Second Thoughts

The "Liquidity Event"

If you were about to buy a server or sim of "land" in Second Life, stop in your tracks, and think hard.

Because any time from today to three years from now, that land will likely become completely devalued and possibly even inaccessible except for further expenditure. This won't happen because there's an earthquake in San Francisco, or because the U.S. Congress decides to tax virtual worlds. It will happen because of a choice Linden Lab itself has already made, which is to open-source the server code and create the possibility for people to host their own virtual worlds.

If you think that's just speculation, you need to listen to the interview with Linden Lab's, Mitch Kapor, chairman of the board, by Adam Reuters in Davos.

He makes it abundantly clear in this interview that there will most definitely be a shift in the business model for LL, from earning money off real estate (servers) -- something that makes up 70 percent of their revenue now, and a turn to a "diversification of the business model, over years, not months." "It is mostly land or hosting now," Kapor explained to Adam, adding that there was some revenue from the currency exchange and tiny revenue from classifieds. While the ad business for the Metaverse will be huge, getting there will take time, and these software engineers in San Francisco are unlikey to take on the administrative overhead of that work. WHAT their services will be isn't clear possibly even to them. But THAT they will change is absolutely not in doubt.

That means that land you have held for one or two or three years may not be there next year. It's not going to be forever. It will come to an end, and possibly an abrupt and nasty end if the history of LL and their rapid, roughshod changes is any indication.

Are you still doubting about this and thinking this is a tinfoil hat? Please, spare me. Listen to what the man says: "There is a clearly stated intent to let people put up their own servers, the only way to scale, to have one million servers." So they will be making it possible, through licensing or open-sourcing, for their so-far badly scaling world to scale further -- and do this by devaluing our land.

Oh, you say. That's tinfoiling? Hosting doesn't mean devaluing land, as it will still cost money to buy servers, and host-your-own people will still need to uphold the value of land.

Again, if you don't like listening to me, listen to the board chairman of LL: "To be dependent on a land business, when anyone can put up land, doesn't make any sense," the board chairman of this phenomenally growing California software company said in Davos, at the World Economic Forum.

So you wonder, with this frank and unabashed a comment from the board chairman, that I would have to spend an hour convincing my comrades in the Sutherland Dam that not only will the Lindens do this, they understand perfectly well -- right NOW -- that they have a plan to devalue your land -- that being in the land business, "doesn't make any sense". Like the rest of the Internet, only knowledge workers with portable skills will be able to make it off this burning ship -- the rest are fucked until they either find a new game or "get a life" or do whatever people do when they have been badly burned in a Florida swamp land transaction.

Can We Get a Tier-Payers' Seat on LL's Board?

[18:02] Madeleine Fitzgerald: Hi, Prok.
[18:02] katykiwi Moonflower: hi prok :)
[18:02] navets Potato: what a crowd
[18:02] TOPGenosse Brouwer: hi Prok
[18:02] Sebastian Galland: Possibly intros would be useful
[18:02] navets Potato: so what are we talking about?
[18:02] Nexus Nihilist: hello Prokofy
[18:02] Little Gray: as a free speech issue
[18:03] Little Gray: i thought prokofy did .. but it was a group invite .. he unfriended me do to my willingness to look into the arahan claveou pissing on quoran matter
[18:03] Sebastian Galland: Im Sebastian I hail from Ravensglass -
[18:03] navets Potato: I'm Navets - IP attorney from Wash. DC.
[18:03] katykiwi Moonflower: hi sebastian
[18:03] Madeleine Fitzgerald: Whoa, Little Gray, I don't speak that tongue.
[18:04] katykiwi Moonflower: navets: i am an attorney who left DC about one year ago!
[18:04] Little Gray: Hi Navets .. CA personal injury & civil rights attny
[18:04] You: Hi
[18:04] Ina Centaur: hi
[18:04] Little Gray: hi Prokofy
[18:04] Ina Centaur: i can't stay for the entire event, but i'd like to know what it's about
[18:04] navets Potato: where did you go when you left DC?
[18:04] Ina Centaur: do you mind if i record the chat transcript?
[18:04] katykiwi Moonflower: too many legal eagles here tonight
[18:04] navets Potato: course not
[18:04] You: well it's on the record, so a transcript will be made
[18:04] No room to sit here, try another spot.
[18:04] Ina Centaur: i have my own recording device...
[18:04] Sebastian Galland: hey prok
[18:04] You: hi Sebastian
[18:05] You: wow did you see we now have a punk thing next to the Refrigerator?
[18:05] Madeleine Fitzgerald: I hope you're not referring to me, Prok.
[18:05] You: ?
[18:05] Ina Centaur: are scripts enabled on this land?
[18:05] You: I'm referring to the Refrigerator of Ravenlgass
[18:05] Little Gray: or me
[18:05] You: on the land there
[18:05] TOPGenosse Brouwer: heheh
[18:06] You: no I turned off scripts due to griefing
[18:06] Ina Centaur: ok, i was hoping to just leave a chat recording bot here
[18:06] Ina Centaur: i have to leave in about 10 minutes
[18:06] You: well I will send you a transcript
[18:06] Ina Centaur: thanks
[18:06] You: anyway I'm sorry I hvaen't been able to hold meetings the last few weeks, just too busy
[18:06] navets Potato: I'd like a transcript too if you would not mind
[18:06] You: and you know there are some days where even just trying to move in SL lately has been a huge problem
[18:06] You: well I will post one at my blog in due course
[18:06] katykiwi Moonflower: nice to see you again prok
[18:06] You: I found I couldn't even move for 2 days
[18:07] You: I did defrag, clean boot etc it got better
[18:07] You: but honestly, it's not scaling lol
[18:07] Dimitrio Lewis: have you tried the first look viewer?
[18:07] You: still, I think we can all get some valueo f SL
[18:07] You: yes
[18:07] You: it sucks mightily
[18:07] You: for me anyway
[18:07] You: I bug reported it
[18:07] You: hi Abramelin
[18:07] katykiwi Moonflower: hi honey
[18:07] You: I saw nothing but big white boxes where trees should be
[18:07] Abramelin Wolfe: hi prok
[18:07] Abramelin Wolfe: hi kitten
[18:07] Dimitrio Lewis: good to get the bug reports in though
[18:07] You: well the topic of tonight's talk
[18:08] You: is: "Resolved: Should we seek a seat on LL's board?"
[18:08] You: and who is we? and how? and for what?
[18:08] You: so I wrote a letter to Philip
[18:08] You: and said I thought that since we had $10 million in tier in to his Lab
[18:08] You: that we collectively who pay tier
[18:08] You: whether 16 m2 or 16 islands or 16 continents
[18:08] You: should have a seat on the board like venture capitalists
[18:08] You: so I pubilshed my letter at my blog
[18:08] You: and he wrote back:
[18:08] You: " I agree it is a fascinating thought. Something to ponder - thanks for sending."
[18:08] Sebastian Galland: lol
[18:08] Ina Centaur: how do you plan to make this representative member show the interest of all tier payers?
[18:08] You: then the next day he wrote
[18:09] You: "How's the search working? did we fix it?"
[

The Adventure Capitalists

Dear Philip,

All of us who pay tier, collectively, pay Linden Lab something like $9.5-$10 million a year (I'm not sure how many total hidden/non-hidden sims there are with tier and island billing). It's as much as a venture capitalist. We're the adventure capitalists.

Could we as a group get a seat on your board? We could run elections among the 42,000 mainland landowners and the thousands of island owners (about 50,000 total perhaps?) The person who was acclaimed by assembly or voted for by direct ballot could serve on your board. At least you could consider having that seat in an advisory, non-voting capacity --though the stake is real. It's 70 percent of your revenue, correct?

I personally would vote for someone with a strong computer programming/marketing/entrepreneurial background or alternatively, an educational/scholarly background (i.e. I wouldn't vote for myself lol).

I just wonder what you think of this idea. Trying to get people together to accomplish anything in SL is like herding cats but sometimes they do herd up into groups of 40 : )

Prokofy Neva

My Numbers

Today's quite the day with 26,000 concommitant log-ons and as Second Life Insider reports, Zee Linden publishing that landowners now have reached 48,000 (!).

So I thought I'd run My Numbers again

Here's Jan. 9th's for comparison:

Total Group Membership: 593
Total Ejected Today (Failure to Log in for 21 Days): 13
Total Evictions Logged Today: 1
Paid Ahead, Not Logged for 21 Days: 2
Total Online Now: 75
Total Logged Within Last 24 Hours: 311
Known Alts: 6

Today, Jan. 15, 2006, 5:00 pm SLT:

Total Group Members: 596
Total Ejected Today (Failure to Log in for 21 Days): 9
Total Evictions Logged Today (Squatters, Chronic Overdue Payment): 3
Paid Ahead, Not Logged for 21 Days: 1
Total Online Now: 103
Total Logged Within Last 24 Hours: 315
Known Alts: 6

Blog Logger

I've got Google Reader now to read all the blog feeds I select, but it's unsatisfying, I find, only marginally a time saver, and I still don't have a thingie that does the opposite -- keeps a feed up somewhere with links of all my comments on all the blogs I comment on -- a Blog Logger. Did anyone invent this yet?

Among my best posts, a critique of the open-source movement as we have seen it play out in Second Life, in a reply to Ethan Zuckerman at Berkman Center

An interesting discussion on O'Reilly's Radar, in which I raise the issue of whether C.P. Snow's problems of 50 years ago with scientists unable to gain equality with those educated in the humanities has now reversed itself so that scientists claim (falsely) not only equality, and not only superiority, but to have completely eliminated the need for the humanities as they are humanists, with every humanities subject digitalized and under their control.

Is SL Machinima Any Good?

I've been wondering this question for a long time. So often SL machinima is crappy, and even embarassing. Looking at it sometimes, I'm reminded of those people in the 60s who would be on peyote or LSD trips. They'd write down what seemed penetrating insights or draw what seemed like fabulously rich paintings. You'd read it, and see that it was just addled scribblings. They'd come down off the high, and go, "Oh, yeah. Hmm, well but I was seeing trails...it seemed like something at the time..."

Hey, I'm the original maven of making endless graphic novels based on screenshots tortuously set up for hours using little props and sims avatars from the offline sims. I remember the HOURS we all used to spend struggling to get the sims posed, moved through a story, captioned, propped -- such hard work! the results, put on RealSlideShow, were often less than the experience of being in the game itself or sharing the albums with others who also lived in that world.

By the same token, machinima, when you come at it unprepared, looks like a lot of clunky, blocky, choppy junk. Trying to get people at work or from my family to focus on it, I fail. There are few very really well-down machinimas from SL. Among the excellent ones that succeed as both what they are (plays made inside SL) and as artworks standing along other human artworks, Eric Linden's "Bells & Spurs" really stands out. It's a combination of his clear skill as a builder, cinematagrapher and story-teller, but of course he cheated by using stuff not available in the client like animated mouths that talk. Or...is that cheating? Maybe in today's concept of Web 2.0 with all the mashing and connectivity, iti sn't really cheating at all?

I remember we spoofed the art world debates by making the Academy of Siminalism and the Academy of Maxisalism. The siminalist or minimalist would only accept albums done in that canon, involving only inventory items like the cactus. The Maxisalists were those maximalists who accepted anything that the Maxis-made game could absorb inside it as an upload (in offline). It was a lot of fun. So I suppose there are purists for machinima and those who find it tarnished by its pollution from other software or games.

Why They Are Banned

Most people who have blogs just ban and IP block people whose commentary they don't like, or just people they don't like period. I think it's important to make rules that are universal and defensible. So I have two for blocking IPs and commentary on this blog:

1. You must use your Second Life name and not an even further anonymous nickname. This is to curb the tendency people have to making harsh and vulgar commentary when they aren't responsible or known -- I want people who attack me on this blog to sign with a name that is attached to an SL inworld reputation. Usually the first such post without a name is left so that anyone is reassured that the purpose is not to chill critical commentary, but they will get a reminder and will get blocked.

2. People who wish me harm in RL or SL, or who act as to actually cause me harm in RL and SL.

Given the loads of people that have come here with fake names like Nolan Nash and such, they've been banned automatically for posting without an SL name. Their harsh and obscene attacks would be grounds for other people to remove them automatically; for me, the issue is their failure to produce an SL last name.

It's Not Cultural, It's Criminal

Free speech in Second Life has gotten another big test, and all sorts of thumb-sucking types may be about to gather and air this ad nauseum -- except they might not, because in Second Life, today's news is so rapidly surpassed by today's other news this minute in the same field.

It's odd that this isn't getting much more play, especially given the hard left's fascination and often celebration of fundamentalist militant Islam, under the concept of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". They all can bond over their hatred of America, Bush, capitalists, etc.

A fellow in Second Life tried to create a latter-day Skokie situation by deliberately and provocatively arranging a stunt that he calls "art". He created an in-your-face "conceptual art installation" of sorts by making a build on SL land with an art gallery with a photoshopped picture of a man urinating on a Koran. a Koran set out, which he had his avatar urinate on. Ugh. No, you don't get a link. And this goes far beyond the Piss Christ, which was bad enough, because that was a static installation which was disrespectful, but merely still life of arranged objects. This is an active avatar doing something hateful and disrespectful -- blasphemous is what religious believers would say -- to someone to harm them, make them angry -- it's called incitement.

Sitting in her fuzzy bunny slippers in front of her pretty computer with the funny cartoons on it called "Second Life,", ever watchful of new, unacceptable ways to invoke genocides, Aimee Weber would no doubt call this a mere pixelated non-event. Surely the awful Petey would say it was merely graphic interactions and nothing to get hung about. Riiggght. And that's why people like Arahan Claveau, the maker of this "installation," are trying, in ever new and more ingenuous ways, to make these pixels sit up and bark.

I heartily condemn this sort of thing for the following reasons:

How the Lindens Just Broke the SEARCH

BTW did everyone notice? The Lindens already shot SEARCH behind the wood shed -- and in an appalling lack of good faith didn't even tell us the day before when this topic came up!!!

It's in the latest patch which wasn't even a download, so you didn't even see a drop-down with liner notes.

There was no discussion of what they were going to do -- they just did it, as a matter of exigency due to what they describe as their overloaded databases.

What they did was EXACTLY what I predicted -- made it worse without telling anyone, and pass it off as better merely because it is "faster".

They essentially made the inworld SEARCH *as bad* as their web site search, and that means that they made it dumber, stupider, and damaging to business. I'm really appalled.

3PointD Pulls and Anshe on Blingsider

Lost in all the hoopla and hypela about screenshots and DMCA takedown notices related to Anshe Chung (she wanted to remove griefing, abusive flying phalluses from websites that didn't haven't the discretion not to use them), is a little nasty that Mark Wallace of 3pointD.com pulled on secondlifeinsider.com, his probably greatest competitor after the Herald, where he is publisher.

I'm not going to reprint the screenshot in question myself -- I don't believe in making in-your-face defiant moves to that extent.

Mark took Master Penguin to task for printing a shot of the Sears build that Electric Sheep is doing. UPDATE: it seemed as if Electric Sheep were doing because they build nearly every goddamn big-business build in SL today but in fact -- hey, shoot me, it turns out to be IBM's hired hands -- though we have yet to confirm WHO and if they are individually hired or from a company. Electric Sheep is the sponsors of his blog; IBM is favourably treated by Mark in his blog regularly.

Master Penguin had even properly linked to his story, writing, "According to Mark Wallace of 3PointD, the build will consist of floors showing off different consumer goods." He carried the same screenshot that Mark did.

That prompted Mark, AKA Walker Spaight in SL, to bark, "1. Take this screenshot down. You stole it from 3pointD.com without asking permission" in the blog's comments.

Whereupon Master Penguin picked up his skirts and fled, removing the screenshot, replacing it with a generic Internet photo of Sears that ostensibly he did ask for permission to use (or which Sears wouldn't care about as it is part of their PR), and had this awful gushing remark to make in an update, "I removed the original image on Mark Wallace's request (See the comment 1 below). Mark I am sorry for any problems this may have caused you. Also I removed the language of "the store seems to have languished in recent years," as I think it may have been stronger then what I was trying to convey."

Ugh -- not only taking down a shot he had every right to put up, but removing his slightly critical remark about the RL store that didn't seem to have traffic in RL (Lol).