I just found a new Device for collaborative surfing in SL. The Daden Navigator is a useful improvement to the not-so-useful HTML-on-a-prim stuff that Second Life provides. It’s not a canvas itself, but simply uses any surface with the proper media texture (great Idea, therefore the Screenshot shows the new DBJ Radio TV, I’m just scripting). The device consists of 2 parts, a control button and a Media Switcher, Antenna, or whatever metaphor you prefer, the common “set to group thingy”. By clicking the button you get a Dialog Box with the commands, but most of them are better usable by simple chat commands. Here are the most important functions:

• url <address> displays a new page.
• search <keyword> performs a google search
• link <keyword> searches all links on the current page and follows the link with the best match to the given keyword
• home / set home browses to the start page or sets the current page as the new home.

With these few commands (I think there are a few more) it’s actually very easy to browse the Int0rweb from within Second Life. You need some practise, switching to the chat commands instead of the normal point-and-click behaviour, but it’s really really useful.

Some drawback, there is no way to scroll a page, Linden Lab just doesn’t provide that feature (yet?). When starting, you should be sure to actually call a URL ending with html/htm, otherwise the tool fails to set the right mime type (after that, it works perfect). And — the device costs 2400 L$, but I think that’s worth the invention.

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