General

It seems, the more people are online, the more the almight lag continues to grow. SL is no fun noawadays when more than 30.000 people are online at the same time.

There is lag, lag, lag, teleporting issues, chat lag and other stuff, that turns down your experience. I just hope that the staff of Lindenlab is able to adress at least some of these issues on Wednesday at the scheduled downtime!

Today the resident count has reached a new peak - there are now over 4 million residents in Second Life. Again without much fanfare, like it was already when the 3 million mark was reached. This is no wonder, when you consider the problems that SL has in the moment and hopefully the next maintenance slot is somewhat going to fix.

Now let’s see how fast the 5 million milestone is going to be reached; I guess this milestone will be then again covered by a press release.

There is an interview at Inc.com with Philip Rosedale about how he started Second Life, what were his ideas, goals and such. If you’re interested in a little history or the visions behind Second Life at all, you should definitely read it.

Some team members of the German blog Industrial Technology&Witchcraft have produced a DVD, targeted at SL newbies as their main audience. There are videos on it, showing several different aspects of the client and the world itself, presented by the avatars Molly Fellini and Case Schnabel.

The price of the DVD is 14.99€ and it is available on some kind of webshop. There is also a 3 minute preview of one chapter of the DVD available for free so you can take a look at it if it is something worth investing your money or not.

Well, I am curious if they are going to sell them or not; I for myself would just rather download the client as newbie and fiddle with it direct without buying such a DVD. Learning by doing, so to speak.

It seems that after opening up the client code some people just cannot await the arrive of the server code under an Opensource license any longer and took matters in their own hands right now.

Enter: Opensim. This is first project that I know of trying to reimplement the server side parts of SL, written in C#, using libsecondlife. So far they claim that you can login, object creation, movement, object updates and chat are working. It started at the end of January and is considered pre alpha.

But - who cares. It has started and now I am curious to see where this project goes and how far it is going to evolve.

So, if LL never opens up the server, people could aid this project and well - who cares, then, if they make it right and get it going.

Yesterday, 1/27/07,  Philippe Borremans wrote in his blog an article about the arrival of the Front National (FN), a right-wing party from France in SL and the possible implications of this move.

He’s musing about the implications like this:

Well, both Le Pen, the head of the party and some of its members have been condemned in court because they made negationist comments about the holocaust. But I guess that doesn’t count in a virtual world.

Wrong; depending on the country it can count. Very much so.

How will anti-racist organisations react ? Do the same, set up a presence in Second Life and take the political battle online ? Does this mean that what is considered as condemnable by law in the real world is not in a virtual one ?

Good question;  but after some investigations you should already know the answer. Yes, those organisations are - or at least their supporters - are online too, and yes, they take this battle online. Very much so.

This is about a place called “Sinner’s Paradise” in the region called Wales. It’s a private island with two adjacent regions - Wales and Wales harbor.

It’s a very nice and romantic spot, great landscape, many different places to enjoy and discover. Short: one of the better sex places in SL, and quite a popular one, too.

But what comes, when you are successful in SL? Right, griefers. They had their own share of griefer attacks and tuned down all bells and whistles now to get rid of them.

But what also comes? Well, of course much traffic. Sinner’s Paradise has no money paying chairs whatsoever, it generates the traffic on its own. Good for the place and also for the store. But, there was a big problem in earlier times: the entrance area, where all people landed, was way too small. So it god crowded very fast and the people were bound to move on.

Today I stumbled about this nice quote on a notecard from Remus Zaoh:

It is amazing to me how few SL residents attempt to market themselves in-world when nearly every article written in the mainstream press focuses on Fortune 500 companies setting up shop in SL. IBM, among others, is convinced that SL and streaming 3-D technology represents the future of the Web as we know it. That being said, in my estimation we truly are pioneers in the dawning age of V-Commerce.

Guess what? He’s right. Most media coverage just is about the companies, that’s all and not so much about the residents actually. So we are going to see where this development leads us. Some just feel the old spirit perhaps like in the old days when the WWW gained ground.

But still consider - the WWW is more like print media. SL is a 3D environment, so both have their niche.

Don Alphonso, a well known German blogger (mostly he blogs about startups, which he often criticizes and wrote articles at DotComTod and BooCompany), wrote an article about SL (German only) in general yesterday at his blog.

To sum it up: he thinks that SL is overhyped. Not only overhyped, but actually some kind of virtual trash can, in which a whole industry throws herself out of free will. First he criticizes the press coverage from LL about the 2 million inhabitants in SL. Well, old story.

Then he criticizes the press coverage about Anshe Chung and her being the first virtual millionaire. Well, it is actually one thing she didn’t deny in an interview. The other thing he brings in as negative example is the griefer attack on her when she gave her interview to CNet. Articles about it are here and here, the video has been already removed on Youtube, but it’s still available on other places in the web. He is of the opinion that no one working in public relations with a little bit of brain left would really make such things in SL, especially when everybody can film it.

I’ve found a bounch of pyramides near a good frequented club, and this time the text in the pyramides still worked.

So, just for the reading pleasure (and to be complete) - here is the text:

Dear Moneymaker,

So, you want to make money, and lots of it.

You have come to the right place.

It is really simple :

1. Right click on the pryamid and choose “pay”.

2. Pyramid will appear in your inventory. IMPORTANT: The Pyramidt you get has not been validated, and will not work yet!!!

3. Drag and drop the Pyramid on the ground near the original and touch your copy .

4. Click yes to the money question which will activate the Pyamid. (If you do not press yes, the object will not work, this is needed to distribute the money that will be payed to the object).

5. If everything has been done correctly, the following text will apear above your object:

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