Recent Comments:

Open Letter: Resident festival instead of Linden festival

Massively

Jun 18th 2008 9:28AM Well this is a truly inspired idea. In Australia there's a very popular 'fringe' arts festival in Adelaide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Fringe_Festival (second largest 'fringe' in the world according to that wiki-link).

My immediate sense is that an SL-fringe festival could perfectly offset the frustration and isolation felt so heavily by individuals and communities not quite welcome to fully participate in SL5B.

I think this idea could grow into something wonderfully *huge*, good luck to the organisers. Great approach to this situation!

Second Life concurrency passes 50K

Second Life Insider

Sep 4th 2007 8:38PM It's good that you keep track of these stats here. It doesn't seem that long since the 40k-mark was passed (checking back it was early May). Perhaps growth has slowed - but it was a bit out of control for a while I recall.

I think the concurrency figure is the great indicator of how things are travelling, rather than the 'total residents signed up' figure (I notice that the SL web homepage has recently discarded that 'total signed up' and only shows "Online Now" and "US$ Spent Last 24h").

So 'yay for 50k' I guess is what I'm saying!

Cheers

Artist DanCoyote Antonelli Redefines Space and Immersive Art

Second Life Insider

Aug 15th 2007 1:39AM Thanks for the heads up with this article Amalthea, this is such a beautifully engineered installation. I love that when you arrive (as you point out), it gives you the 'viewer settings' recommendations to experience it properly.. I would have missed quite a bit otherwise.

I was lucky enough to briefly meet DC in person (so to speak) at another of his installations at uvvy some months ago. He was a really nice, approachable guy.. apart from having created so much incredible work, in such a perfectly suited medium!

Thanks again for highlighting this amazing artist here.
Cheers

Akela's Wishlist: Masking Presence Before Login

Second Life Insider

Jun 8th 2007 5:45AM I have two main characters in SL (one male, one female). The fact that you can't "mask" online status before going in, as you describe here, is precisely why I resorted to creating a *third* character (sometimes male, sometimes female) if I want to go in and check something out without having to alert friends or respond to IMs etc. It helps enormously to have this avatar who is quite anonymous. It does become a bit hard tho when I meet someone interesting, logged in as my third av, and they offer friendship, and I have to turn them down - it is a little hard to explain why! (If they persist I ask them to contact my main avs).

And no I don't use my third av to stalk friends!

Hopefully "mask" will become a feature like it is in IM software.

Cheers

Just Askin': Project Open Letter aftermath

Second Life Insider

May 7th 2007 7:53AM I would think, given the names behind the letter's creation, LL certainly would have read and taken the criticisms under consideration. I'm pretty sure the public recognition and response to the letter was due more to those names than the 4,000-odd who signed the letter, for their multitude of reasons.

For better or for worse, I simply don't understand the need for such a letter. I log on and enter into quite an amazing immersive experience every single time. I look at all the thousands and thousands of hours of work, from people just like me, who have created this incredibly detailed and beautiful environment, for no other purpose than "creating an incredibly detailed and beautiful environment."

I go and read the letter, and I think: "What is it that's limiting all these people's experience, and why isn't it affecting me?" Tateru I believe you are from Australia.. I'm from Brisbane.. I look at all the things that the letter criticises, and I think: is it just because I log on when the rest of the world is asleep, that I don't see these troubles? Surely it can't be as simple as that. Perhaps it's that I'm lucky to have a strong, reliable ISP. Or perhaps it's because I've invested in a system built for high-end FPS games, which handles Second Life comfortably. For whatever reason, I just don't experience the troubles that everyone else seems to be experiencing.

On the five main points of the Letter: luckily I've not lost any inventory, but the 'clear cache' fix seems to help others; yes invariably search and friends drop from time to time, good point; everyone has experienced weird teleports and general 'instability', but Tateru posted today about 40k concurrency, no sky-falling incidents to note; yes build tools do seem to work better on low-populated sims, good point; and luckily I haven't experienced inventory delivery problems after a purchase, giving ample time for the transaction to process. All these things.. disastrous?

The thing I have noticed however, ever since (my) day one, is this: a never-ending torrent of complaints about some aspect of the service. And I'm not talking about things like Prokofy Neva's analysis/dissidence, or Clay Shirky's scepticisms of LL's promotional data. I do mean, every fella who's written some entry on the blog: "It's broke!! Fix it!! It sux!! LL sux!!" (I wonder how many of the signatories to the Letter really thought about what they were signing - would a lot of them have signed *any* LL-critical open letter?)

So I see and hear all this whining; thus, when I see something like the 'Open Letter', my first reaction is: here we go again. I try, and try, to have some understanding of the realities of the criticisms, but they just don't ring true to me in any sense, because for what it is, this thing works *great*.

Well there ya have it.. my negativity about everyone else's negativity. Go figure.

And I don't care what anyone thinks.. sculpties will be *excellent*.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64711602@N00/485011303/

No I don't serve at the pleasure of the President.

Peace

Concurrency finally passes 40K

Second Life Insider

May 7th 2007 6:05AM "That the grid handled this with few noticeable breakdowns suggest that there's more work going on behind the scenes than we're necessarily aware of."
- Amen! Well noted.

"Will it hold together, and will growth resume, or have we just advanced to a new set of limits - another plateau?"
- My money is on *yes* it will hold together. I feel lucky to have witnessed it hit 20k concurrency, shake a little, but hold together. Then the same around the 30k mark. And both times, folks screaming about the sky falling and such. I hope more people can see the sky opening!

Lots of great stuff out there beyond the stratosphere.

Peace

On the Inside, Episode 4: Eureka Dejavu

Second Life Insider

May 5th 2007 3:01AM Terrific podcast. Some fascinating ideas from Eureka/Rita re SL influencing RL! And great to hear the positive aspects of the platform, like the cross-cultural and interreligious understanding already happening. The in-world experience really opens doors to more and more of this kind of constructive development.

I haven't followed the Belgian police story, and perhaps it's a delicate matter, but I do find it disturbing to hear the word "rape" applied to a virtual incident. As you point out Akela, you can always log-out or switch off. Depending on one's level of immersion, it could certainly be a horrifying invasion of personal space and liberty, but I think it must demean the experience of someone who has survived rape to hear the term applied in this manner. I don't mean to diminish virtual 'attacks' but I do think a term other than "rape" should be used.

Sorry to get all serious.. thanks for the podcast. Cool stuff!

Fitting the Pieces Together

Second Life Insider

Apr 27th 2007 9:14PM "So, Torley was in on it all along. Gone down in my estimation after this."

- How come, Stephen? There's probably all sorts of things in the works that Torley (and others) can't or don't tell us about, until they are just about ready for release. Sorry if I misunderstood your comment.

Peace

Good shepherd or invasion of privacy?

Second Life Insider

Apr 16th 2007 10:29AM I tried to incorporate a link to your "Digital native or immigrant?" article but the html wasn't right..
For anyone who missed it, I think the article has relevance:
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/04/05/digital-native-or-immigrant-just-askin/

Cheers

Good shepherd or invasion of privacy?

Second Life Insider

Apr 16th 2007 10:13AM Timeless Prototype: that's the best thing I've read in a *long* time. And spot on.. the perfect answer to any prospect of bot-invasion.

Eloise,

In the defence of this search tool, a lot of comparisons have been drawn between a bot-avatar collecting information, and widely used web-search tools like Google. One thing overlooked in this comparison is the fact that when a 2D web page or blog-type entry is created, it is normally done with full knowledge that the entry is going to be indexed and easily searchable.

When I leave objects in SL, my reference point *was* that I knew a few or many people could wander along and see that stuff, so it was never really private. If I want to keep it a little bit private, well I'd put it up 1km and your normal folks will miss it. But I never expected it to show up on some third-party search tool, available for all to see with the right search criteria.

Discussing this with a friend the other day, he pointed out to me: "I wonder if it is a generational thing. To me, growing up in a google world where everything is searchable and most private data is made up of 1’s and 0’s it wouldn’t even occur to me that my data wasn’t searchable or that some exploitive tool wouldn’t be made and the original experience wouldn’t be pushed in directions that I hadn’t intended."

When my bud sent me that note, I was immediately reminded of your recent article, Digital native or immigrant? ..and I wonder if those important points of reference subconsciously affect our reactions to this sort of news? Certainly other things seem to be influencing approval or disapproval, for example: am I a content creator wishing to sell my product; am I normally very immersed in the SL experience and therefore feel a strong connection to "my" things in-world; am I concerned about the growing presence in-world of a) Corporate entities and/or b) non-human controlled avatars, or do I see these things as part of the logical evolution of the platform?

All of these questions have relevance to each member of the SL community.. or perhaps, the SL population has outgrown the concept of being a wide (but closed) community, and is the reason why we see such things as: search-bots; loss of 'Profile' ratings; loss of 'First Land'; integration of 'voice'; and open sourcing of the viewer and ultimately the servers. These are just a few recent pointers to a fundamental shift in the development of the platform.

I feel like I have entered into 'Second Life' at the end of a particular phase, and the next phase is well and truly underway. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it will feel very uncomfortable, even threatening, to many.. and all the more so if unleashed by stealth, as the ESC search tool appears to have been.

Peace