The Dominion Blog and Talk on Blogging

The blog : http://dominionfemdom.blogspot.com

Deirdre:
The Dominion is a cool femdom group. They are active, serious and friendly.

They started a blog recently, and it's lively, informative, and well-worth keeping an eye on.

Here's a passage from their intro :

"To those of you who are not familiar with The Dominion Femdom, please allow me to tell you a little about us. I am Evangeline Eames, the First Mistress and owner of the Dominion Estate and it's sims.

Opened in October 2008, Dominion was paid for, designed, and for the most part, built by myself.

This is not meant to be boastful, but to assure our readers that The Dominion is a real Femdom and that it is not owned or operated by males in any fashion.

As anyone who knows me can attest, I am truly and fully dominant in every world. In real life I am a single Canadian self employed woman who works in the field of design and who enjoys building and socializing in this new frontier that is called Second Life."

Have a look, both at the blog and the sim. Definitely one of the best femdom groups in SL.

lelo:
Mistress was invited by Miss Evangeline to give a talk yesterday on the subject of blogging at the weekly femdom media event at the Dominion Arena.

She gladly accepted the invitation and we prepared a 40 minutes talk about our new love, blogging and our SL Fetish Fashion blog specifically.

We arrived at the Arena early, which we needed to let the place rezz.

In the Arena there were chairs and sofa's so the Ladies could sit and listen/read.

There were 5 Ladies and 7 subs at the talk, Miss Evangeline did a short intro over voice and off we went.

The timing was perfect and after answering 3 questions we had filled our 40 minutes time slot.

After Mistress's presentation, Lady Tiffany Torgeson read an excerpt from "The Mistress Manual: The Good Girl's Guide to Female Dominance" after the blogging presentation.

We had some very nice feedback after the meeting and i think we stimulated some new blogger.

I'll end with the same words Mistress ended her presentation with:

"So, to sum up : blogs are cool, and blogs are easy" and talking about them is fun *smiles*

Here's the transcript of the talk given by Deirdre Young on Tuesday March 31st 2009 at The Dominion:

Hello everyone I want to thank Evangeline for the invitation to speak here tonight As some of you may know, I've been running a blog for six months with my slave lelo. That makes me an expert, because in Internet time, that's like fifty years ;) I'm only half kidding, because what we do is a daily. It was our decision, it's a cool project, but it IS a fair amount of work. Fortunately, it's fun work to us, so I think we have a good chance of keeping it going for a long time. Let's dive right in, then : Why does anyone blog? We blog when we have something to say That's the most important requirement Everything else follows Many blogs flounder because they have nothing to say We blog when we want to share something we love The format of a blog is perfect for news... say, about a group’s activities ;) What’s a blog? First, it’s a web site - duh ;) That we make without special software using just our Web browser. If it has a spell-checker built in, so much the better *cough* Firefox *cough* ;) A blog is made of posts. A post is one page of content, with a date and a title usually covering one subject. Concept : you need a place to put your stuff Your stuff being posts (text) and images As George Carlin used to say, A house is just a place for your stuff ;) Blog companies know not everyone has a place already, so they give you a free place. We use Blogger. It belongs to Google. Their free space is blogspot.com So our blog is slfetishfashion.blogspot.com There are others: Wordpress, Typepad, and many more They also give you a place for your stuff Here's another important concept : In a blog, the content is separate from the appearance What do I mean by that? Content (your text and images) Is separate from the look of the blog The look is the background color, the size and color of your text, how many columns there are on the page, and how wide they are, and so on. All that is controlled by a template. Pick a new template, the whole blog changes appearance without affecting a word or a picture of your content. Some cool features of a blog The text is immediately searchable - you get a built-in "Search" box. In a traditional Web site, you have to make your own. Blogspot posts gets indexed by Google immediately. We come up fourth on Google when someone searches for "Kayliwulf" Posts can be labeled A label can be a category, or anything that groups posts in a meaningful way. So when a visitor wants related posts, they click the label. We decided to push that to the limit: We have items like "boots" as labels and store names, like "Bax Coen" and categories like "other blogs" and "guest bloggers" Also, you can plug in extra moving parts Like visitor counters and many others How to blog? Before I say anything else : blogging is easy! The very *point* of a blog is to make Web publishing easier than making a traditional Web site, which you must create with dedicated software, that requires specialized knowledge, and you then upload your pages to a space, that you rent on a Web server. whew! ;) In a blog, you pretty much type your text, and click the "Post" button. Seriously. The rest is details. There's a little text editor on the Web site, that looks like a dumbed down Word. "Bold" is the big bold B button, and so on. Dead easy. Free services require you to create an account i.e., pick a user name and password. On Blogger, like all Google services, you use the same ID, which is also your Gmail address. Choosing the look of your blog is also easy. Standard templates are applied with one click. Fancier templates take a bit more work: You need to be able to copy and paste ;) Some big blogs are team efforts There are roles, just like in Second Life groups On Blogger, an "author" can create posts and an "admin" can create and edit other members' posts. Blogger allows up to 100 authors. Who blogs? The old misconception is that a blog is the boring diary of an emo teen. Blogs used to be mostly that, but not anymore. A lot of bloggers are amateurs at writing, but have good knowledge of their subject. Professional writers (like journalists) have their own outlets lelo and I are not writers, or fashion specialists, but we are an experienced, lifestyle, fetish and D/s couple. English is a second language for both of us, and sometimes it shows. But that's not going to stop us from sharing what we love. Connection between the blog and Second Life The blog is located outside the world That's very neat, because we're talking *about* the world but oddly, SL is not a text-friendly place. Our connection is an URL giver which we place at designers shops, and that points their visitors to our blog when they click it. A Web surfer may find our blog with a Google search, and since we put the SLURL of the designer in our posts, she can go to the store in-world if she has a SL account and if not, can really wonder what we're talking about ;) Our blog : Second Life Fetish Fashion Why do *we* blog? We talk about what we love. We meet interesting people : designers, other bloggers, makers, doers, shakers and movers. We started SLFF because we couldn't find a good list of all the fetish fashions and toys in SL. Our posts are not dated like typical news items. Each post is like a catalog page; as the blog gets longer, the info gets richer. We see that our readers use the search feature a lot; and that's great. That was totally our intention. We decided on a daily post. Posting regularly shows that a blog is alive. We may slow down eventually, but we're doing fine for now. A daily blog is a big commitment, in time and effort : a typical post is an hour, between taking the pics and writing the post together. Not counting the time we spend shopping ;) Working together is really fun. I wouldn't even consider making the blog alone. I always refer to lelo as my extra brain ;) We're proud of what we create, even if some days it's not easy! Here are some fun aspects of blogging so you don't think it's all work and no play : Stat watching is fun: we have readers from the UK to Japan and a few other places ;) Getting feedback from readers is terrific even if they don't always agree with us. We have regular readers, followers, even! That's a Blogger feature - we're not a cult ;) We love finding new blogs that link to us some in languages we don't understand! Being found on Google is great too Here are some of the keywords we see: second life fetish eva footwear femdom magazine open collar So, to sum up : blogs are cool, and blogs are easy :)