Reading Radar

Wondered why Stuart and I never got our posts from Meara, who was assigned to send us something… saw this comment from Quaintly on Stuart’s blog:

On Monday, Meara posted on her personal blog (bleepbleepbleepbleep) that she would be taking a break from SL. I guess it could extend to not checking her SL email as well, or writing SL stuff & posting on SL blogs. I know she didn’t submit her other post to Radar either and didn’t publish the posts she received on either of her blogs (Ann Otoole ended up posting her own Mix ‘N Match post on her own blog because of this). Perhaps you could contact Wildstar Beaumont? I think he might need a host as Meara didn’t put up his post either.

Listen… if you are signed up for something, and then you decide to pull a disappearing act, LET PEOPLE KNOW.. the people who are waiting for you to fulfill your commitment. At the very least, tell Vint and/or Arminasx so they could tell us. No one expects you to do something if you have reasons you can’t, but show some common courtesy to the group whose project you signed up for.

Edit: re-reading this post, I have to think that they aren’t saying they had 30,000 signups and 1,000 land orders this week, they mean that’s what they have in total. But 20,774,912 sq m is only 317 sims, right? Not nearly 1000. I’m confused about what’s being claimed here. But I’ll assume they meant they hit over 30,000 sign ups, not that they had 30,000 last week. End of Edit.

Bettina Tizzy is reporting that Openlife claims 30,000 new signups in a week, and over 1,000 new land orders.

Here’s last week’s numbers published on their web site.

Here’s this week’s.

You be the judge. That’s a delta of less than 3,000, and the size of their metaverse hasn’t changed at all, meaning they haven’t filled any of those orders for land yet. Unless I’m misinterpreting what they mean by land orders, and they just mean people buying plots. But from their web site, the only land sales I see mentioned are sims.

I can’t wait until they really do start going through their growing pains and all the people who are supposedly leaving SL starting noticing “hey, this isn’t as smooth as we thought!”

Openlife is taking on a precarious role if they’re truly accepting the mantle of second Second Life by trying to attract the most dissatisfied SL’ers, because when they have a few “what the fuck just happened” moments, and they will if they really grow anywhere near as fast as they think they will, they’ll find out that how fickle people can be and how little most people want to go through the birthing process all over again.

Someday OpenSim solutions might be really appealing when they’re run like web servers and thousands of companies can offer stable sims with big bandwidth, but right now Openlife has to go through all the same stuff that LL went through to get scaled up. The difference is that their code is behind, and they have fewer people and less money.

Look, I’m not bashing them out of any kind of ill will, in fact I wish them all the best luck because choice is GOOD, but to think they’ll be able to sail sublimely through the troubled waters that LL’s already crossed is naive at best, amazingly stupid at most. They have huge challenges ahead. There are going to be problems, a lot of them which SL’s already been through. If people really understand that, that’s one thing.

I just keep remembering the whining about the system skirt. If people are upset about that kind of hardship, imagine what’ll happen when they routinely can’t keep prim attachments on or scripts go wonky, they can’t stay logged in for more than 10 minutes, and their inventory has to reload every time they cross a sim border (which kept happening to me, btw). I hope the crew at Openlife actually understands for real the high expectations of SL’ers if they’re actually trying to pull the disgruntled ones over. You know… the ones with higher expectations and less tolerance than anyone else?

Best last line regarding the openspace sim controversy:

From Wagner James Au on Gigaom:

“Still, one thing remains clear: “I’m moving to OpenSim!” has already become the metaverse version of the “I’m moving to Canada!” threat we hear every U.S. Presidential election.”

Does this make the protesters the Alec Baldwins and Susan Sarandons of SL?

A funny story on the protest from Itazura Radio coming up in the next podcast.

A lot of different blogs, a lot of comments on the openspace rate increase. And so many of them are outraged and blaming LL for their use of openspace sims as residential or business locations based on the fact that LL double the prim quota on openspaces. “Clearly they MUST have wanted me to use this for my booming business!” goes the argument.

I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine and his wife bought a steam cleaner. They took it home, cleaned all their carpets, then returned it. I asked what was wrong with it. “Nothing,” was the answer. “We never meant to keep it. They have a great return policy and they don’t ask questions.” Saying that clearly LL wanted you to load the openspace sims with tons of prims, scripts, and avatars because of their higher prim counts is like saying clearly retailer X wants you to buy steam cleaners, clean the whole house, and then return them because they have a good return policy. Both are unethical and at best naive, at worst totally dishonest.

I don’t think the rate hike is a good thing either, and I don’t think it’s the way to deal with overloaded openspace sims. But come on, people, at least be honest about this, if you’re going to complain and leave SL in droves (which is doubtful, but we’ll see). Don’t make stuff up just because it suits your cause. If you really believe LL encouraged you to use these for other than the clearly specified purpose, you’re just engaging in a predisposition to see it that way to justify your use of it as such.

One minor way to help contribute to people’s knowledge of SL if you’re so inclined is through the SL Wiki. If you have an SL account, you can edit the wiki. Tonight, for example, I added an entry for imageSynth2 on the Texture Tools page of the wiki, and previously I put in a link to my Final Wrap Up on SL Voice Recording on the Mac post, as well as to WireTap Anywhere on the Wiki’s Voice Recording page.

I’m not pointing that out so you’ll all send me flowers and want to pick out curtains with me, but as examples of little contributions you can make to resources that people use when they’re trying to figure out how to do stuff in SL. Little helpful tips for people add up, as Scottlo Scorbal reminded me last night in a chat I had with him.

There’s actually very little as satisfying as putting a little tip or bit of information out there and then finding out later someone stumbled on it and found it useful. I never was a fan of knowledge hoarding.

And in fact, I see that on the Machinima page that I need to add a link for ScreenFlow for the Mac…

Linden Lab spend more time blogging about their blog nowadays than actually blogging about their business.

Tateru Nino talks about this on Massively, properly conveying the sense of confusion all of us have about what’s going on with LL and their blogs and other communication tools.

Isn’t the job of a PR department to break things down, make them simple, and help people NOT be confused? Ok, the real job of any good PR department is to lie and cover the company’s ass, but aren’t they supposed to do it is an easy to follow fashion? Any real problems with LL have a lot less to do with their actual approach, but rather their communication. The one major exception probably being age verification, that was just handled stupidly from the word go.

Maybe we should all follow LL’s lead and blog about our blogs for awhile. Publish something once or twice a month, and have it be metababble. Whaddya think?

I was a little confused when Torley’s video tutorials were apparently banished from the SL blog, since they are a good resource for learning new things about SL and the client software, but apparently that confusion has ended as there is now a Tutorial Showcase section on the second life website.

Categorized, and searchable, it should make it easier to find video tutorials about SL that interest you or answer whatever it is you’re trying to figure out.

Anyone who knows Keeme probably knows what a multifaceted kind of guy he is. He’s got talent like SL has women who are men - in spades, only in this case it’s a good thing. Keeme is not called “The Keeme” for nothing.

So when he told me about his new blog, Sim Crossing, I just added it to my blogroll without even thinking. I know it’s gonna be worth reading anytime he puts something out there.

You can catch Keeme in RezzedNecks, Diamonds and Rust, and so much more… he’s one of the funniest humans alive.

Know what’s interesting to me? I can write a detailed post on recording voice in SL, which I think is an interesting and useful topic, and while it gets a lot of views and mentions by others, a post about the psychology of avatar appearance blows it away in terms of numbers of people reading it.

It says to me that people really care about the social aspects of it more than anything, but sadly the metaverse or mirror world or trick universe, whatever you want to call it, is not going to be ubiquitous until you can make it as easy to use and navigate as playing tunes on an ipod. Then it will truly be what most people really focus on, a social platform that anyone (ok, anyone with a powerful computer) can access easily.

The sad thing to me is that a lot of people don’t really get that it’s the best platform ever for content creation with as little learning as possible. Yeah, they understand that, but not on a personal level. IOW, they haven’t taken that fact and made it their own by doing it themselves. Although the technologies behind this are limited (LSL, sculpties, etc, don’t really match up to non-SL equivalent technologies), the combination of relatively small learning curve in building and programming and breadth of scope presented by the types of content and the in-world tools used are probably second to none.

I don’t know what it means, but I do know this… as fascinating as whatever psychological mysteries an inner 3d world presents are, they can’t really beat the fun of making stuff. Because content creation presents an endless opportunity for learning, while worrying excessively about what it all means is fun, but in the end, it’s all psychobabble about how we relate to 1’s and 0’s arrayed in the form of a new world. And while philosophy is fun, accomplishing stuff is more fun.

Arminasx has some interesting thoughts on the SL economy… both of them, actually.

It’s a good post that underscores how hard it is for people to make a RL living from a micro-economy like SL where the going rates for things are pennies or low dollar amounts.

For those who make money in SL, is it as my perception tells me, that it’s mainly the really popular content creators who make items for sale in-world? I don’t believe any of the marketing/builders/consultants are still making livings from SL activities alone, are they?

Seems to me like right now it’s going to continue to be padding for now, rather than a way to put your kids through school. Whether or not that’s the ultimate fate of the mirror world remains to be seen.