New World Notes

Do Residents Need Their Own Flag?

In my favorite scene from Seven Samurai, the villagers who've spent most the movie resolutely working together to defend themselves from outside attack, come undone with panic.  They're about to surrender, when Toshiro Mifune climbs to a high point and holds up the makeshift flag they've made to represent their village.  The peasants gradually quit their caviling and bickering as they look up at that tattered banner; their courage returns, their unity is restored.  That moment occurred to me when Laetizia Coronet sent word that she wants designs for a Second Life flag. 

Second Life(tm) Trademark Turmoil Continues-- And Gwyneth Lays Down The Gauntlet (Updated)

"®  is the new black!", fashionista Kit Meredith announces sweetly, then hands me the latest must-have accessory for the metaverse:  Intellectual property symbols converted into giant ear rings. Kit created them on a lark for friends, she tells me, but Crap Mariner has been passing out copies across the grid, so you're likely to see them dangling from fashionable heads around Second Life.  It's only the most overt response to the tumult over the Lindens' latest trademark policies, scheduled to go into effect in three months, but seems to be causing more anxiety, than understanding.

"I know people who've gone through a year of blog posts to update all the references [to Linden trademarks]," NWN fashion correspondent and blogger Irish Ophelia tells me, "and I really won't have the time for that for more than three months, so I have kiiinda been freaking out about it."  I'm not sure that's required-- if I read the guidelines right, it's only necessary for bloggers to include the "®" symbol on "your first or most prominent reference to a Linden Lab brand name", i.e. on your banner. 

Still, I'm not entirely sure myself.  Then again, neither is Gwyneth Llewelyn, and she's one of Second Life's most influential intellects (named as such in the official guide), along with being CEO of Beta Technologies, a leading metaverse developer which just helped launch the official SL presence of Slovenian public broadcasting.  Seeking clarification in an open letter to the Lindens on her blog, she points out how the new policy contradicts Lindens' previously established guidelines:

Your previous policy, established in May 2004 (”Second Life® Fansite Tolkit”), and later reinforced with referral programmes like “Viva La Evolution”, positively encouraged the widespread use of your trademarks, so long as it was quite clearly displayed that no infringement was intended. To requote your own terms of agreement for the usage of your trademarks:

If CopyBot Comes Back, Should Anyone Care?

Not CopyBot 2: Impressive video demo of Second Inventory, Angelo Biondi's offline content copier (see site FAQ denying any relation to CopyBot)

"Have a scoop for you," someone messaged me yesterday, writing it out like it was a headline already: "CopyBot 2.0 Hits Second Life, Lindens cover it up as they have no idea how to stop it." 

Born in 2006, CopyBot was a program leveraging the open source version of Second Life to enable copying of content (albeit imperfectly), and its mere existence caused tumult across the grid, seemingly threatening an economic collapse.  Hundreds of stores closed, and thousands protested to the Lindens until they belatedly interceded, and specifically forbade it.  (You can read the whole story here.) What my source said reflected a rumor that's been rumbling unconfirmed through the Second Life blogosphere these last couple weeks, most recently by Vint Falken: supposedly, new and improved versions of CopyBot are surreptitiously making their way back into the world, and the Lindens are waging a shadow war against them.

Any truth to this?  At the moment, I've no idea.  More interesting to me is the underlying assumption that gives this rumor any juice at all: the belief that CopyBot itself caused the chaos that came before.  So it's worth remembering what actually happened in 2006:

The unsubstantiated panic over CopyBot caused the chaos.  Consider:

The Problem With Protesting Content Theft In A World Without Mass Media

The naked campaign by top SL content creators continues to provoke thoughtful commentary throughout the blogosphere.  Fashionista (and real life IP lawyer) Kit Meredith likes the power of its personal, grassroots appeal.  While admiring the motives and the approach, however, Alesia Schumann of The Secondlife Newspaper is highly skeptical that it'll work.  Chief problem being:

[A]wareness itself is very hard to raise in a fragmented world such as Second Life. There is no national media around here. There isn't one source of information or one place that everyone ends up visiting in a short time span. Should the campaign be short-lived for a quick splash, it will meet that obstacle.

Unfortunately, this point is very true.  For example, my guess is this blog is regularly read by just 10-20% of the active user base, and that's on the high end for SL-based media.  In any case, New World Notes like other metaverse media sources don't engage the new users inclined to commit content theft (often without even knowing they're doing so.)  Barring official notices posted in the Linden viewer, can a media campaign really become widespread across Second Life enough to have an impact?

Naked Pleading: Stroker Serpentine On Content Creators' IP Rights Campaign, Two Weeks In

I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't want to piss off a big naked guy with tattoos and a mullet.  (Or for that matter, upset a nude blonde.)  In recent weeks, Second Life's content creators have stepped up their protest against a rash of theft, first with a real world plea, and now with an eye-catching campaign created by Chez Nabob and featuring top entrepreneurs posing deshabille. 

The Lindens generally tell Residents who feel their content is being expropriated in-world to file a DMCA notice-- a time-consuming process that often leaves the dispute unresolved. This campaign, by contrast, raises consumer awareness, and brings a moral dimension to the issue.  (Hollywood and the record industry have attempted similar efforts to little effect. Presumably, consumers are less impressed by pleas from gargantuan media companies, than those from grassroots content creators who provide the bulwark of Second Life's economy.)  Or as Stroker Serpentine puts it, "[P]rojects a united front against the deluge of thievery. An informed consumer is our best ally."  As the owner of the phenomenally successful Strokerz Toys and the man who successfully took an alleged content thief to real life court, Stroker (he of the muscles and the mullet) is sort of an elder spokesman on the issue.  So I put this question to him: are they seeing tangible benefits to the campaign?

Lindens Limit Libertarianism: Billboard Advertising Restricted, Continuing Rollback of Laissez Faire Policies

The libertarian era of Second Life is quickly coming to an end.  The latest in a long series of regulatory moves was announced by Jack Linden yesterday. Starting today, you'll probably begin seeing giant ad towers like this one in Gryzdale disappear.  The new rule prohibits advertising on the Second Life mainland which impairs a neighbor's view, especially if it's done "to deliberately and  negatively affect another resident’s view so as to sell a parcel for an unreasonable price"-- i.e. pressuring that neighbor to sell their land from sheer eyesore coercion.  It's a necessarily vague prohibition, requiring a surprising level of hands-on regulation by the Lindens. 

It's also a reversal of Second Life's experiment with laissez faire society, which I track roughly from the beginning of 2004 and the sale of land, to the mid-2007, when the turnarounds began.  Consider:  in 2005, when a landowner began peppering the world with ugly billboard towers, Residents protested.  However, the Lindens generally refused to intercede. "It's not for us to decide the relative merit of construction in Second Life," Community Manager Daniel Linden told me then.  That hands-off stance has apparently changed.  The same could be said of other libertarian principles, like legalized gambling, unregulated banking, and permissible sexual extremes.

Metaverse Bots: How To Spot Them, What To Do With Them?

Do the Lindens plan to address the impact of bots on Traffic stats?  After three unsuccessful attempts to get a reply (any reply) on that question from their PR representative, that remains unknown.  Meantime, I discovered this Jira feature request vote from Haravikk Mistral, suggesting that Traffic be eliminated as a metric altogether, largely in protest against bot farms.  Go here to review and vote on it, if that's your inclination.

A larger question remains, regardless of what happens to Traffic-- how exactly do you recognize a bot?  In the novel that inspired Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick had a fanciful machine that did the job, called a Voight-Kampff.  In Second Life, that's quickly becoming a practical necessity.  But what's the best avatar-based Voigt-Kampff test? 

New World Tableau: Faerie Hax and the Mermaids of SL

Guardian Mermaids Dunan Wilder and Faerie Hax

These images are taken from Faerie's compilation of photos documenting the mermaids of Second Life. "The mer culture is another that lives quietly in the background of SL not getting the attention that the Elves get, but getting along quite nicely," she tells me.  "I think there are more mers than most people realize."  I believe her, for I first noticed the emergence of a mermaid subculture even back in Second Life's first year-- as this 12/23/03 visit to the underwater grotto of Myradyl Muse attests.  "I honestly couldn't say how many," Faerie allows, then points me to Natalia Zelmanov's Mermaid Diaries blog, "but there are plenty of mermaid malls and shops and sims.  Because the mers live under water, people walking around a sim don't accidently wander into the mer places.   Many people wouldn't realise that they may be next to a 'mer-place' unless they think to question why those green dots on their minimap are in the water!"  So like the mermaid of legend, the mers of SL largely keep to themselves, often only seen as flashes of color beneath the waves, briefly glimpsed from the shore.  Unless perhaps they rise up to guard their territory from sea monsters, as Faerie and Dunan must sometimes do.

See more of Faerie Hax's mermaid photos at this link.  Details for submitting your own Tableau after the break.

Ziggy Revealed: SL Creator Addresses Content Theft With Real World Plea

Ziggy Quirk in Second Life (courtesy her SL Universe archive)

"I'm the human behind Ziggy Quirk..."  So begins a unique video that represents just the most dramatic move taken by a loose affiliation of content creators protesting a recent wave of content theft.  I'm still trying to assemble the narrative, but apparently, one or more Residents were discovered to be selling or giving away skins and fashions from several well known designers.  This led to some shop closings, a exhaustively documented Jira report, and a swarm of SL fashionista blogs echoing calls for action. (Second Arts has a round-up here.)  "They are all over the grid chasing content thieves," Noirran Marx told me over the weekend.  "It's really tragic, they've ripped off so many skin designers." 

Which brings us back to Ziggy, who addressed the simmering issue in person yesterday, via YouTube video.  NWN has a long-standing editorial policy not to prominently publicize Residents' real world identities, but for obvious reasons, Ms. Quirk's impassioned call to action requires an exception.  "[I]n any online environment it can be easy to forget there's actual people at the controls, with actual human emotion," she tells me.  "I was slapping my own far less attractive face up there as a reminder."  A reminder that raises the moral stakes of virtual world content theft, breaking the consensual reality of SL to establish the human cost behind what might otherwise seem like harmless copying of 3D graphics.

Still Un-Alive: A Landowner Defends Her Use of Bots (Updated)

Who created the horde of undead Resident bots that now infest Second Life's most Popular Places?  That remains a mystery, but on further investigation, it seems to be more widespread than I originally assumed. After reading last week's New World Notes post on the pervasiveness of bots, Viajero Pugilist went in search of them in B&B Skins, an island fashion emporium that consistently ranks among the top of the Lindens' Popular Places category, a raw listing of total avatar foot traffic.  He found them not buried inside an underwater vault, as Christophe Hugo had, but high overhead, in a cafe four hundred-plus meters in the sky above B&B island.  They sat there staring blankly, and though Viajero invited them to dance, no one took him up on the offer.  Since dancing is such an essential community activity, this was a dead giveaway. (If Second Life had a Voigt-Kampff, the Blade Runner test to discover synthetic humans, Harrison Ford would ask his subjects to get funky to James Brown.) 

Last weekend, I tried to visit B&B's airborne zombie cafe, but was not as lucky; it's set above the limits of natural avatar flight.  However, I did find the owner of the island, standing silently on the balcony of her mansion by the sea.  I asked Bagnaria Wunderle about the dozens of undead above us. 

"I hope your article includes all sims that are using bots," she told me. "There are hundreds. That is all I have to say."

To be fair, there seems to be some truth in that.  At Miss Wunderle's prompting, I randomly visited three other sites listed in Popular Places, baldly asking questions like "Are you a bot?" to large groups I encountered there. I found just one of them full of actual Residents, albeit mostly away from keyboard, while their avatar collected free Linden Dollars in a camping system.  Another site also had a cafe of bots, only situated at sea level, with a few genuine Residents sitting among the undead in camping chairs [See Update below.]  A nightclub called TheHood had lined the bots up along the bar, like wallflowers watching a dance that they could never join:

Last year, the Lindens released an open source version of the Second Life viewer code, as a way of encouraging innovation, and this is that policy's most unintended of consequences: hacked versions of the program that create numerous Potemkin Villages of simulated activity.

"There are different levels of sophistication," Bagnaria tells me. "In any case, bots are not all that different from camping.  It is usually the percentage between bots and campers that differs."

I asked Bagnaria Wunderle how she justified her bots as another form of free money giveaway.  After all, I said, "With camping, at least an actual Resident gets L$, right?"

International Unions Organize in Second Life

Last September, a thousand-plus international union members converged on IBM's Second Life campus, protesting a wage cut affecting Big Blue's Italian employees, garnering widespread media coverage.  Resident johninnit Ni just pointed out this site, SL Unions, which aims to capitalize on that success.  "A bunch of real life organizations are getting together to start an island as a networking/events/ campaigns space for all unions internationally," he says, "a set of facilities held in common between them."  He adds that the group's Second Life island will be open to the public next month, and for now, you can follow their progress at their homepage.

Intellectual Property and Public Virtual Spaces

Rik Riel, cruising for a DMCA notice

If you're a photojournalist reporting on the news in New York's Time Square, you don't need to get the permission of every business owner whose logo and trademarks will surely show up in the published photo.  That's because there's already an established legal precedent of fair use.  (Especially if the logos are part of the news-- for example, photos of an anti-globalization protest outside a Nike store.) Trouble is, every Resident owns the IP rights to their content (including logos, trademarks, etc.), but to my knowledge, no real world court has adjudicated over its fair use by others, in similar contexts.

Which brings us to why NWN events maestro Rik Riel is sitting on an ugly red cube. 

Second Life Property Lines Attract Frosty Protest

It's fair to say few Residents enjoy slamming into red ban lines, those force field indicators which come up when you travel into private land where the owner has forbade entrance. Recently, Veeyawn Spoonhammer took a classic poem and re-purposed it into an elegant metaverse protest sign.  "If you feel the red ban fences don't make much sense, add little or no privacy and generally disrupt the SL experience," he writes on his blog, "let me know. I created a group where we can all complain about them." Image credit: Veeyawn Spoonhammer.

World of the Undead? Lindens Say Bot Population is Neglible

Chamber of the undead-- photographs by Hugo

Avatar-based caricaturist Christophe Hugo was wandering the world recently, when he came across a stranger kind of caricature: buried in a chamber beneath the waves of B&B Skins, a fashion island that usually ranks at the very top of SL's popularity index for Traffic, were dozens of "enslaved avatars", as Hugo puts it. 

The Traffic metric is based on the number of avatars to visit a given location, and the time they spend there, which yielded the infamous "camping chairs" that landowners pay Residents to sit in, to boost that number.  These are used by Residents controlled by actual people, but the latest iteration uses various versions of SL's open source client to log in zombie avatars, sometimes unleashed by landowners for marketing purposes.  "Without knowing Linden Lab's algorithm for calculating Traffic, I assume that if I had put 70 'dummied' avatars on my land all day like B&B Skins does," Hugo speculates, "My traffic would have jumped to around 60,000."  This boost in turn attracts genuine visits by Residents who assume the place is legitimately popular.  (The Grid Live reported this hack last month, I should add; also, I tried contacting the owner of B&B, but received no reply.)

In any case, this is not the only application of bot or zombie avatars; I noticed another recently, when I went in search of BioShock avatars.  Visiting a store that carried them, I went to chat with the blue-gray woman in a silver bikini who was there, assuming she was the owner.  Only to realize (as her profile indicated), she was a mannequin avatar, "usually logged in with the SLeek" client.  I spotted another mannequin avatar nearby, encased in a small robot costume;  on a hunch, I clicked the dynamic Map, which indicates in-world Residents with green dots.  And saw this:

There was just one Resident controlled by an actual Resident in this location (i.e., me), but the map indicated that there were three.  The dynamic map, in other words, doesn't discriminate between the living and the undead.  And an awful thought occurred to me: given all the landowners who used avatar bots to boost Traffic, or search for available land, or simply act as mannequins or NPCs, how deeply had zombies penetrated the population?

So I asked the Lindens: on the homepage, there's an "Online Now" meter tracking the number of Residents in-world.  Last Sunday, that number peaked at 61,000+.  But how many of them, I wondered, were simply undead pawns in a larger game?

Trust Collapse: Lindens Prohibit Unregulated Banks, Community-Based Lending-- But Why?

A late night run on an SL bank-- note reassuring service message, customers, protesters, Soviet flag

Like that scene from It's a Wonderful Life except with club babes, a sentient squirrel, and the Spanish guy from Street Fighter II, there's at least one run on a bank going on in-world right now. Residents who've put Linden Dollars in one of the many in-world virtual banks must withdraw their funds by January 22 or risk losing them, since that's when the Lindens just announced they'll ban all such services.  Unless, that is, a bank's proprietors can prove they're regulated by a real world government body.  When I arrived at this particular financial service, many were waving protest signs, but Massively's Tateru Nino (who got there earlier) told me she suspects this is diversionary damage control:  "There was a [bank] staffer here setting up a petition, and calming people, and directing blame at Linden Lab," she tells me. "It feels like a fabricated protest from where I'm sitting."

But why is it happening now?  "Since the collapse of Ginko Financial in August 2007," Ken D Linden explains in the announcement, "Linden Lab has received complaints about several in-world 'banks' defaulting on their promises."  He also cites banking activities, the law, and protection of Residents and the in-world economy's stability. That's all certainly true, though I can think of at least one other motive: the way CEO Philip Linden described Ginko, about a year ago:

The Mean Girls Guide to Purple Racism

I've written about real world racism carrying over into the metaverse, but is it possible for such prejudice to carry over into the fantastic?  Over at Mean Girls Guide to SL (a snarkily great blog) contributor Orchid Glitterbuck recently shared her experiences as a Resident whose avatar is neither black or white, but instead, a purple hue:

I found a couple 'normal' skins that I like to accompany the purple skins that I feel are really 'me'. When I wanted to make a 'quick' friend, I'd wear a normal skin and try to make my outfit match before I visited somewhere. People came up to me to talk, even though the conversation was 'petty'. You know "Wow I love your shoes where'd you get em?" or "Oooh that's a really cool shirt, who made it?" That kind of thing. But I always get the opposite reaction when I'm purple.

Surprising observations and an energetic discussion follow.  Mahalo to Caterin Semyorka for leading me to Orchid's purple musings.  Image credit: SL Mean Girls.

Listening to the Guvnah: Desmong Shang Explains Caledon

He began by creating and selling virtual antiques from a time that never existed, graduated to creating and selling virtual tulips in a (surprisingly successful) attempt to recreate Tulip Mania in Second Life, then went on to launch an empire of his own.  Drawing thousands of visits weekly, the Victorian steampunk-themed Independent State of Caledon is, as I reported recently, one of Second Life's most popular communities, thanks in great part to its founder and benevolent ruler, Desmond "the Guvnah" Shang.  He was recently interviewed in-world by InformationWeek's Ziggy Figaro, and it makes for great weekend listening.  Radio Riel has the audio file here. 

(Hat tip: Zoe Connolly's SL Blogosphere.)

Governing Extropia: A New City State Rises

At Virtually Blind, metaverse lawyer and legal analyst Benjamin Noble brings word of Extropia, a new SL city state created to look like a sci-fi future utopia, and promising a self-governed “haven for creative expression – in architecture, social relations, sexuality, artistic and technological media.”  Elections for public officials (including judges) begin in January-- read more about this promising experiment in virtual self-governance here.  Hopefully it doesn't go the way of Neualtenburg-- or for that matter, Bioshock.  Image credit: Virtually Blind.

Mere Child's Play

In the second life of Marianne McCann, childhood never ended.  Though in real life a woman well over 30 (by her description), Marianne's avatar stands knee high to a June bug, with pigtails wrapped in pink ribbon.  In Second Life, she mostly plays with avatars who look her age (there are hundreds of them), attends elementary school, goes to summer camp, and returns home to loving parents who tuck her in at night.  She's even turned the trappings of childhood into a business-- her store, You Know For Kids (direct teleport here), is located in a kind of mini-mall built like an elementary school, and there she sells SL versions of Lite Bright(tm), Eazy Bake Oven(tm), and other nostalgic toys from 70s.  ("Stuff dat I wanted as a kid," as she puts it.)  While this recreation of lost innocence is presented without irony, you can still occasionally see the adult behind it peeking out.  (The store's name, after all, is evidently borrowed from the Coen Brothers' Hudsucker Proxy, not exactly the kind of movie a kindergartener watches.)

If you've been half-following Second Life's more recent controversies, this last paragraph will probably seem strange, since the connotations of avatars roleplaying as children have been anything but innocent.  Rather, they've been associated with allegations (by the media and European authorities) of simulated pedophilia, and worse.  And while the Lindens have expressly forbade that kind of behavior in-world, non-sexual roleplaying is still permitted, and persists-- often, Marianne tells me, by people like her who have been abused as children themselves, and yearn to recapture in Second Life an innocence that was so atrociously ripped from them.  So now this subculture of adult Residents roleplaying as children exists in a social purgatory, adamantly protecting itself from occasional pedophiles who'd exploit them, while also enduring the suspicion of Residents who assume the worst-- or just find the whole notion of playacting as kids to be essentially creepy and suspect.  (In a distinct class of strangeness, that is, from roleplaying as a robot, or a magical elf, or even a humanoid furry animal.)

All this came up after Marianne McCann won New World Notes' Uncanny Valley Expo, in which she presented her avatar downcast, and close to tears.  In effect, she'd turned her avatar into a form of protest against the backlash directed at all child-age avatars and the moral panic spurred by totally legitimate concerns over protecting real children.  So after the contest I chatted with her, and Marianne described this community of overage kids, and her reasons for joining it.  Her conversation-- painful, forthright, likely controversial to some-- after the break.

Saved by Angels: Residents raise $3000+ for child's life-saving operation

Barbie Starr and T180Kay Smalls

Last Friday, I mentioned a charity ball fundraiser to cover the $3000 co-pay for an operation to save RJ, a Resident's little nephew who recently sustained a life-threatening head injury.  According to Barbie Starr, who organized the event and converted the L$ to US$ which went directly to the hospital, that figure has been reached: "We have raised over L$108,000 and have had enough money paid directly to the hospital and also by Paypal to pay the bill and the surgery went well," she tells me. T180Kay Smalls, RJ's aunt, will visit him soon.  Members of RJs Angels, the impromptu group formed solely to support the drive, are now wondering whether they should broaden its mission:  "[W]e might use this group as a way to help other kids of Residents in SL that are in need," Ms. Starr, one of the Angels' chief organizer, tells me.

Torley's Take on Trouble: SL's Most Beloved Linden Attempts Communication Breakdown Repair

I met Torley Linden in 2005, when I was still a Linden myself, and at the time, he was a Resident named Torley Torgeson, and not exactly a "he", but most certainly, among the community's most beloved figures.  He joined the Lindens shortly after, while I left the Lindens some months later, and what's striking is how he's managed to retain so much of his original, dazzlingly wacky identity, even after "going corporate".  After I reported on a reader survey indicating a monumental decline in Linden-to-Resident communication quality, I posted a response from Linden community director Robin Linden, and in Comments, Torley followed that with his own perspective.  Reader response to that, it's fair to say, has been mixed.  As an ironic demonstration in communication breakdown, it's worthwhile conversation worth reading, and participating in: do so at this link.  I just hope clarity comes sooner rather than later.

Ophelia's Gaze: Losing Ginny

Exclusive to NWN, Iris Ophelia's ongoing showcase of all things stylish in SL...

Wearing Ginny's Isabelle dress in remembrance of a truly Dazzling person

On November 10th, fans of Last Call, a leading SL fashion studio, learned shocking news about one of the company's co-owners on the official website: in late October, the avatar we’d all known as Ginny Talamasca had died. This explained an earlier five day closure of “The Quad”, the name of the four adjoining sims where Last Call's boutique is located. In spite of requests to respect these sim owners’ privacy, there was a flurry of gossip and speculation over the closing. I don’t think anyone really expected a real life death to be the reason, and certainly no one wanted it to be.

As one of SL's top fashion designers, Ginny Talamasca provoked a wide range of emotions, both admiration and jealously, love and resentment, all a reflection of the fiercely competitive industry.  But through it all, she (or rather, he) remained Ginny, one of the most passionate, charming, and dynamic residents that Second Life has ever seen.

Communication Breakdown, Addressed: Robin Linden responds

Last week I published the results of a survey suggesting that the quality of Linden-to-Resident communication had recently reached a remarkable low, with 83% of respondents describing it as "Poor" or "Mixed".  I put these figures to Robin Linden, company VP of Marketing & Community Development (pictured here from a 2006 interview) to get her feedback.  Here's her reply in full-- comments on it welcome.

"As you can imagine, the last year has been a whirlwind of activity for all of us at Linden Lab. Second Life has seen hundreds of thousands of active Residents each month and a doubling in concurrency, and we have been hard at work establishing both a concrete technological platform and improved operational procedures to better serve our Residents. Understandably, this is quite an undertaking.

Communication Breakdown: 83% surveyed Residents report Poor/Mixed Linden-to-Resident communications

The world of Second Life may be worth a half billion dollars on the open market, or perhaps even ten times higher that, but it's only as valuable as its most dedicated Residents, and the value they're willing to create in it.  That, in turn, depends on the confidence and trust they place in the Lindens, who literally hold their world together.  Over the last few months, however, the most recurring complaint I've come across, in-world, in the SL blogosphere, and in real world meetings, has been a decline of clear communication between Lindens and Residents who are invested in it most.  To make sure these weren't anomalous comments, I felt obligated to launch this (admittedly unscientific) survey, to get the take from Residents who read my blog.

As the results suggest, it's evidently very bad, and based on my reporting, it's not difficult to suggest some reasons for these numbers:

Undersexed, Overbuilding: Academic survey of SL user activity belies stereotypes (Updated)

Source: SL Survey

Last April, I linked to a study of SL activity being conducted by Wolkam Winger and Angelyka Klata, two European academics/Residents.  Their results are finally online, and they're fascinating.  Most striking to me is a question which adds another datapoint to the recurring question, "How much activity in Second Life is sexual?"  I've long suspected it was much less than often assumed, even more so after the Lindens claimed that land designated to have Mature-rated activity was less than 18%.  Winger and Klata's survey of 657 Residents is in line with this:

Asked if they engaged in SL cybersex, only 13.6% answered Often/Always.  28.9% answered Sometimes, and 52.2% answered Never.  This fits my anecdotal sense that most SL users try sex a few times for the novelty-- or consider it, and just pass.

Model Camper: Free money site adds ironic new twist to camping chairs

When Tateru and I began our search for genuinely popular communities in Second Life, free from camping chairs, we briefly scratched our heads over Puerto Banus, a place that's consistently crowded and in the Lindens' Top Twenty sites by foot traffic.  On my first visit, I saw dozens of fashion models striding along a row of catwalks in a kind of fantasia Miami Beach locale.  Must be big hangout with fashionistas, I thought, and teleported off.

Tateru wasn't as amazed: "It's just camping chairs."

I went back to double check, and so they were. The Residents weren't roleplaying models: they were fixed to an animation embedded in the floorboards, which was making their avatars automatically sashay across the catwalk like so many Tyra Banks marionettes.

A View from Big Blue: An IBM insider's surprising perspective on last week's labor protest against IBM

As international union activists converged on IBM's Second Life campus last week, staff and management watched at a distance, refusing public comment.  However, a longtime IBM staffer with colleagues working on the SL campus recently got in touch with me, and on condition of anonymity, offered their insider's view on how the strike was perceived from within the company.  According to my source, it was generally seen as a positive development, justifying their substantial investment in Second Life and other "3D web" platforms:

“[S]ince we're gung-ho on virtual worlds technology, this kind of event in the news only goes to show everyone (including our upper management) that there's a real need for us to be here and for us to be on top of it." The source believes it will actually encourage IBM to continue its heavy activity in Second Life.

International Union Protesters Converge on IBM: Company refuses comment, strike leaders claim success, 1850 total attendance (including bananas and geometric dissenters)

As the labor union strike finally came to a close a couple hours ago, protest leader (and Italian IBM staffer) Barillo Kohnke looked out over the crowd of several dozen still there at the IBM Italia region, and declared victory:

"A BIG SUCCESS !!! THANKS TO ALL," he shouted. "AFTER 12 HOURS THE PROTEST IS FINISHING... LET'S SEE THE REACTIONS OF IBM TOMORROW.  PLEASE STAY REGISTERED IN THE PROTEST MAILING LIST TO BE UPDATED."

The strike began in the early morning today (round Midnight, Second Life Time) and when I visited IBM's main hub, a crowd was already gathering.

Most of the activity seemed to be concentrated on the IBM Italia region on the corporate campus-- unsurprising, since the protest is over a paycut impacting Italian  workers of the company.  In any case, they continued streaming in, and the leaders kept count of unique visitors.  At the end, the Uni Global Second Life spokesman told me they'd counted 1850 in all. 

What IBM management thinks of all this is still unclear; I talked to several staffers on campus during the strike, and they declined comment.  A senior IBM staffer watched the protest from a distance, but when I asked to take a screenshot, he promptly vanished into the metaverse aether.