General

• CNNmoney.com has an interesting interview with John Zdanowski about the Linden Dollar. It’s from the 8th December 2006, but still worth a read.
• Also in CNNmoney.com, from the 10th November 2006 actually: “No, Second Life is not overhyped.”
• Packagingessentials.com - I am linked there as an “expert source” under the category “3d graphics”, “virtual reality.” Well. A big welcome to all readers from over there!
• An older report in the German magazine “Focus” named “Neue Freunde, guter Sex, echtes Geld.”
• More to come next time…

Don’t we all know it? The famous “Pyramid system”, which brings many people to litter other people’s sims with it in the hope to make some cheap money without much or no effort at all?

Every time I see this type of garbage I want to barf. Some people just need to grow a brain, somewhere, somehow - and very fast, too!

Those types of schemes are not working! Not yesterday, not today, or tomorrow! No, no, never!

The only people making money with it are in the 1st and 2nd level of the pyramid actually, the rest gains nothing. Nothing at all, well, not really true, perhaps they gain anger and want to kick themself in the ass for being so dumb to actually pay money for such kind of rubbish!

If you don’t want to believe it, well, take a very close look to the article about pyramide scheme in the Wikipedia. If you still want to pay money for such a scheme and are not in the 1st or 2nd level of it actually - well, better read it again.

As many might have now noticed (or not) - the implementation of the search feature in SL has changed.

According to this article in the SL blog it is now this way:

You may have noticed that Search > Places returns slightly different results after today’s update. Previously if you had a place with a description like “clothingshirtshoes” a search on “shirt” would find that place. Now our searches work more like Google, Yahoo, ect. and will only find full words. Thus “clothing shirt” and “clothing, shirt” will be found, but not “clothingshirt”.

This, to say it simply, hurts business until the word spreads around under the users and still then some might not know how to do it otherwise.

(Yeah, some people would just right now say: LL is to blame for using the “toy database”MySQL, why have they not used Postgres or $insertyourfavoriteenterpriseRDBMShere from the beginning? Guess what? Stick this statement in your ass, those flamewars bring nothing new…)

In Terra Nova is an interesting article about potential backlashs about Second Life in 2007 by Ren Reynolds.

Points one to three are:

1. It’s all just sex. sex sex sex I tell you
2. It’s not just sex, it’s prostitution
3. It can be used for hiding / laundering money

Well, guess what? Point 3 already has happened, there are already articles about this possibility in the web. Definitely also worth a read and some of them are just bound to happen sooner or later!

I’ve found the article “Second Life: Hype vs. Anti-Hype vs. Anti-Anti-Hype” from the midth of December 2006. A very well thought article from Wagner James Au about the recent developments, company side and growth in SL. Definitely worth a read, so not a short one, so take your time!

[Update]: Seems the user base grows about 23% per month according to this artice based on numbers bei Philip Linden.

Here is an interesting article from a marketing company named “Online Communities are not virtual”, describing some prejudices of them and how they really are. Definitely worth a read, especially if you want to do business in them!

Here is an interesting read about the average power consumption of an avatar per anno (German only).

When you take in count the about 4000 servers used for running the grid, the computers used to control the avatars and coolant systems in the data center of LL one avatar consumed about ca. 1752 KWh per anno. The average power consumption of an inhabitant from Brazil seems to be 1884 KWh.

So what should we do with these measures? Nick at them, it is an interesting number, but meaningless all the way for all other except LL, who has to pay the energy bill for its datacenters.

After the Copybot-incident (another article from the Washington Post about it) there was one project many blamed actually for this: Libsecondlife. Many people would have liked that this project would be shut down, perhaps even forcefully, or at least that Linden Labs is not endorsing it anymore. But nothing like that has happened. Why?

Well first: because SL is here to stay. Second main reason: many big and not so big companies are entering SL to make their business in, too, or at least to market their RL business. And here starts the problem.

Many RL companies have experiences in standard industry 3d tools like Maya, Poser, AutoCAD and so on. But you cannot use any of them to build anything in SL, since the client or just SL itself lacks a defined interface for 3rd party applications.

Enter here: libsecondlife. The people there have made deep efforts to reverse engineer the protocol used in SL to create such an API. Even if companies want to extend their programs in a way to work with SL directly don’t use libsecondlife they can use it as base for their own efforts. The protocol of SL is documented in the source code of libsecondlife, more or less.

There seems to be a new blog in town: Official EuroSLCC 2007 Blog. Welcome!

Many people think that a game like Second Life is better than real life. They are wrong and right at the same time.

They are right, because you just can go away if someone bothers you.

But they are also wrong, because people are people and ever the same. And in SL many people are on a even more rude behaviour than in RL because of the (false) anonymity  an avatar gives you. Many are trying to do things in SL, which they would never do in RL. This is part of the charms of the game and of course not bad, but there always some people who cross the line, then. And this is bad.