Being the new year and all, I’m doing some much-needed maintenance work on this site. The discussion forum has been very quiet the past couple of months and I’m actually wondering if it may have outlived its usefulness.

What are your thoughts? If you’d like other sub-forums or have a special interest area you’d like to moderate, let me know. If there’s no real response in the next month I’ll probably close the forums.

A year ago tomorrow, we posted our first comments on SLOz. We launched in the midst of the mainstream media frenzy around Second Life that brought so many new residents. When we started out, we knew that no-one was covering events in Second Life from an Australian perspective on a daily basis. What we didn’t know was the level of response there’d be. Each day we get IM’s and emails from SL users with story suggestions, tips and feedback. Each week we have someone from the mainstream media making contact, asking us to interpret trends and events in-world. It’s made it the interesting ride we’d hoped it would be and we’ve never been more motivated to continue the work we’re doing.

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be making some fairly large changes to the site as well as to our in-world presence. We’re also hoping to expand our stable of writers so we can cover more issues and events. We even have a book on the way – more on that in coming months.

A big thanks to all of you who’ve supported SLOz over the past year. Kudos to Graham, our education writer and gratitude to our sponsors who help to keep the site running.

As always, we’re very keen to hear any suggestions from you – after all, you’re the reason we do this each day.