Second Thoughts

Sheep 'Dance on Eggshells'

READER's DIGEST: Some 126,000 signed up to check out the CSI:NY sims, but the numbers of actual log-ons and retentions, and the ROI that might be expected from their clicks on CBS websites are not being revealed. The controversial SEARCH ALL in the new OnRez browser covering the more refined search in the LL browser was a matter of "chosing the poison" -- no other option was considered. No project under $1 million is likely to get ROI, surmises Sheep Chief Creative Director.

Almost no hard numbers for sign-ups or log-ons or traffic -- let alone ROI -- came from the Metanomics meeting today with Chris Carella (Satchmo Prototype), who told an audience of some 100 or more avatars on a half dozen sims that he was "sorry" he had to "dance on eggshells around the numbers we don't own."

At the end of the day, the Electric Sheep Company, as much as they rule our world -- or hope to -- are only the sherpas at the foot of the Metaversal Everest being attempted by Gentlemen Explorers like CBS. Satchmo volunteered a number of "126,000 sign-ups" -- but acknowledged this could have been far lower than possible due to server problems that sent the newbies from one Amazon server to another -- and even caused some CSI:NY watchers to go to the Lindens' website to download the regular client. Satchmo said LL reported a "surge" in sign-ups, but the *log-ons* for 3 hours did not reflect any surge, and in fact bounced around the 40,000 mark, going to 41,000 and then down to 38,000 even while people on the West Coast were still watching (regulars may have logged off for fear of log -- or even to go watch the TV show!)

Trying to get a handle on what the real numbers are for a caper like this seemed impossible, while CBS wasn't talking. Contrary to rumour, CBS did not "acquire" ESC; they have a minority stake in the metaversal development company with a $7 million investment that includes not just this project, but others like the L-word and some to come. After paying the Sheep for the build and the event management, whatever CBS got after that from their own website hits or however they measured their clickthroughs -- remains a secret.

Satchmo didn't provide any information about how many people actually showed up, stayed on the islands, and played the clue game. However, he did say he and staff were surprised at how these numbers continued to rise in the next few days, so there may be a asynchronous effect that might eventually help the whole world -- as the Lindens claimed to me when I asked them why they sold off the viewer to the highest bidder.

Meta-Nonsense

Reader's Digest: The Metaverse Market Index, an offshoot of Metaversed.com, is a project of ambitious social and political climbers who wish to appeal to large corporations and obtain their backing in order to give them research on subscription and revenue figures from virtual worlds to help them determine their ROI, and to shape public policy about the Metaverse. To gain credibility, the MMI should step back from such close corporate connections and also cease its bid to become "the one place" for all conversations and research about VWs and interoperability.

Several people have noted the interesting coincidence involving my being canned from Metaversed.com with the Sheep bleating about my critical podcast on CSI NY, and today's Metanomics event featuring Satchmo Prototype of the Sheep. No accident, comrade! The event wasn't originally in the Metanomics schedule, which has been set way in advance as it is tied to a course at Cornell University -- but the organizer, Prof. Robert Bloomfield, had indicated he would be taking suggestions for speakers.

I don't know whether Giff prevailed on Metanomics to get in the show, or whether Nick Wilson sycophantically asked the Sheep to come in order to "make nice" after this podcast that caused Giff to hysterically and furiously fire off a blog post denouncing Metaversed as "tabloid" and me as a speculative poor journalist for telling the truth -- a blog he later pulled when conniving with Nick.

You would think this podcast was a Howard-Stern like rant to hear them all talk, but it is worth simply listening to the podcast, which wasn't a problem at the time it was made, to understand the absurdity of what is going on here, and the behind-the-scenes pressures. There's nothing incorrect, false, speculative, wrong, or vitriolic in this podcast. It makes the simple point that the SEARCH is buried under the OnRez view and that big companies taking over the SEARCH have a civic responsibility to manage the public trust and create a kind of "Yellow Pages" that does not favour just them and their properties.

Other bloggers have quietly made the exact same point about the buried search, with no Sheep neuralgia. Giff Constable himself on his own blog (from which my comments have been scrubbed) or in acid responses on my blog have supplied the odious quotes about his supreme indifference to the public weal by stating that he's under no obligation to include the Lindens' paid-for classifieds in his browser -- it's like your ad for the Times not obliged to be shown for the Post. He snottily declares any notion of a public trust as "state-run like the Soviet Union" -- as if Verizon's Yellow Page was like Pravda or even Google, which can't *stop* you from being seen once you have enough clicks.

The arrogance and failure to grasp the impact on small business inworld of this kind of cavalier attitude has been really surprising to me. I'd like to think Giff Constable was sincere in believing there was something "wrong" in what I said -- I no longer believe there is. It's merely a concerted campaign to try to wipe out critics, sanitize business blogs, and pave the way for more corporate battering of Second Life. Ugh. That is doesn't *have* to be so ugly and crude and greedy can be seen by the other corporate projects in SL that haven't been this aggressive.

Art, Not Architecture

An architectural contest has been underway and now over -- always a good thing in Second Life, where the Lindens only seem to reward programmers and bug-hunters in *their* contests, and inworld contests often seem limited only to fashion. I love architectural contests -- I came to Second Life for the sole purpose of sponsoring them, as I had in the Sims Online. In time, I even began a Society for Virtual Architecture to promote general appreciation of the amazing builds and projects in SL. I was discouraged from keeping the meetings going, once I saw all the builders flock to perform corporate builds, and becoming neuralgic about any criticism of them -- but I hope to start up discussions again soon -- free discussions, not controlled by corporations, are desperately needed.

I was dismayed to go and see the results of this contest, however -- not because it wasn't good -- even amazing -- art, but because it wasn't architecture.

Oh, I realize I'm not helped much here by dictionary.com, reminding me that architecture is "the profession of designing buildings, open areas, communities, and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. Architecture often includes design or selection of furnishings and decorations, supervision of construction work, and the examination, restoration, or remodeling of existing buildings." That's because dictionary.com doesn't say anything about meat-world versimilitude. See where this is going?

By being in a virtual world where it's all "Not Possible In Real Life" (to use the terminology of one elitist artists/builders' group), people building pride themselves on extending the boundaries of the possible. No rain -- no roof. No gravity -- no stairs. No privacy -- no walls. No eating -- no kitchens. No sleeping -- no bedrooms. No anything, really, but just flying a pixelated format of one's attention around (let's not even call that thing a "body" eh?) -- so why have anything even remotely representing "a house" or "an office"? That would be retarded, eh?

Certainly Nick Yee and other condescending pundits wheeled out on CNN or Terra Nova or the New York Times are here to tell us that -- isn't it awful, Yee hand-wrings on national television, that people come in these virtual worlds with all their possibilities, and build McMansions. Isn't horrible, he chastises on the newspaper read in every editorial office in the country, from his privileged perch in California, that people only care about affluence and wealth. Indeed!

So why are people such Babbits, such pedestrian mediocrities, that they wish to have versimilitude (a word Nick Wilson didn't know, couldn't spell, or even pronounce?) Why can't they shut up, and do what highfalutin artists tell them to do, and live inside Moebius strips and have meetings in Kline bottles. WTF is *wrong* with these people who won't *do what the creator fascists say*???

The Geek Keyhole on Second Life

Fashion Avenue, the elite shopping sim spoon-fed to CSINY newbies.

I've been debating Aldon Hynes, whom I only know from recent reading of his blog. Because his blog has a really frustrating -- typically geek! -- openID system to register (believe, I've worked OPENID stuff for ages and have a tremendous and justified critique of it), and a need to generate a new password if you try to use the standard registration -- AND apparently a word limit much smaller than typepads, I'm putting the answer here. I can't tell if it posted there.

The answer to Aldon can in part take up the need for a rebuttal to Grey on Metaversed.com which I was prevented from using even before my banning due to the comments being closed. I'll have more to say to Grey and deanpence and others from that thread in the next post.

This is a post about the huge perception problem we all face in SL, and it's time for those of you who can understand this to declare war on it, in ways that I"ve hardly been able to do in Second Life as much of an Infamous Antagonist as I've been -- the walls of geeky perception really need to be broken down and the geeks really, really need to stop seeing through their keyholes. They get insulted even being told they see through a keyhole, but it needs to be burned in: through their demographics of 20-something or 30-something male IT guys, with insolent Internet culture making do where culture in the humanities might have been imbibed 30 years ago; with their cynicism and me-first and entitlement outlook; with their belief that everything should be like "the Internet" and everything should avoid the fearful 1990s that they may have even missed, still watching Sesame Street.

Good Journalism, Bad Law?

Wow. If you ever want to see the difference between law and journalism, look at these two stories here and here. Or...between good journalism and bad law, let's say.

We've all been following the story of how Stroker Serpentine has been chasing an avatar called Volkov Cattaneo, as furiously as Anthony Zuiker is telling us to chase evil murderous furries in his CSINY game in SL.

Volkov was seemingly going to be able to give him the slip because he bragged to Reuters reporter evidently in an inworld avataric interview that he gave false info to LL when signing up, and couldn't be tracked. Many people who have been griefed by anonymous anonomyzer-using alts gnashed their teeth -- that is indeed the issue.

Not for Stroker, who did the very thing that Cristiano Midnight always used to sneer at me about, and say rarely happened -- by getting the Lindens to turn over the IP address associated with the "Volkov" account, he was able to convince AT&T and another ISP to turn over the home address of the people associated with this IP address. So yes, when they want to, they can crawl down the Internets and track you from your ISP to your very home.

That is -- a private detective hired by Stroker can -- and he came and found a quintessential SL user, apparently, a 19-year-old 325-pound kid with a goatee beard living with his grandma in what is described as "modest housing". Of course, granny could have been hustling the Sexgens, but suspicion fell on the kid as the likely IT master of his household, and the 2nd ISP of another Dallas home had people in it who said he had logged on at their house, so the fingers of suspicion all pointed at him. Nevertheless, Eric Reuters was careful merely to quote the claims of the private investigator in the story, about confronting the kid and careful to report in balanced fashion high up in the story that the kid also denied these allegations. He never claims he is the perpetrator or takes a side in the story.

No so sense of balance from Benjamin Duranske of Morally Blind, who I've dubbed "Benjamin Sycophanske" (I could call him Suckophanske but this is a family blog) for the craven way in which he has sucked up to those with power and prestige in SL. His headline says confidently "Defendant Named in Eros Copyright Suit" (contrast with Reuters' "Eros lawyers ID ‘John Doe’ avatar; Youth denies he’s Catteneo". Duranske writes, with moral and journalistic blindness, "Alderman has confirmed the identity" -- but never questions that he could be mistaken. In a household with 4 people in it, in a situation where kids are wandering around plugging in laptops, could we please get a little more, uh, evidence here?

I continue to worry about how this case could well establish bad precedent just like Bragg did by never reaching the court phase and never getting a legal decision. It establishes then only one thing: that the legal system can be used with iffy cases to hunt down people you hate in Second Life, who do things you don't like.

The constraints on doing this in real life are considerable. What we're finding with Second Life is that they are not.

Solving the Clues

Still sleuthing, trying to figure out what the real numbers of sign-ups were for the ESCapade last night with CSINY. I see two massive spin cycles going on -- Sibley Verbeck is saying that there were all these sign-ups but they didn't get inworld due to computer specs or the viewer not working for people; Anthony Zuiker has done a hugely clever about-face and made it sound like the purpose of this effort was to woo people on something like Second Life back to television (huh? I thought the purpose was to go chase your viewers who no longer watch TV and don't sit still for ads, Anthony!)

If you were wondering more about why metaversed.com needed to become sanitized of me and my podcasts (including one I didn't get to do which was to be a critical analysis of CSINY the night it aired), look at what's up there:

This coming Monday at 11am SLT Professor Robert Bloomfield will host a Metanomics session entitled Building, Marketing and Media in Second Life. His guest will be Chris Carella (Satchmo Prototype), the Chief Creative Officer at The Electric Sheep Company.

Naturally, we will be talking about the high-visibility CSI build (see JenzZa's photo gallery), as well as the OnRez viewer. We will also talk more generally about the challenges of getting corporate clients the type of information they need to get virtual world spending authorized, and how they might define and measure ‘success’.

*Chuckles*. This was not in the originally scheduled Metanomics program, but is, erm, what you might call "extracurricular" fanning to make up for my "evil" podcast -- hurry to download before it is wiped.

Honestly, we need to start a new service called the Social Climbing Index *chuckles*.

Tiny Avatar Syndrome and Missing Texture Disease

I haven't had Tiny Avatar Syndrome in ages -- gosh, not since I was a newb. I used to get it all the time then -- and I used to get it back in The Sims Online, too. It's when you lag out so badly that your avatar pitches forward on his own, and if they get over a sim boundary or something, even though you haven't touched the dials, your avatar seems to assume a life of its own, disappearing ahead, turning very, very tiny, descending into the depths of immersion without you. You can avert your eyes...or log off and try again.

SL has been a lag bomb for me lately, but I think it's my own personal lag induced by some Vista/Nvidia emmm extraoperability (is that the opposite of interoperability?).

But...There was a sign of something, much, much worse, however...

The Lies of Terra Nova

Gosh, annoying to have to waste time rebutting Benjamin Sycophanske again, but it's a public duty. He's now fawning and bowing and scraping over at Terra Nova and making a ridiculous lying post about me. It's an interesting discussion, and he outs himself as a cynical and callous IT guy sort of griefing asstard with his post about his view as griefing as not involving any pain for the avatar, but as mere "playfulness".

Rich Bryant makes a gratuitous nasty and says that "griefing is anybody who disagrees with Prokofy." Richard Bartle, always the gentleman and the scholar, asks if it is griefing to insult somebody when they are banned from a forum.

Sycophanske steps in and casually announces, "Since everyone who gets attacked at Second Thoughts has been banned for one arbitrary "threat" or another, I'm not losing much sleep over Rich Bryant's comment."

Lies and falsehoods. The only people who are banned from this blog are people who incite or cause real-life or Second Life harm -- and this means of the serious type, say, crashing of a sim in real life to lose business, or making a false charge, as Sychophanske Duranske has done, claiming I have committed "libel" by criticizing him and questioning his alarming misuse of his position as a "lawyer" to pronounce people as criminal or not criminal.

As any regular reader can see, there are numerous people who attack me, even stalk me and vilify me and harass me with vitriolic posts. They aren't banned whatsoever. Many people even suggest they be removed, they are so obnoxious and regular and whining, but I only ban people for cause, under my 2 rules (the other being if you refuse to use a first and second SL name, RL name, or recognizable bloggers' name).

Watching the Detectives

Green dots half hour into the show.

The stars came out tonight in Second Life, it was exciting to watch the green dots blink on, first on one CSINY island, then on a second, a third, a 100th, a 420th. The figure was finally released -- there were said to be 416 sims, although 420 claimed by Sheep insiders.

But the numbers of people on those sims, for the three hours I watched them before, during, and after the CSINY show, couldn't have beat 5,000 concomittant, and no more than 20,000 max total arrivals. In fact, it's probably far lower. Of the 420 islands, there were no more than 2-10 people on any given island in those 3 hours. There were 35-70 people piled up constantly on 3 of the big Orientation Islands, but they weren't getting off.

I was also getting newbies at the regular infohubs, including in Ross, where several furries, dancers, Philip-clones said they were CSI newbies and then began struggling to walk or fly. I redirected them out to the clue sims but they weren't terribly keen to go there -- these were the people that typically like to get OFF an OI they've been forced ON.

So if a million viewers was supposed to make 30,000 log on, it didn't work. I don't know what number they'd use to declare success. There weren't more than 4,000 people on these sims, sorry. I was only rooting for them to succeed, while heavily critical of the Sheep's crippling of the worldview through the browser with SEARCH ALL. Still, like many of us, I'm asking the same thing the detective asked when his partner in CSI on the TV show said that people make businesses in SL. "Why?!"

Walking Between Worlds

Geeky avatar ready to rock and roll between worlds of different sorts.

Thank *God* some people who are experts in this business have spoken up against this really bad idea which has some really worrisome things lurking under it -- like the Second Life Open Grid Architecture plan that casually puts up in the wiki a notion to close down the LindEx currency exchange and possibly then make even the land auction obsolete because ostensibly there will be so many worlds and so many currencies that you couldn't impose just one.

There is no vision for the integrity of each world also accompanying this interop stuff, and no notion of why walled gardens are things people want and like.

The horrible FEAR of not getting Left Behind in the Rapture of the new Internet iteration has many people losing their minds about what was effective about AOL -- and hey, is *still* effective about AOL lol.

I've been stumping against unseemly haste on this for the longest time as IBM and Linden Lab and their fanboyz have been advocating it and breaking everything they can possibly break to get to it. I went to the LL/IBM interop meeting yesterday but it was brutally laggy and freezy, lots was going on for me in RL at the moment, and I couldn't get Ziggy at first to put my question through -- he was bossing me by saying he didn't think it related to interop (about closing the LindEx). Ginsu was also annoyingly brushing away the concern saying that the Brainstorm site was written by users, and "look at the history" -- though the history doesn't show you WHO wrote that article (I'm going to wager it's Zero Linden, and frankly, Lindens need to take ownership of this and put who authored all those initial pieces).

As Information Week can get pretty takedowny about their content, I won't publish even a partial transcript, because I want to see if I can find the whole thing, think about it some more, and try to figure out what's up -- what I *did* hear was full-throated densely-parsed statements about this that reflected loads of pre-existing meetings, internal talk, decisions alread made and now a phase where the interoperatives were now trying to "put the message over". It's not "Let's see if people like the idea of Global Avatar and research if they need it," it's "We're making a Global Avatar that you will concede you need because we tell you so."

My main beef so far has been failure to include users and community leaders in the closed-doors elite interop meetings and having geeks from libsl in the Open Grid Architecture group is not what I mean by users and community leaders. Having John Hurliman (Eddy Stryker) the maker and seller and liar-about Copybot in this group lets us know how much the Lindens care about our content.

When the interoperatives say they are making a Global Avatar, I constantly ask "Why would you want to?" And the only answer I am really getting is "Because we need to sell you connectivity widgets and track you better to advertise to you" and sorry, that's no sale for this idea for me. The coolness of having Dyerbrook and Prokofy walk to each other's worlds isn't cool -- because they're already my extensions. If I need one to have a texture the other can have it too.

Glitchy Gumshoe (MTV guy) told me that his SL account Glitchy was frozen and probably going to be lost over these billing snafus we all have had holding up thousands of premium accounts in SL. And I was saddened that such a cool name, associated with a whole line of content -- the links called Glitchy links at 3pointd.com would lose their avataric connection. Glitchy's typist seemed saddened, but suddenly, this cynical hard-edged tekkie geeky 20-something noir sorta guy clutched his chest, and burst out sentimentally, "But Glitchy will always be in my heart", rocking his human the way avatar would rock if he pressed on the pie chart animation and declared his love. He was only half kidding. Glitchy *is* in his heart -- and the heart behind the reason for interoperability must never be forgotten.