Our dedicated and busy weekly webmaster ensemble at Script School have now officially launched a group blog called called: VTOR (Virtual TO Reality). VTOR will deal with creating a complimentary and/or secondary business inside Massive Multiplayer Online worlds like Second Life.

We’ve been adding posts to this blog for a month now, amassing 40 posts [see VTOR archives], and today we are starting to get out and promote the blog.

If setting up an extension of your online business in a virtual world piques your curiosity, or you are just wondering what these Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) worlds are like, then please subscribe to the VTOR RSS feed .

In addition to the others in the group, I have been working on my own business idea in Second Life and will be sharing this soon. Is it possible to make a real living inside these worlds? Wired recently ran an article that says yes, some are doing exactly that, and our group will explore our own business trials and tribulations:

Now Second Life is her primary source of income, and Grinnell, whose avatar answers to the name Janie Marlowe, claims she earns more than four times her previous salary.

Grinnell isn’t alone. Artists and designers, landowners and currency speculators, are turning the virtual environment of Second Life into a real-world profit center.

We started VTOR as part of the overall experiment using the blog hosting service BlogCharm, but may move to our own server down the road. It might seem strange that we wouldn’t use our own dedicated servers for this new project, but part of the overall experiment involves using the BlogCharm service. Blogcharm is expected to officially launch tomorrow and was reviewed at Hmm on January 29.

VTOR was the idea that, in part, I pitched to ZDnet recently and they passed on. I see that WIN is also looking to start a Second Life-related blog. Cool, the more the merrier. I find the whole virtual to reality business side of things very interesting and while there a bunch of Second Life blogs there are not many blogs seriously discussing how to blend the two worlds from a business perspective. Will 2006 be the year of MMO blogs? Perhaps doubtful, but our group is definitely dipping more than a few toes in the water with this effort, including sharing real world and virtual world facts and figures.

Just to understand the dynamics of our group, we aren’t all builders and scripters, either. One is an adult webmaster, another is a printer tech, another is an adult performer and others are webmasters of various experiences. Clearly, there are social and business interests inside SL for others besides builders and scripters, although these are the primary professions.

One of our group members, Weirdharold, is getting married on Wednesday, March 8 and says he has spent nearly $150USD on the virtual wedding so far. Yowsa, and the whole wedding business scene is just one of many, many businesses operating inside Second Life. He asked me to be his best man. Wouldn’t you just know that the first best man experience I’d have would be in a virtual 3D world?

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