johnny

M is for Pangloss

April 12, 2009 Leave a comment

There’s an interesting post over at the official SL blog this week, wherein M Linden considers the “State of the Economy“; if you don’t have time to read it and the many responses it has generated I’ll sum it up for you:

M Linden: Everything is just grand! The future is rosy!

Residents: No.

I’m exaggerating, obviously (though not much; the picture accompanying the post shows a virtual tree, but instead of leaves it has, like, dollar bills! So even the illiterate can tell that the economy is booming). M seems to base his optimism on a couple of headline figures – 2008 user-to-user transactions of US$350 million, and US$100 million cashed out via the Lindex in the same period – and a rather vague survey of business owners showing 64% claim to generate positive net income and 61% are optimistic that their revenues will grow.

US$350 million may sound like a lot of money, but for a place with around 1.4 million active residents (according to the latest statistics) it’s small beer. For comparison, in San Francisco, with a population of a little over half that figure, the city council alone has a budget of over US$6 billion. Furthermore, it’s unclear how much of the spending actually takes place in commercial transactions, as opposed to people moving money around between their alts, or other such transfers.

The US$100 million figure has already been debunked by Urizenus Sklar at the Alphaville Herald; I can’t add much to his analysis. M claims that “a good part of [the money] went into Residents’ pockets”, but when asked in the comment thread what Linden Labs’ share of it was his answer is a not particularly forthcoming “We do indeed have accurate and up-to-date figures about how much comes back to us for land fees. It’s not a number we publish which is why I didn’t publish it.”

The survey had a response rate of 15%, giving a sample of 2645; I have no idea if that is a respectable figure for these sort of things, but I would want to see some comparisons between the responder/non-responder groups before I accepted that the results were generalisable. Even if they were, the figures are essentially meaningless without a lot more context. 68% of enterprises are maintaining or increasing their investment compared to the last six months, 15% “significantly”, but how much is significant, and what is the base level? 5% of business owners say that they generate 80-100% of their total income from Second Life, but is that their total household income, or just their personal income, and what are the absolute figures? The guy you pass in the subway every morning may make 100% of his income from panhandling, but that doesn’t mean he has hit on a viable revenue model (or maybe it does).

I long ago concluded that I would never make any money from Second Life, so I shouldn’t really care about any of this flimflammery, but I can’t help but feel that the Lindens should stop trying to pretend that SL is something that it is not, and concentrate on maintaining their income by looking after the people who will be around for the long haul, those who see the virtual world as an opportunity to explore new frontiers, rather than a venue for disposable entertainment, or a place to make a quick buck. Prime mover advantage doesn’t last forever, and there is always something newer and shinier just around the corner, ready to tempt the disaffected away. I’m quite attached to the old place now, and I’d miss it terribly if it disappeared.

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with Economics, Second Life

Girl from Mars

April 7, 2009 1 Comment

After a prolonged gestation period, the virtual world of Blue Mars has started to recruit beta testers, and will, if you believe developers Avatar Reality, go live sometime in the summer.

The visuals, which utilise the CryENGINE2, certainly look pretty, and A-R are promising that users will be able to play without having to buy the latest graphics card, though they are keeping the details of the minimum hardware specifications a secret for now. Windows Vista is required though, so my old linux box definitely won’t work.

It’s claimed that the platform will be able to support thousands of simultaneous users in each region, which would be a massive advance on the paltry number Second Life can manage. It appears though that this will be done by a process of sharding, which I’ll admit I don’t really understand, except that it involves running separate instances of the same location on different servers, with new ones being spawned as necessary. I would have thought that this meant that if you had arranged to meet someone at a popular place then you might miss them because they were on a different shard, but there might be some technical way around this.

There will be a content generation system, but this will be limited to developers who have paid to sign up with A-R, leaving no space for amateur creativity. A central item registration system will protect IP rights, and, presumably, allow A-R to prevent the manufacture of the sort of things that have generated all those lurid stories about the perversity of Second Life. Some sort of virtual currency will exist, but ordinary users won’t be able to cash it out into real money.

So is Blue Mars a Second Life-killer? The graphics are a lot better, the scalability sounds attractive, and there does seem to be plenty to do. I can’t see too many current SL residents being tempted away though, since they would surely miss the freedom to produce their own content, and the potential, however illusory, for making some money.

Hard-core SL fans are unlikely to be the target demographic for Blue Mars though (but then, judging by Linden Labs’ recent actions, hard-core SL fans aren’t even the target demographic for Second Life). Avatar Reality will have their sights set on the corporate and educational markets, as well as new VW consumers who have graduated from places like Habbo and Club Penguin, and are more interested in the metaverse as a place to be fed entertainment rather than an outlet for their creative urges. These of course are exactly the clients who, we are told, represent the future for SL. If A-R are successful in stealing away this potentially lucrative business, they might just end up messing things up for those of us who do stick around in Second Life.

I was originally going to go for the obvious Bowie track as the title for this post, but I like this tune better.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Music, Second Life

Lists are a good idea after all

April 3, 2009 3 Comments

ArminasX has revamped his list of Second Life blogs, and this time we have made it on, at a rather remarkable #108.

If Second Life Shrink was a player on the WTA tour we’d be Virginia Ruano Pascual – perhaps not the best-known or most glamorous personality on the circuit, but a solid performer who has quietly racked up nine grand-slam titles in a seventeen-year career.

Filed under Blogging, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Second Life, Statistics

Here comes the summer

April 1, 2009 Leave a comment

March saw an increase in our traffic for the sixth straight month; our daily average is well ahead of what it was this time last year. There’s no great mystery about how we’ve done this; new posts are appearing much more frequently (helped by having two of us working on the blog now) and we’re making a conscious effort to include more links to relevant blogs, which does seem to be generating some return traffic. I’ve tried to raise our general profile by registering with Technorati (where our rating is a semi-respectable 2493137) and Blogged (editors’ rating 7.4, “very good”), signing up for a few Second Life blog rings, and leaving comments around the SL blogosphere; this has been less successful.

Even when we go a few days without a post we still get a steady flow of hits. I think that’s because we’ve been around long enough to build up a critical mass of posts, meaning we show up on most Google searches that include the words “Second” and “Life” somewhere, even if it is usually on page 3 or 4 (though we’re back on top for the “Second Life Shrink” query). Our two top posts this quarter have been Olivia’s pieces on Star Trek and Vampires, which I guess tells you something about what’s popular in the SL universe.

I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to keep the pace up, now that the days are getting longer and the attractions of summer beckon. We’ll see how it goes.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life, Statistics

History is a random aggregation of opinion

March 24, 2009 3 Comments

ArminasX Saiman over at Second Effects has compiled a list of the top 585 Second Life-related blogs, and Second Life Shrink fails to appear anywhere on it. I know that this really shouldn’t annoy me – we’re way too cool to care about being on some lame list, obviously – but it is somewhat irksome to be told that our intellectual endeavour is less significant than a virtual hair blog. At least I’m not the only one who doubts the veracity of the rankings.

More positive feedback has come from the unlikely source of the Thoughts about notes* blog, whose author, the imaginatively-named “Blogga”, ripped off one of my posts in its entirety last week. I was alerted to this by Sheila Bastard, an Australian blogger who had one of her posts plagiarised too, and who is mightily pissed-off about it.

I can see where Sheila’s coming from, but I actually quite like the mash-up effect of Blogga’s creation. He or she is like the blogosphere personified, a mass of contradictory opinions that the author just can’t keep inside, despite the world’s indifference. I’d like to think that my post was carefully selected for inclusion in Blogga’s project, though I suspect it was probably plucked at random from an RSS feed in some automated process. He/she should keep going with this for a couple of months, then print the whole blog as a book; it would make interesting reading, a snapshot of the preoccupations of the blogging population at what might just turn out to be a pivotal moment in history.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Second Life

Bad reputation

March 20, 2009 Leave a comment

Reports revealed this week that the UK government is maintaining an island in Second Life, at a cost of £12000 a year, for the purpose of allowing private companies to showcase new technology.

I would show you some pictures of the sim, but of course we mere taxpayers are not permitted to visit; only government officials and the firms taking part can gain access. The story has created a minor scandal, with opposition politicians seizing the opportunity to accuse the ruling party of “living in a fantasy world”, while the scheme’s defenders have claimed that holding meetings and events on the grid will greatly increase government efficiency.

My first reaction to this story was to think that £12000 a year was not a great deal of money, as government expenditure goes – it’s the equivalent of one very junior civil servant. Compared to the amount that, say, defence contractors gouge, it doesn’t seem to be the basis for a particularly lucrative business, even if the project is expanded when the pilot phase ends in 2011.

It also makes me wonder why government departments, or corporations, or educational establishments need to be connected to the main grid at all. Why don’t they run mini-grids on their own servers? That would be sufficient for meetings, presentations and teaching, without the risk of participants wandering out of the building and coming across something scary; it would also maximise control over access and security, and would presumably run faster and be more reliable. Most importantly perhaps, it would create some distance between the client’s business and the potentially toxic Second Life brand.

For the one thing that the man in the street knows, or thinks he knows, about SL is that it is a haven for sexual perversity of the worst kind, and while Linden Labs may insist that they have solved the problem by quarantining questionable content in its own continent, all they are doing is drawing more attention to the fact that the problem exists in the first place.

The potential customers that L-Labs are courting with their new U-rated strategy are probably not particularly worried that they personally will be exposed to anything untoward; they will be more concerned that association with Second Life will be a hostage to fortune. Political opponents, disgruntled shareholders or disaffected employees will be able to search Google images for something suitably salacious to take to the media; the result will probably be transient embarrassment rather than lasting damage, but why take a chance?

Real-life locations can reinvent themselves of course; I remember Times Square being pretty sleazy when I visited New York years ago, but I hear it is now thoroughly Disneyfied. I guess time will tell if Second Life will be able to undergo a similar process of rehabilitation.

I’m sure Joan would agree with me that Times Square was better the old way.

Filed under Culture, Politics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Music, Nostalgia, Politics, Second Life

Command-X, Command-C, Command-V

March 18, 2009 Leave a comment

On a more positive note, Cut and Paste has come to the iPhone! So now I can post all those interesting links in my blog without having to resort to writing them down on a piece of paper! Maybe this new media world isn’t so bad after all.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with Blogging, Computing, Internet

Intelligence Failure

March 18, 2009 3 Comments

I can still remember the story on the front page of the only copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that I ever bought – it was a report on the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi, which means I must have purchased the paper on the 22nd of May 1991, when I was travelling up the Pacific coast on my way to the Cascade Mountains.

If if I ever make it back to Seattle (which I hope I do one day, because it is probably the nicest city I have ever visited) I won’t be able to buy the paper again, because, as of today, the S P-I has become an online-only operation, after 146 years in business.

The print newspaper model – where investigative reporting was subsidised by advertising sales – has collapsed, as ad revenue has migrated to the web. What will fill the news-gathering vacuum left behind? The idea that an army of bloggers will ever replace the likes of Woodward and Bernstein is patently ridiculous.

Information may seem to be more freely available then ever, thanks to the ubiquity of the internet (in the developed world at least), but the real knowledge, the stuff the Man doesn’t want us to know, will be buried even deeper in the mass of celebrity trivia and idle speculation that passes for news in the blogosphere. We are doomed to a new age of ignorance. Only musicians can save us now.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Politics Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Nostalgia, Politics

Paranoid

March 13, 2009 Leave a comment

Shortly after publishing my last post I tried to log on to Second Life, to meet up with Olivia, but I kept getting knocked back, with a message saying there was some unspecified “problem” with my log-in. Then Olivia emailed me to say that she wasn’t able to sign in either.

Suddenly it all became clear to me. The Lindens had been so badly stung by my criticism of their “adult content” proposals (and all my other subversive posts) that they had kicked both of us off the grid in retaliation. They were obviously logging all the traffic on this IP address. They probably had my phone bugged as well, and, come to think of it, the postman who delivered the mail this morning wasn’t the regular guy either – he must be working for them too…

I enjoyed my status as Linden Enemy #1, The Blogger They Could Not Silence, for five minutes, before reluctantly checking out the grid status page, and confirming that it was a universal glitch that was keeping everyone out.

Oh well, I can dream. At least it gives me an excuse to link to some vintage Black Sabb.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Psychology, Second Life

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