Reading Radar

I was darting over to get the funny freebie from Garth Goode, and I ran into another blog reader who was coming after the same thing - Veritas Raymaker. He immediately told me that he’s read my blog and it was good to meet me. I was actually kind of stunned, I’ve had people tell me they listen to the podcast but this was a switch.

The coolest thing for me in SL is running into people like this and having them say “hi.” And invariably, I look at their profiles and find out that THEY are the people who are doing interesting and worthwhile things in SL, by far more so than myself. It’s humbling. And it’s the best part of SL.

Thanks for saying hi, Veritas. That was the best part of my day today!

You know, the only bad part of all this is that I wasn’t present when the deer bit the big one… I’m just NEVER around when a meal just THROWS itself down on the big dinner plate in the sky.

I was mentioning to Itazura the other day that it really is kind of depressing to do something a little different in the Podcast and get feedback questioning whether I have the right to deviate from “rant and make fun of myself” mode.

I’ve noticed also that my blog posts that get the most traffic are the ones where I take issue with something and go off on it. A couple notable exceptions are my video and audio how-to posts, which keep getting read, thankfully.

I guess all I’m saying is that no one should keep up the same approach to any podcast, blog, or other creative endeavor just because they are expected to. Do what you enjoy and can be satisfied with, and if someone listens or reads, great. If not, you’re probably a talentless hack like me.

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.

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?