah, to me it is simply a gadget that at least most girls (if everyone else too) probably have in their changing rooms at 'home' used for a variety of purposes. Definitely true that a pose stand is commonly used by animation sellers, but it is used more generically as well.


Updated: I meant to say that the object will include animations, but also scripts, configuration notecards, and maybe textures.
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