Second Thoughts

The Lindens Invade the XStreet Forums

Oh, except it's just Apotheus with his new Linden hat -- he's Calyle Linden, "technical lead for the new e-commerce initiative" i.e. the XStreet buyout. I guess he's found time to wade into the forums -- in fact, at my behest, because I abuse-reported the two people heckling me there, a long-time trouble-maker Ewan Mureaux and a new alt and Herald water-bearer Kitty Ushimawa. I put it to the Lindens (Apotheus) very simply: moderate your forums, or lose them. I explained that the problem in the official forums wasn't that they had to ban me -- that was a symptom of their incompetence, not a proper move. No, their failure was in refusing to moderate early, often, and equally. Had they done that, I wouldn't have had to wage my famous struggle on those official forums simply because Jeska, Pathfinder, and other Lindens who had first been residents couldn't see their way clear to moderating their friends when they became abusive in response to my legitimate, TOS-compliant critical posts. These jackals went so far as to post my RL information and make false claims about me based on a mistaken identity gained from Internet-sleuthing, and the Lindens sat on their hands -- and permabanned me for continuing to expose this hypocrisy after only one 3-day ban and another 7-day ban, leaving scores of their little friends with multiple 7- and 14-day bans and no further action.

I'm all for unmoderated forums. Of course, they usually lead to the chaos and destruction of Second Citizen, and on my own blog, I see fit to have the simple rule that you can be abusive, but only if you sign your SL name, and only if you don't cross into actual damage of me inworld or in SL. Then you're gone. But if we're going to play moderated forums, which we were already playing on Slexchange.com long before there were any Lindens, let's play them equally, shall we?

To give the back story -- stop me if I've told you this one! -- in Slosser, this ugly boxy store appeared, with a fairly old player named Moon Cole putting up a sign that said WEIRD SHIT as the store's title. The ugly boxy store, built SMACK on the property line as all such ugly boxy stores are always built, plus the stupid big sign, ruined the view for 3 sims -- it had just been starting to get back to normal. I would have simply ignored this blight, not the first nor the last to appear in the region, if it had not been for the obnoxiousness of Ewan Mureaux.

How did this fight start? It was started by Moon Cole's friend and group member, one Ewan Mureaux, abuse reporting me to the Lindens for a tree waving into the boxy store build SMACK on the property line. I always marvel at assholes that do that -- they blight the view and pressure everyone else around them, and then wilt at a tree waving lol. Of course, he could have simply IM'd me to move the trees a few inches, but instead, he got the Lindens ginned up to remove them. I was annoyed, because they removed original Governor Linden trees that I had left exactly as they were originally on the property. In fact, I got the Lindens to put them back eventually -- but honestly, what a dick. I then noticed the build and the stupid sign, so I IM'd him, and then I put up my own sign: EVEN WEIRDER SHIT.

Stranger Than Paradise: Is Second Life Really Like This?

Having gone over to the CBC to watch this, I have to say: no, SL isn't like this.

I haven't seen a guy with nose-rings and eyes that bug open like that waiting at the bottom of a waterfall that I jumped off -- well, ever -- ROFL.

Seriously, is this story typical of SL? As a landlord in SL who has literally had tens of thousands of customers in the four years I have been in business, I would have to say: no, SL isn't really like this, and it's a crude sensationalism. People don't really spend the entire day glued to SL and leave their RL spouses and kids to pursue SL lovers -- that's an exotic exception.

This may come as a shock, but there are in fact a variety of things that people enjoy more in SL than they do cheating on their RL spouses with pixelated fantasies on poseballs. These include shopping, which I think outpaces sex as the most enjoyable SL activity, exploring and chatting with friends, which I think also outpaces sex for many people, and more "serious" applications like attending lectures, taking part in discussions, seeing art shows etc.

Of course, the SLintelligentsia is going to be preoccupied with more niche activities like the Education Faire or Metanomics, but take the average tenant in Ravenglass Rentals. They spend a lot of time, like nesting creatures, building or decorating their houses (mostly the latter, as most people buy prefabs), planting gardens, inviting friends over to show off stuff, watch movies and chat, then they go to clubs, malls, and other friends' houses, or organized activities like fashion shows or concerts, etc.

In all the years I have been doing this rentals business, I can only think of one case I know of a wife who left her kids in real life *and* her RL spouse whom she had first met in SL (!) for *another* SLer, a Gorean master. What a story. And that was a phenomenon I first became familiar with in the sims: that the marriages that are most likely to break up are those that themselves had started online or in games or worlds anyway. The kind of person who begins very addicted to this kind of relationship will want to repeat it again and again as the thrill wears off.

I've seen a few cases of people who "took it to real" and were very disappointed or simply left flat by the reality, but I've also seen a few cases of people who formed successful and lasting RL relationships out of SL that didn't involve some dramatic break-ups of real marriages that were either already ended, or the people were single. I think the demographics are such in SL, however, that most of the people forming online liaisons do not have them in RL, or are dating multiple people in RL. They are young, and aren't cheating on spouses because they don't have them yet. Or if they do have RL spouses, they have what they claim are "open marriages" where both parties are allowed to cheat and even mix and match online -- I've seen more examples of that phenomenon than the heart-breaking stories a la "Strangers in Paradise" -- although frankly, I don't completely buy them myself. I think there's always a party who is shafted in those "open" relationships, and it's often the woman who has to take care of the kids. It's interesting to see in the CBC story two women who force the males in their relationship to take care of the kids while they go "have a room of their own" online.

I don't know about you, but my impression watching and hearing this woman on CBC was that she was possibly suffering from mental illness -- depression, at one level, and a kind of hysteria and addiction at another level. She had a kind of strange hysterical laugh while talking about SL, and she looked terribly flat and depressed while picnicking with that RL online boyfriend -- who looked to be about half of her intelligence. Of course, CBC likely wanted to play up that angle. The contrast between that gray-haired Miss Hathaway type that the CBC had as the narrator, who could never say the word "avatar" without a perjorative drawl, and the vivacious young mother with the sexy avatar couldn't have been more pronounced. There's no question that most of the people watching this CBC show would look past the tweedy, judgemental shoulders of Miss Hathaway to the fun world of SL and plunge right in. Who wouldn't want a boyfriend with a nose-ring waiting for them at a bottom of a waterfall?

Obama's Fake Virtual World of 13 Million

I really don't like this idea of the 13 million. I think actually, I'm even probably on this list of 13 million Obama "followers" but I still don't like it.

The technocommie Silicon Valley nerds coupled with the leftoid blogopshere Dems have cooked up this idea that there's this..."movement"...now of 13 million. But like a lot of online community stuff, it's largely virtual.

Somehow, I am vividly reminded of what dear old E.P. Thompson used to say to us about things like the Hungarian Peace Council circa 1982. "That's not a movement; that's an office."

And office it is -- when you see the peeps trying to run the thing.

Yesterday I was in this meeting where people began piping up that they thought Bam should get to keep his Blackberry. Bamberry. To which I said what I always said at these moments, "Sure, if he will wire it into Twitter and keep it in the public domain live as a presidential communication with Chicago cronies *should* be in the public domain live, eh?" Especially given that the newspaper press is so shattered that they might not be able to scramble around anymore and cover stuff like this.

Then somebody said they had befriended Ban Ki Moon on facebook. I tried to outdo them by saying I found and followed Ban on Twitter first and found some useful info there...but I was outgunned. Except...later I discovered there are 23 accounts on Facebook pretending to be Ban Ki Moon, spelling in different ways, etc. Eeek. How to tell the REAL Ban Ki Moon who *might* really become my real friend?

I tell this weird story because it's a kind of vertical story to the horizontal of making Ban your FB or Twitter or whatever friend, which of course, is no substitute for hearing the guy talk in RL or paying attention even just to his website now and then where his people write stuff he approves.

So who are these 13 million? Well, I'd like to approach the very real problem of this fake movement as a problem that is not unlike the problem of our favourite MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds.

13 million sign-ups you say -- meh. Tell me your 60 day uniques! Tell me your more than one dollar spend inworld!  Tell me your alts and sock puppets!

Cut the Cutting

I don't know why there'd be any long discussion on this subject of Land Cutting.

The Lindens aren't *really* asking your opinion, they already decided what they're going to do:

They will have a Policy. The will not have a Technical Fix.

So any discussion about it is retarded. Completely.

The Lindens will have a Policy. That means you can AR land cutting that is intended for extortion or to force a buy.

It will be manually audited, just like the ad farming extortion stuff. They will get abuse reports, they will go to the scene, and examine it with their two eyeballs in their organic heads, not through bots, technical menus or scripts or whatever (as has been proposed by some on the JIRA).

So if it's a big field of cut up lawn that is decided to force a sale, it will fit the policy and the person will be warned. If it is Weedy Herbst on Ravenglass sim with her secretive weird "family business" (har har) where she and her "husband Dave" need to audit the scripts on this sim for some unfathomable reason, the Lindens will pass by, like the angel passing by the blood on the lintel.

All of this screeching, edgecasing, hysteria is -- again -- stupid. Kim Anubis blogging her consulting services maximization is -- again -- stupid. The Lindens can tell if someone oh, desperately needed just this very 16 m for their uh...slex box.

BTW, in due course, the Lindens will get rid of that magic box stuff anyway as they merge inworld and web accounts, obviating the need for an inworld thinger completely. Duh.

All the other ridiculous fisking, edgecasing, whatiffing, etc. is all moot. Who cares? The Linden out there in the field can tell the difference between your mall, with search/places adds stuck in a row for tenants in 16 m2, or your field of extortionist selling. Please.

So the questions the Lindens might reasonably ask, giving his is a POLICY, is, "Are there any cases when chopping up your real estate sell into little bits would be justified?"

Um, no. Because the end user of an entire parcel who might have to carve this or that 16 m2 out for a landing point, a different search ad, or just a place to give his little Nautilus trophy object it's own very special bounded home -- will be doing so with land that is all contiguous in one group. It won't likely end up being sold separately as a donut, etc.

The Lindens and their little friends can think about edge cases til the cows come home. In the end, who cares, because they have a *policy* and that means manual, organic eyes on the subject, not a tool inside the viewer to prevent cutting smaller than 128 or sales smaller than 128 or something. Anyway, let's get done with this one quickly and move on to the other more pressing issues of the mainland, like NUE on the mainland, for instance.

A Visit from an Ancient One

Yes, I think I've about summed up what is required to put paid to all these endless arguments about traffic, about XStreet versus inworld stores, about proximity even to infohubs or welcome areas.

Get the Lindens -- with their love of transparency of economic statistics! -- to tell us WHERE and HOW sales are made in Second Life.

Number one, which sims inworld have the most sales in volume, and which have the most sales in total sum?

Number two, which works best for a sale, a teleport from search/places, a teleport from classifieds, a teleport from an avatar pick, a SLURL from the forums -- what?

Does XStreet produce more sales or do inworld stores?

Do boutiques and stand-alone stores on their own islands and parcels produce more sales, or malls?

If this isn't something the Lindens can automatically traffic, they can do things like sample 1,000 log-ons to see what sequences are made from their purchasing habits, i.e. search/places/teleport or classifieds/teleport or what.

Tell us these numbers. Then make the policies fit the numbers. For example, if search/place/teleport based on traffic sorts in fact leads to sales, then logically traffic shouldn't be removed. If XStreet is now rapidly taking over all sales and exluduing inworld stores, removing the need to pay tier or even come inworld hardly, then ponder the implications for the Linden business model.

My own absolute conviction is that the lion's share of sales now come from search/places/merited traffic sort/automatic camped traffic rejection. That's the economy. This is hated by some for ideological reasons; it's the truth, however. Next, avatar profiles lead to sales, and then classifieds. Important, but not the lion's share. XStreet? Some sales, but not the lion's share -- unless of course the Lindens step on the facts, step on the numbers, and push the inworld SHOP button that bypasses visible traffic, a public metric, and plays to a gamed, silent, invisible traffic on XStreet.

Fair Faire

I

Irah Anatine reporting live from Kurdistan via Second Life at the Education Support Faire.

Visiting the Educational Faire (yes, I'm groaning at that cutesy men-in-tights Ye Olde stuff), I felt very acutely today some of the pains and promises of Second Life. I guess I'm still waiting for the normal people to show up in Second Life, and I exclude myself from that company. They may be starting to trickle in...but it's been a long time in coming.

I had been putting off visiting the faire, like I put off the dentist, but since it only had a week to run, I was going to force myself. Fortunately, an interesting event announced in Metanomics compelled me even on a busy day to TP into a sim called, er, Faire (sigh) to listen to a woman reporting from...Iraq. Good Lord, SL is wonderful, innit?

Well, except she wasn't really in like hardcore Iraq Iraq, but Kurdistan, which is sort of the Hong Kong of Iraq in my understanding, which is admittedly VERY superficial. Obviously in a place where business is better, people are more nimble about restoration, conditions are freer, etc. she was able to hook up to SL.

And there's a hugely important context to her story, which is that she is a victim of the accident-always-going-somewhere-to-happen called the SLLU Meme Train. I have no idea if what she posts here is true; what I do know is that the SLLU magnetizes the loons and extremists of the hard left like nobody's business in SL, and they're impossible to reason with. It's funny, three of them used to be my tenants for ages in some very cheap rentals, until one of them pitched a hissy fit over the penny monthly total in "group liabilities" that he thought was some horrible rent-seeking imperialist usorial exploitation.

Irah has an SL partner with the rather unfortunate -- tasteless would be a better word -- name of "Gulag". I'm thinking "Gulag" doesn't happen to be the word for, oh, "Desert Flower" in Iranian, but is some kind of awful inappropriate reference to the place where millions perished in the Soviet Union. Think of the reaction if you had a partner named "Auschwitz" -- and perhaps you'll get it.

Change Agent LifeFactory Writer reporting for duty on the front lines of sectarian battle in SL.

Also on the scene, adding to the hideous skew to the left of this "educational event" was this indefatigable busybody LifeFactory Writer, for whom Irah, who seemed to have allied herself with Paulo Casaca, who is at least a credible lefist in the European parliament (feted on Metanomics) and is at least very critical of Iran and thoughtfully critical of NATO, was *not left enough*. LifeFactory kept asking pointed, sectarian, loaded questions about the financing of Irah's trip to Iraq; the association of the Babel project with this MEP; the awful, er, I dunno, running-dog implications of being associated with this evil imperialist entity called the European Parliament or something. Picture the scene, this poor woman having dialed up from Kurdistan, for Christ's sake, struggling to tell us an important story about the elections and the absence of monitors, and this sectarian SLLU meme freak (by day, a "media strategy consultant in Washington, DC" is pummeling her with microscopic examination of her credentials -- all while this big blue Babel fish kept actually swimming around us even without water, and as I calmly purchased and pocketed the big Babel flag by accident because it was left on sale. Somebody else with narrowed sectarian brow was wondering if Irah was American (no, she's Portugese). Ah, Second Life...

Aki Shichiroji's grotesquerie at the landing point of the Education Support Faire, an unwitting metaphor for the destruction of the university by the Left.

But let's see if we can try to push away all this, er, narrative frame and get to the story. Irah was telling us that amazingly, 200 women were running in these elections. God bless 'em. Maybe they have less of a chance of being shot then, oh, the late president of Pakistan. There were no local monitoring groups -- too hard and too unsafe mots likely. There were also no international monitors or journalists parachuting in, I guess because they didn't care. Oh wait -- it *might* have been because the evil imperialist U.S. armed forces barred them entry -- but check on that, because that factoid was implied by Ms. Writer during a time when Irah wasn't audible because the voice thingie was popping off and on.

Typepad Borks

I'm told by the customer service people at Six Apart, which runs Typepad, that these two chronic borks that I've been dealing with for months and months are supposedly being fixed soon:

o comments immediately going into the spam file, although "moderation" is not turned on, requiring manual fishing and republishing;

o each blog post reposting to feeds each time any comment is posted to an entry -- and reposting several posts in a row often.

This makes it God-awful to read planet.worldofsl.com I surely realize, for myself first and foremost, as I don't like re-reading my posts any more than you do! I have written repeatedly to Tao Takashi and asked him to reset the feed or even turn it off until this is fixed if it bothers people that much but he never answers.

This all started when Six Apart moved to a new compose editor and a new way of handling republishing of blogs. No longer when you change various settings or elements do you have to republish the entire blog all over again yourself, it's happening somewhere in the background. But that process evidently has its bugs. The one big improvement to Typepad is that now it automatically saves your posts as you type, even if you don't consciously save them, like a Word document. That's a HUGE boon because it's uber annoying when you lose a post because your computer crashes or you inadvertently close a window.

Public Spaces in Second Life

Having had four years of experience trying to keep open -- and supported -- public spaces in Second Life, I can tell you boatloads of stuff about this. In a nutshell, it's this: there is not a huge demand for public spaces in SL. But...there's *enough* of a demand and *sufficient* support to make it worth it. Currently, we have about 100,000 meters of open public space at 37 locations in the SL Public Land Preserve. Despite all the expense and trouble of having to pay for the purchase of the land and some of the tier (I'm luck I have help on tier from generous colleagues like Clubside and Something Something), I continue to add spots from out of my own company's holding or I've bought new spots to add prims to existing locations, i.e. in Durango, where you now can find a snow cabin, a snow tree house, a tiny romantic ledge by the waterfalls, and a snow woods. Snow, snow, snow! They are among the popular locations -- it's a unique deep chasm sim with mountains and a Linden bridge. They don't make them like that anymore!

I've been pouring LOTS of effort into sprucing these places up now, making some new ones, adding content, fixing their problems, and working on the financial report (almost done!). At each site, I have a tip jar with the goal being the tier for that site. Half the tier is already covered by about a dozen of us (i.e. all the tier in the group called SL Public Land Preserve), but the point with the effort to collect tier in cash is for people to see what land costs (otherwise they tend to leave only $1) to keep open, and to keep experimenting to see if eventually, the general public wouldn't be able to sponsor more of this.

Currently, the tier donations only cover approximately 15 percent of the cost, so tier donors are still always needed. I have approximately half the tier covered by donors like Clubside, and for the other half, provided out of Ravenglass Rentals, I then have approximately the 15-20 percent. I also have the $50 membership fees and content sales which cover the 37 x $30 search fees each week and the occasional classified. So I have to kick in a certain amount of support each month myself and naturally, from time to time, I review whether this is worth it. I think it is -- but as I said, given that traffic is usually in the low four and three digits every day, I can't say this is a barn-storming operation. It's *just about* worth it. I need to work more at getting more support when I'm less busy.

The idea of serving the public, having public spaces, keeping open preserves -- these are old hippie ideas, of course. Nowadays, public spaces in RL are often kept open by corporations who  use them merely as loss leaders. Like some big skyscraper belonging to some big company like a Sony or something in NYC will have an urban park with lunch tables on the first floor. Or they will make a donation to a public library or museum. Without business, though, government couldn't keep open public spaces, and without the public.

In SL, people have no objective need for public spaces. That's because they don't really want to be in public. They want to be in private. They want homes. Even when they want stores or clubs, they don't want EVERYBODY joining them, but just people they want to see. When logging on, most of the 82,000 people of Second Life do not chose to go to the Linden public spaces or other big public areas, or public sandboxes or our land preserve (perhaps a hundred or more a day do, judging from the small tips and purchases of content, especially the $0 content). Instead, they chose to go to their homes, clubs, stores. Malls probably have more "public space" function in SL than a park.

Of course the Lindens, being hippies (like me), want to have welcome areas, Linden sites (Anzere skiing, the Governor's Mansion in Clements), and of course infohubs, which I just  blogged at length about. They want them because they are devoted to the idea of the masses, the poor people, the newbs, being taken care of in public. Public spaces are for the public -- but mainly the poor public. In RL, it's mainly kids of working single moms and the homeless who fill up the public libraries every day -- not rich people, who buy books on amazon.com. The people in the lunch spots are mainly old ladies and gents whose feet hurt (the homeless are kicked out) and the poorer office workers with bag lunches who can't go to a restaurant.

In SL, as in RL, public spaces tend to attract, well, the public. The masses. The masses are asses, some will tell you, and in SL, you can see this with all kinds of horrible stuff. Like a fat naked idiot in Ross today, who, when told to put on clothes, said "nothing fits" and put on a series of knives or parrots and a rock on his head. He kept dragging giant houses out of the library on to his head, and then barging around the hub with them. Over at a welcome area, was it Ahern, I'm told there's a woman who enacts a very vocal masturbatory scene on live voice, to the amusement of the odd assortiment of newbies and "regulars" assembled. The welcome areas are the worst, attracting loud, stupid, obnoxious and outright griefing assholes, many arriving with an expectation of either shooting or sex on demand.

I really don't know what the Lindens can do about this in the larger sense since they are so libertarian that they are reluctant to lay down the law and invoke disturbance of the peace to break up the scenes there. Judging from the very-buried police blotter, which is so invisible it has ZERO deterrent value, and no memory or reporting, the Lindens spend most of their time policing sandboxes and care more about alts who refused to provide their RL information, and newbs selling out of public sandboxes, than they do about gross behaviour in the hubs or WAs. Still, they take action sometimes, egged on by the Mentors and Volunteers who AR the scenes.

Fall-Out Continues from LL Shopping Sites Grab

 

We won't know for awhile what the ultimate ramifications are of the Lindens' voracious decision to buy out two shopping sites, gutting one and co-opting the other -- but I can already see a few obvious things happening.

Some are big winners, some are big losers. Read the still-free forums (they may not remain free for long) and see that unlike the official web site forums, people are frankly describing not just big *increases* in sales from the change to put the shopping connection on the official Second Life front page, they are describing big *losses*. And of course, there's absolutely no way of knowing without more inside data whether these losses or gains even correlate to the Linden connection. Some people admitted their gains might be due to a rollout of a new product. Others admitted their losses could be  unrelated.

This poll, even on the controlled official site, show most people perceiving the move as definitely bad.

I can only report what I experience in my little businesses:

o my sales on XStreet doubled -- um, they went from 0, to one sale of my Flamingo Court/Motel of Last Resort ashtray for $1

o eyeballs for my experimental paid featured ad on XStreet for the Memory Bazaar Random Compass when from like 2000 to 1000 to 800 in three days -- which is probably more than they get inworld, but I can't tell (classifieds only show you teleportations, or clicks, not views)

o in likely unrelated developments, many more newbies came in to rent the cheap seats --  rentals in the $150-$500 range, often in groups with friends, from places as far-ranging as Peru to Spain to England to Poland to Chicago, IL -- but a few in larger parcels began refunding for the these reasons:

o bought a new homestead sim (1)
o broke up with my boyfriend (2)
o can't stand performance issues in SL, back to RL for me (1)
o moving in with a friend (1)
o moving to a RP sim (1)

The sticker shock over the Homesteads *might* be subsiding -- don't forget where you heard MUCH of the whining and gnashing of teeth about Homesteads -- not the end-user, for whom $75 or $95 or $125 are  not at all a big difference, and represent one less trip to Taco Bells or Starbucks that month, but the bulk buyer, who would be suffering more in aggregate trying to flip the damn things.

Will the statistics from these shopping sites join the rows of figures-lie-and-liars-figure statistics on the Economic Statistics page? I bet not. Proprietary info, you know. But it would be great to know how many shoppers, how many clips, how many buys, etc. And of what. If we lived in a normal country, for example, we would have the kind of reports you see all the time on AP about real life like this: "Starter Home Buys Decline"; "Real Estate Vacancies Growing" or "Recesssion-Proof Fashion Industry" -- only applied to SL.

So, Nu...NUE

Vanity "newbie helper" Lyden Marikh invades Ross with megaprims, violation of the Linden trademark, grief-bots, texture theft -- and a huge attitude of "entitle me".

In order to write about the Lindens changing the New User Experience (NUE), which they have just begun today with a new Community Gateways program, first, I have to tell the story of what happened this last week in Ross, which has been pretty awful.

As many readers know, I have been working on developing the Ross infohub, which I named Memory Bazaar, since early 2006, about 3 years. Jessica Ornitz did the wonderful Moroccan-style build there, Ordinal Malaprop has helped with scripts for the Explorer Compass, others have contributed such as Gerami Fizz who made the texture for the compass, I have scoured the world to find all kinds of props, and the students at Virtual Morocco and their wonderful creations have been particularly appreciated.

Ross itself, like other telehub sims, of course had a troubled history. Just to summarize years of turmoil, originally Anshe Chung bought the area directly around the telehub and put up one of her successful telehub malls; Blue Burke was also in the area, as was DNA Prototype with a mall. Catherine Cotton originally successfully bid for the rare mainland island in Ross (in those days people just didn't buy the separate private islands as they were found to be unstable) and put up  her Christmas store. I had a club and then later a mall on neighbouring Refugio, and I bought Catherine's neighbouring island when she quit SL for awhile after being hounded and harassed on the forums.

Eventually Anshe sold me some of the back mall land, when she figured out early (or got a tipoff) that the Lindens were planning to ditch the telehubs. She then took compensation from the Lindens for her remaining land later, even though it didn't technically fit in their dates. For at least a year, I struggled with keeping a PG mall alive, even when the telehubs were there it didn't produce significant traffic, and Anshe retained some land that she rented to me for passage to my mall at a high price. Typical cut-throat Anshe. When she took her buy-out from the Lindens, she left a strip of 448 m2 on Ross in her ownership, which ran between the Linden telehub land and the Linden-bought land which then became the new infohub. I call it a spite strip. She has refused to sell it -- who the hell knows why. After enormous efforts, I got her staff at least to put autoreturn and no scripts on it so that the griefers could stop using it as a safe-haven.

Most of the experience in developing the Ross hub has been positive. Every day numerous people come through and an informal group of people help them. I spend a lot of time writing and redoing the tutorials and answering questions -- I envision it as an advanced tutorial for those wishing to find out things like how to start a business, how to run a group, learn about machinima, etc. I try to put interesting interactive stuff and freebies also throughout the site.

Yet like other infohubs, this one has been infested with a group of annoying regulars who constantly heckle me, sometimes rising to AR'able TOS violations -- one particular frequent flyer has been permabanned for abuse of scripts (she used to orbit me regularly and override autoreturn with giant grief pictures of me, etc.) but has come back on an obvious alt. She and her little cronies, one of who rented land next to the hub to parasite off the newbie flow with cheap stuff, continue to annoy, filling the bulletin board with stupid or even obscene notes and preventing its use by newbies, standing around blocking traffic, pretending to "help" but more often hindering.

Oh, but don't I parasite off the newbie flow with cheap stuff lol? Well, I have run a mall there since 2005, at times with nothing there to attract traffic whatsoever (after the telehub pullout the infohub the Lindens first made had traffic in the low double digits and no newbies were sent there). But tenants remaind and the stores survived due to search and regular customers. I have made the whole sim a place where newbies in particular can get a start in business by having low-cost rentals. I have some newbie housing there for $150/150 prims and also floors and stalls in the lighthouse tower. The entire island barely breaks even because the costs of development aren't offset, even if the rents mainly cover the tier. I also have a money tree there. There is no question that I have spent -- and continue to spend -- on Ross more than I will ever make back on it. I just try to keep the costs down.

You can read about my philosophy for the tutorials here and here -- the idea is to help people learn not by having them look at flat, slowly-rezzing 2-D posters or movies showing them things like building or flying, or reading the wonky Knowledge Base, but getting them to interact with objects that "talk" and sometimes "do things" to help them remember where the information is visually.  For example, click on the genie lamp for "help," click on the lamp to find out "how to turn on the sun," click on the parrot for "how to talk," click on the tent to learn about "privacy and security" etc. etc.