Femdom Day 2010

This weekend, March 6th and 7th, the prominent Femdom groups of Second Life will gather for a weekend of celebration and fund-raising.

The dates were chosen to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8th.

This is the second annual event - last year's attendance was in the thousands, so whatever event you want to attend over the weekend, make sure to arrive early.

Proceeds from Femdom Day will benefit Pro Mujer, an organization working to improve the life conditions of poor women and their families in Latin America.

Hugo's Designs, which we've covered regularly here, will participate in the fund raising, with a fashion show in which the outfits will be auctioned off - should be fun!

The Slurl : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Einstein/127/127/23

Here's the event calendar, subject to updates :

Places - The Dominion Femdom

We haven't covered a place in ages, and while shopping is good, there *is* Second Life outside of stores.

The Dominion Femdom is such a place - but don't worry, shopaholics, they have a good mall.

We've covered the group and blog in a previous post, but instead of just slapping a "places" tag on an old post, we decided to add more info - including a lovely group gift.

This is where this post started, really : we received a notice from the FEMDOM Group (which is an association of 12 femdom groups including Dominion), about the gift.

It's really quite generous : a bunch of latex pants, corsets, and shoes, in a variety of colors.

Also included : a FEMDOM group spanking paddle, and all the Femdom Magazines to date. Just join the group, and click the sign to receive the gift box.

So, the Dominion : a group of nine islands, some dedicated to the group, some residential, all devoted to female domination.

As we said, a very active group - it's not uncommon to see two or three events in a day.

To help you find out more, we've got most of the links together here. Enjoy the visit!

Public area => http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Dominion/119/218/30

Shopping area => http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dominion%20Fetish/129/174/22

Art Gallery => http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dominion%20Luxe/18/58/405

Femdom arena (members only) => http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Dominion/126/195/34

Blog => http://dominionfemdom.blogspot.com

Fashion blog => http://dominionstyle.blogspot.com

Magazine => http://issuu.com/femdommag

Femdom Magazine Issue 4

131 pages in issue four of Femdom Magazine... it's good to see they're not running out of topics ;)

The lead story is Tharna, a Gor femdom sim. Also notable, a 16-page article on the coming adult content rules. Good research and thought, the point about all the formerly-adult land going on sale at once made me think.

The regular columns are here : In Gear, View From The Top, 10 Questions.. if you're a regular reader, you won't be disappointed.

Femdom fiction readers will enjoy the 17-page "Peculiar Apparatus" story.

The photo spread this month is a vintage, forties looking session : Kayliwulf and Latex Station latex for the ladies, fedoras for the boys. Really well done.

Pick up your copy of FEMDOM Magazine #4 at The Dominion or read it on-line at www.femdommag.com.

FEMDOM Magazine issue 3

Here is the latest issue of the FEMDOM Magazine, number 3 and still going strong, Evangeline surely is true to her word.

This issue has 125 pages. "In Gear", "Brilliant Advice" and "A View From The Top" are back in this issue, along with "10 questions with..." featuring AngelRose Boucher from Bouddica.

"Dragon Ladies", a smoking fetish article, is very nicely done: a Domme taking her new admirer on a trip through the smoking fetish places in SL.

The recent age-verification fuss from Linden Labs is discussed in part 3 of "A Brief History of Our Times".

The center pages are filled with a colorful collage of shoes, boots, and accessories called "Strictly Style".

It's good to see that the magazine has managed to get some advertising in. This should cover some of the costs and secure the future of the magazine.

Pick up your copy of FEMDOM Magazine #3 at The Dominion or read it on-line at www.femdommag.com, which will be the permanent address for the current issue.

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 :)

FEMDOM Magazine issue 2

The second issue of FEMDOM Magazine has hit the stands.

Producing any serious magazine is a challenge; and a monthly one, in Second Life, is challenge multiplied by ten.

But as Evangeline told us in her interview, it really looks like the project is going to stay the course.

The launch party - which was terrific - is covered in a four-page spread. Readers of this blog who own a magnifying glass can see Deirdre and lelo on page 20 and 22, dancing with friends Daphne Goodnight and Kat Fetisov. Name dropping? I have no idea what you are talking about, dear ;)

Regular features are cropping up : "In Gear", the toy roundup; "Brilliant Advice", the q&a corner, and "A View From The Top", presenting dommes with a particularly interesting story.

The Staff list at the end of the magazine is a great idea, introducing the contributors.

This is not a slim magazine. Of the 135 pages, most are taken up by text, and very little by advertising and pictures.

Some items, like the OWK history, are bound to be controversial. Most reflect a strong lifestyle femdom point of view.

This is definitely one you'll get for the articles ;)

Pick it FEMDOM Magazine #2 at The Dominion or read it online.

The FEMDOM Magazine

Last Saturday, we attended the launch for the new "FEMDOM Magazine". Yes, that's the title. No confusion here ;)

Evangeline Eames was kind enough to give us this interview :

Deirdre Young: Who had the idea of a Second Life femdom magazine ?

Evangeline Eames: Well, I did. I outlined that a bit in my letter to our readers. (Note : Page 2 and 3)
EE: I am not the first to do it : there was another Femdom magazine called Ouch, a year or two ago.
EE: I understand they had problems getting writers and good material..so it halted.

DY: BDSL died too... Magazines in SL do seem to die. Does that concern you?

EE: Yes, it is a concern. I think every project in SL only survives if there is a driving force behind it willing to put time, money , and energy in to it.

DY: And for FEMDOM Magazine, that force is you?

EE: Yes. It will happen because I'll make it happen.

DY: Projects are rarely picked up once the originator abandons them.

EE: I'm here to run the distance, not to do one issue and fade away.

DY: I like the sound of that.

EE: Well... we'll see if I am here a year from now, won't we :)

DY: The first thing that struck me was, that is a huge magazine.. 119 pages

EE: I thought it was small. An RL mag is double or triple that. Mind you, we had no ads the first issue.

DY: Do you intend to keep that page number going every month?

EE: We'll get bigger... minimum of 100 at the very least.

DY: How many people are on the team ?

EE: Right now, there is a core with a number of people contributing on a rotating basis

EE: The core is Madeleine Broome..our managing editor, Maztor Giles, our creative director, and myself. About 10 or so others assisted on this issue.. that number will fluctuate.

DY: All volunteers?

EE: Yes. there is no revenue generated by this magazine at this time....no ads. That will change - although at heart this is not a 'for profit' venture

DY: Labor of love, then. Do you intend to ever sell the magazine, or do you plan to keep it free?

EE: It will always be free. I don't expect many would pay for an SL magazine... and if so, not much..not worth the trouble.

DY: If not profit, what is your motivation, or your goal for the magazine?

EE: To strengthen the Femdom community in SL...and also it is great fun to do. Great to see people's ideas, great to offer a forum for people's thoughts and creativity.

DY: I looked at the Web version, and found it really convenient. Is it going to be a regular thing too?

EE: Yes it will be. Lots of people don't care to read magazines in SL..having an online component was imperative to me - I wouldn't have done the magazine without a way to view it online

DY: Will you be soliciting contributions?

EE: Yes, we have an open call to anyone who wants to send something in. Whether or not it is published will depend on the quality, and whether it fits into the feel of the particular issue we are working on.

EE: The more material to work with the better.. we need everything :)

DY: Will you be announcing themes for upcoming issues?

EE: No, although we already have one for our next. It will always be a surprise.

DY: Interesting :)

EE smiles

DY: How will you distribute the magazine?

EE: We have vendors up in a few Femdom locations...we hope to get them in to more. We also have a mailing list of a few thousand we drop it to. And unlike many magazines, our issues are copy and transfer. We want people to pass them around.. never understood why others were not.

DY: If the magazine is free, there is no reason not to make it copyable, I agree.

EE nods..and transfer..but I suppose that is to keep track of distribution. I don't care about that :) I care about accessibility.

DY: Counting readers is useful to convince advertisers, perhaps.

EE nods....so is quality and buzz, though. Lots of people know about us...word is getting out. Hopefully people will see it and want to advertise. But if they don't, thats fine too. A profit is incidental..if we have one at all

- - -

There are worse philosophies for a project. We wish long life to FEMDOM Magazine.

Where can you get the magazine? Inworld, get your copy at The Dominion or see the online version.

Kayliwulf fans won't want to miss the 12-page spread starting on page 57