gwyneth-llewelyn
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The Virtual Whirl: Vox virtualis
A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Seriously, I don't actually know anyone who says this other than myself; though I'm assured that there are some folks out there who do. With that tragically underutilized platitude in mind, then, last week I posed a question to a spread of well-known virtual environment users (at least to those that I felt would actually respond) and collected the responses. The question put to the respondents was "What's the single thing that the operators/developers could do to make you feel more satisfied with their virtual environment offering; what thing would help an operator keep you as a customer, or that would make some other operator more appealing than the one or ones you already have?"
Dodgy Second Life viewer doing the rounds
We'd like to caution our Second Life readers about a dodgy Second Life viewer that's currently doing the rounds under rather dubious circumstances. The viewer is calling itself Neil Life, and purports to include some content-ripping features over and above those normally available to users. One particular feature of the viewer, apparently related to a permissions exploit, appears to have triggered Linden Lab to perform an emergency update to Second Life to close the exploit last week. The viewer was widely advertised last week with distributed notecard advertisements in-world which purported to have been created by famed resident, Gwyneth Llewelyn. In actual fact, a copy of one of her existing notecards had simply had the text replaced so that it appeared that she had authored it. (This is one of the main reasons we don't generally accept the provenance of notecards in Second Life)
Is the Second Life economy in a boom or a bust?
It seems a simple sort of question doesn't it? Is the Second Life economy in a boom or a bust? Is it stagnating or recessive? What the heck is it doing, exactly? Well, life is never simple, and the Second Life economy certainly isn't. In the main, the Second Life economy follows the same basic rules as any national economy might, because well ... it is full of people doing what people do with and within economies. The differences are in the axioms. The Second Life economy is to regular economies what geometry would be if pi were (for example) equal to exactly three (circles would have a whole lot more sides, for one thing). The familiar set of rules produces vastly different results if the underlying constants are different. All economies have some level of striation. There's always more than one kind of economy operating under the hood. The fundamental circumstances of the Second Life economy, however, lead to a greater disparity in the striated economy than is the norm elsewhere. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
The last days of grace
Monday is a special day. Firstly, it's the fifth anniversary of Second Life -- though not the birthday, a fact which Linden Lab kind of drummed into me in 2006, when I made that mistake myself; The birthday is in March, the Lab insisted at the time, though the anniversary is in June. The Lab seems to be changing that tune and calling June the birthday nowadays. We're not sure if that's a concession to popular misuse, or if the Lab has become genuinely confused over it. It doesn't really matter, though. Monday's a special day for more than just that. Monday's the first day after the 90 day grace period on trademark use has expired.
The history and implications of SL's fifth anniversary
Virtual worlds consultant, pundit and thinker, Gwyneth Llewelyn has taken a long and detailed look at the background behind the Second Life fifth anniversary celebration, its planning and the eleventh-hour reversals that it has suffered and what they all mean in the ongoing, well, tension between Second Life users and Linden Lab, the operator of the virtual world. "Once it was clear that the decision was final and unappealable, the organisers understood the message perfectly: they were not in charge of SL5B any more." Llewelyn looks at earlier events, and how they were organized, and how they panned out, as well as the organization for this year's festival -- which began in July 2007, and whose core goals were finalized ten months ago, before being disrupted only three weeks ago. It is a thoughtful and interesting read, as we've come to expect from Llewelyn's work, and even if you disagree with her it is well worth your time.
Boost your traffic, without bots, camping or coherent spelling
Completely oblivious to the decoupling of traffic from search rankings in the new Second Life system, Traffic Injection has just started up a business to boost your traffic, promising variable amounts of dwell up to 150,000/day. This apparently seems to be achieved by mule avatars and (if we're reading this right) by spamming group IMs. It isn't easy to tell, actually, since their Web-site (actually a blogger.com blog) is so poor on the grammar and spelling fronts, that much of it almost defies any attempt at comprehension whatsoever. English, we guess, isn't their first language -- which might be why they seem to be unaware that the basis for their business model is about to disappear (within the next week or two, most likely). If you don't recognize the .nr on the end of their domain name, that is -- regrettably -- Nauru, the smallest nation in the world, and one with a grim history. [Thanks Gwyneth Llewelyn]
Linden Lab sparks bloggers strike
Starting today, a number of prominent Second Life bloggers are on strike for three full days in protest at Linden Lab's sudden detrimental change of position on the use of current and new trademarks. These bloggers feel snubbed and threatened by the new brand guidelines, which they find contradictory, excessive and potentially restrictive to free speech, and are going on a symbolic three-day strike as a gesture to show that they do not find Linden Lab's answers to these concerns sufficient.
HTML-on-a-prim kills sims
Well, the new HTML-on-a-prim feature in Second Life has one little tiny, teensy little problem. You can crash simulators with it. Sharp-eyed Gwyneth Llewelyn discovered, rather by accident, that you can reproducibly, reliably, and immediately crash a Second Life simulator by setting parcel media properties incorrectly. The details are all filed in the public JIRA, and this one's definitely a showstopper. Get your voting fingers ready, and we strongly suspect an emergency fix to go out on this one really quickly. This feature should have gotten more time for public testing on the beta grid. Like any at all, for example.
Six virtual world myths busted
Second Life celebrity, thinker, developer and blogger, Gwyneth Llewelyn takes a look a white paper by Proximity London on virtual worlds. The white paper is based on some 4,000 interviews with people and builds up a picture of the realities of these synthetic environments. The paper's author, John Urpeth, basically rounds up six of the most popular claims about virtual worlds, and basically finds them all to be pretty much so much smoke - and you don't need to ask where that smoke is blown or why. Llewelyn goes through all six and the results are well worth your time reading. If you only know virtual worlds from TV, newspapers, and major news sites - then the odds are you've learned little that's actually true. You can find interesting and energetic discussion on the topic at Digado.
Second Life release candidate available, but not announced
Sharp-eyed Gwyneth Llewelyn has spotted that there's a new Second Life release candidate viewer available for download today, through the Amazon S3 service that Linden Lab uses for delivery. The viewer appears to be datestamped 21 November, though it's not yet been announced or linked off the Second Life website yet, though. We're guessing that it got waved-off at the last minute (perhaps because of the holiday, perhaps because of bugs) and may possibly be replaced with a fresher version before a final announcement goes up.
