Teenage Kicks

I’m aware that lately we have been rather remiss in our duty to provide you, our dear readers, with ill-informed opinion on what’s going in in the wonderful world of Second Life, so here’s my two cents on some recent events:

Philip Rosedale at SLCC – Philip delayed the start of his family holiday to show up in person, sending the clear message to potential corporate customers that virtual communication is OK for trivial stuff, but if you really want to impress your audience you had better appear in the flesh.

Teen Grid to close – Not much of a shock, given that some sources put the average TG concurrency as low as 300. What’s more surprising is the decision to open the main grid to 16 year olds. I can only imagine that this has been done to placate content creators who do business with the educational sector, or perhaps the educators themselves. It looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen though. It’s one thing to have kids sneaking into your adult establishment – as long as you make some token effort to exclude them you can claim that any bad things that happen are their own fault – quite another to invite them in, thus assuming the responsibility of keeping them free from harm. I predict traumatised teens will be signing up for the inevitable class action before the end of the year.

The Emerald Viewer controversy – Now this is really what Second Life blogging is all about – the chance to work oneself up into a lather of righteous indignation over some utterly trivial “outrage”. I know that clandestinely co-opting your customers into a DDOS attack against a rival developer, or secretly building a vast database of your users’ IP addresses, is thoroughly reprehensible behaviour, but, on a global scale, it’s hardly worth getting angry about (unlike this, for example).

But who am I to talk? This whole blog is just a way for me to relieve my frustration with the world by mouthing off on subjects I know little about. I can’t say that it’s not cathartic, and it’s always fun working out how I can shoehorn in a link to some classic music.