Staying with my thought that Second Life today is like what the web was in 1994, I bit the bullet and set up my first shop in Second Life. I don’t have anything in particular that I want to sell. I just wanted a little space of my own where I could create things with a little permanence and see what happens.

My new Second Life home is here. Stop by and say hi.

Now, let me talk a little bit about setting up shop in Second Life. Being an old techie, I tend to think in terms of servers and all of that, and I think there are some interesting parallels between webservers and Second Life servers.

One option is that you can set up your own grid. Right now, the only software available to do that is OpenSim. It is still at version .04, which means that it is still pretty limited. However, I was very pleased to see what I could do with OpenSim. There are two different ways that I’ve run it. The first is as a grid running off of my Linux box. The Linux box runs the grid, asset and user servers and runs four regions. I have another four regions running on an old Windows 2000 box, four more on a Windows XP desktop and four more running on a Windows XP laptop.

My other configuration is when I am traveling with the laptop. In this case, I run the four regions standalone, without a grid. This way I can develop stuff or run demonstrations without being connected to the Internet.

Right now, my Internet connection doesn’t permit me to run servers from home, so this grid is pretty isolated. At some point, I’ll upgrade my connection and make my grid available out on the Internet do my friends.

To me, OpenSim is like the early apache servers. The Second Life servers are like the Microsoft IIS servers. Right now, you can only use servers being run by Linden Labs, but that is bound to change over time. Linden Labs is talking about making their servers open source.

To the extent that you want to set up space on a fully supported and functional Linden Lab server, you have a few different options. At the high end, you can by an island. For the web parallel, this is similar getting a dedicated server from a web hosting provider. An island currently costs $1,675, and then there is a monthly fee of $295. Think of the island cost as the initial setup cost.

Another option is to own parcels of land. This is sort of like getting space on a virtual server. If you are a premium member, which costs $9.95 a month, $6 a month if you pay annually. This allows you to own up to 512 square meters of land. The more land you own, the more you end up having to pay. You still have to buy the land. The average square meter of land was around L$ 7 in August and has been around L$ 6.50 during September. So, a 512 square meter of land would end up costing around L$ 3500. At current exchange rates, that translates to around U.S. $13. So, a modest piece of property can be gotten for $13, with a $10 ongoing fee.

Of course with all of that, you are getting the raw space. It is then up to you to build something on it. You can build it yourself, or find an experienced Second Life developer to build out your space for you. Those projects might start as low as a couple thousand dollars, but can spiral up to as much as you are willing to pay, with some people paying six digit development costs.

Yet for me, I’ve taken a different option. Today, I rented a storefront in the Lamont Mall. This is sort of like the low end shared server agreements people get for web hosting. Lou Lamont uses software from Apez to handle lease transactions, so it can all be done in a nice simple automated way. I paid L$ 300 for a two week lease of a small space that is a few square meters. I’m limited to the number of prims that I can have in my space, so I can’t build anything all that fancy.

I did run into a difficulty. Although my rent is handled nicely via the Apez software, I still needed to contact Lou Lamont to get permissions to modify my space.

However, I don’t want anything all that fancy, yet. So far, I have two prims set up. One is a bumper sticker from the John Edwards campaign, and the other is a photograph of myself with a script added to it. Each of these images, or textures in Second Life parlance, were ones that I uploaded. That costs an additional L$ 10 per upload, but in my case, I had already uploaded them for other purposes.

The script does a couple things. First, it tracks anytime a new person enters the space. Being off the beaten track, I don’t expect to see a lot of visitors, but it will be interesting to see who shows up. It also records what people say in the room. Again, since I’m not expecting a lot of people talking in the room, that is probably okay. If it gets busy, I’ll probably change it so people need to say something on a specific channel. My idea is that this may be one of the building blocks for a guestbook.

So, for L$ 150 a week, I have my first space in Second Life. Before the recent stagnation in Second Life day trading, I was making at least that much each day in my day trading. Now, I’m probably covering that in camping in Second Life, and even if I wasn’t, L$ 150 works out to be under fifty cents a week and I can probably fit that into my budget.

Renting a storefront in one of the malls is probably a good inexpensive way to set up a more permanent presence in Second Life.