Over the past few months numerous people have approached me about writing for their site about Second Life. I’ve had protracted discussions with many of them about writing style requirements, what sort of compensation I would receive, what the considerations are about me posting the material to my own site, or writing for other sites as well. In just about every case, the discussions just sort of petered out, or the expectations were higher than the compensation justified.

However, recently I’ve had some good discussions with Garret Bakalava of SLNN.COM. We haven’t nailed down all the details, but I have agreed in principal to write for and edit the business section of their website. I will focus primary on inworld business and another editor is likely to focus on real world businesses in Second Life. To me, the RL/SL division always seems a bit artificial, but so do many other ways of categorizing business or other topics as well.

My goal will to be write and/or edit approximately two articles a week, with another two or three announcements each week as well. To do this, I will be looking for writers interested in Second Life writing. By a normal writers pay scale, the salary sucks. By a normal bloggers pay scale, the any sort of income is nice and by Second Life standards, we’ll do what we can to be fair.

It will be an interesting challenge for me, since news articles should be in the AP style; a style that I’m not completely comfortable with. My normal blogging style is first person with an ample sprinkling of my own opinions. I will need to keep that in check as I write for SLNN

One of the conditions that has been important to me with whatever Second Life site that I write for, is the ability to cross post the stories to my own site. To the extent that I am writing an opinion piece in my blogging voice, I will post it on Orient Lodge, and allow it to be cross posted to SLNN. To the extent that I am writing a news piece for SLNN, it will go up on SLNN first and at a later point, I will add it to Orient Lodge. These posts will be mostly for archival purposes and are unlikely to appear on the front page of my blog, although they will occur in the Games section. The first story that I wrote specifically for SLNN is now cross posted here with a link back to SLNN.

Meanwhile, I continue to strive for at least one or two blog posts a day on Orient Lodge, running the gamut from the political to the personal, with technology, games, social networks, poetry, and whatever else thrown in. Stay tuned.