New World Notes

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VOLKAN

Last week a large blue cat fluent in Mandarin stopped by my office, to tell me an insight she just had. 

"Apparently," Patchouli Woollahra announced, "Second Life meets all six criteria imposed on the creation and continued existence of large groups, as theorized by a psychoanalyst named V.D Volkan." 

This is not the sort of observation a cat is prone to make.  (Nor for that matter, a busty Kawaii babe, among the many avatars in Patchouli's brimming wardrobe of identity.)  But this particular feline happened to be writing her graduate on socialization on virtual worlds.

So I bid her to recite the list.  And the blue cat did so from memory:

WHERE IN THE WORLD THEY PLAY

Charts courtesy of Forseti Svarog

The offshore haven of the Cayman Islands may have the most active Residents, but most of the 500,000-plus active Residents are from ten nations-- thanks to the Electric Sheep Company's Forseti Svarog, we have copious charts to track their May usage.  The two above are the most striking to me, for they suggest the active Residents are just that-- in-world from 21 hours (that's Brazil) to 50 hours (that's the Netherlands) a month.  Forseti points out an interesting wrinkle to this: older Residents tend to be in-world significantly longer-- an average of 90 minutes a day (45 hours a month), for those in the 35-44 age bracket, and 110 minutes (55 hours a month), for those 45 and older.

Much more here at the Sheep blog, Out to Pasture.

Tateru's Monday Reality Mix

Tateru Nino's weekly look at recent real world incursions into Second Life

Comcast is the largest cable-television company and second largest ISP in the United States of America. You would expect their distinctive values to flow through to their Second Life venture, though I'm not sure why that involves a steampunk fizzy drink laboratory, racing games, and candy-colored signs.

Join us for this Comcastic(!) experience after the fold, along with two video premieres (Machinima and the Chemical Brothers), Playboy, musical solstices, architecture and design, another protest letter, and a couple slices of gender bias (one celebratory, and the other perhaps not so much.)

THE AVATARIZATION OF BILL KELLER

It happened with little fanfare, which is a shame, because I think it represents an epochal shift: in early June, Bill Keller, executive editor at the New York Times, sat down for a Second Life interview with Adam Reuters.  Even three years ago it would have been unthinkable that the senior editor of the world's most powerful newspaper would consent to become an avatar in a virtual world, taking questions from Residents with names like Razzy Rocket. But that's just what Keller did, discussing a number of subjects, including (most appropriately), how the Times is adjusting to the Web 2.0 era.

Tateru's Mixed Reality Headcount

Baller's City: California hiphop b-ball-- and a PhD thesis

NBA loses home court advantage to Ballers City; Pride goes before a fall as Lesbians sink below The Pond

Ballers City is a plucky, homegrown basketball-themed community with streetsmart, hardtop flavor, and right now, it's whipping the pants off the NBA's official Second Life site, performing twice as well despite the NBA's 25% rise in visitors this week.  (3,606 visits to the NBA's 1,596.)  As it turns out, it was developed for the PhD thesis of Rein Spire, the City's founder: "How to create a compelling SL place: Preconditions and Requirements for Avatar Based Innovation." Seeing as how Ballers is beating out the most renowned corporate brand in professional basketball, I'd hazard to guess his paper will get good marks.

After the fold, we'll check breasts for firmness-- how did the fantasy version of Hefner's fantasy measure up? That plus our regular rundown of the corporate top ten.

OFFSHORING SECOND LIFE

Linden Lab's latest user stats include a fascinating tidbit, first unearthed by Celebrity Millionsofus, who used them to compile a list of active users by national origin, then listed these on the blog of Millions of Us (a sponsoring partner of NWN.)

Here are the first ten countries where Second Life Residents are most active, based on the average number of minutes they spend in-world per day, per user:

• 161 - Cayman Islands
  
• 132 - Indonesia
• 130 - Netherlands
• 128 - Canada
• 122 - United States
• 122 - Korea, Republic of
• 116 - Russian Federation
• 109 - French Southern Territories
• 104 - Antigua and Barbuda
• 103 - Martinique

A lot of smaller nations, and a few you might not expect-- a localized version of SL has only recently been released to the South Korean market, for example, and it already boasts 1018 power users.

Second Life's most active Residents, however, are from a country you'd easily recognize, if you read a lot of thriller novels.

WEEKEND OPEN FORUM

Got topics to discuss, subjects/events to announce?  Post here for highlighting later!

THIS IS CHINA TRACY

Ideal viewing over the weekend: China Tracy's art project mentioned here recently hit the SL machinima stream, and it's beautiful, meditative, sometimes sardonic, but ultimately moving and hopeful.  As a movie, you may see the influence of Wong Kar-Wai and Wim Wenders, among other world class directors.  Nearly a half hour in total length, it plays out in three separate but thematically-related parts.  Part I is an introductory montage to Second Life, and it lingers on both the beauty and the excesses of virtual capitalism that also make the metaverse a consumerist sprawl.

The equally amazing Part II and Part III reviewed after the break...

HALF A MILLION, PLUS CHANGE

It's the number that stands out for me most, in the Lindens' latest publicly released demographic figures: 507,844.  That's how many active Residents there were last month, "active" defined as a Resident who went in-world for more than an hour.  It conforms to an industry thumb rule, that an online world's active users are ten times the maximum concurrency-- which in May was reaching close to 50K.

Less than six months ago, it's worth noting, active Residents were around 250,000.  At the time, Tateru projected that active users so defined would total over a million by the end of 2007.  How likely is she to be proven right?

SITE SEEING, PART II

Lillie Yifu in her skybox of mutual desire

Continuing my weekly stroll through the thicket of new SL sites and blogs, I find these flowers:

Lillie Yifu documents her work as a highly-paid avatar escort with a uniquely evocative literary bent in 2nd Sex.  Her recent post "A Moment" is a sexy and lyrical meditation on indelible instances of desire-- both real and in-world.  (Not safe for work reading, unless you work at Grove Press.)

- M is for Myg is a gorgeously realized group blog merging commentary and imagery. Can't wait to see the graphic novel!
- A Better World in Second Life, as the title suggests, tracks the development of a machinima-based documentary on the potential of SL for real world activism.  (Now with five chapters!)