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*.

Draxtor Dupres of Live4U TV was able to smuggle in a link to his samizdat, which is a critical coverage of the Sheep-dip even featuring an interview with me.

Since YouTube only lets you leave comments of 500 words (not made for me!), here's my response to Draxtor:

Good job smuggling this samizdat into the site I've been banned from now, although I used to have a weekly podcast there lol -- the last one I did was critical of the Sheep.

And this blog needed to get sanitized of me, so that business could proceed as usual:
http://metaversed.com/25-oct-2007/monday-metanomics-electric-sheep

What you failed to mention, Draxtor, which truly is exasperating (maybe it was too complex to get into your own old-media-style TV broadcast even though it's machinima) is that the Sheep viewer covers the view of classifieds and search places normally visibile in the LL browser upon pressing SEARCH.

When you open the OnRez viewer, you see a SEARCH box in a better place than it is on the LL browser -- so far so good -- but with a worse feature -- a default to SEARCH ALL. SEARCH ALL produces chaos and idiocy in SL, as it mixes together Groups, People, Land, Classifieds, etc. -- in a non-Googlized search, this is disaster. There is a *reason* why it is tabbed and tagged from land, and works more like amazon.com, and its pulldown menu like "books" -- that gives cleaner returns.

Sure, if you can figure out to press on the magnifying glass and drill down to the next level and try to bat away everything else distracting you on the OnRez viewer, like the HUD people won't figure out how to get rid of, you can see CLASSIFIEDS paid for by SL residents outside the Sheep magic circle.

But you truly are SOL if you didn't figure out how to game up your lot to show in SEARCH ALL through campchairs, or you didn't get yourself into the Sheep Fashion Avenue sim -- the real windfall of the CSINY caper, as those dozen or so lucky friends of the Sheep will have first crack at separating the newbie stream from their newly-acquired Linden dollars.

Soon, even that SEARCH ALL that at least in principle covers our stuff will be replaced by a SHEEPSEARCH. For this, you had to NOT opt-out of the Grid Shepherd scanning your land. I sure did -- as did many others, because it was hugely annoying, that Forseti couldn't enlist the help of the community in tagging their own objects and making a social network out of it; instead he had to come and greedily scrape everything, not even intended for sale, and dump it into the maw of the Sheep dbase where our proprietary information becomes his for free, to use to detect hot spots, advertising prospects, proximity information -- whatever is needed to sell ads better -- the Sheep will be starting an advertising campaign.

Notice how Forseti gushes about an "ecology" involving LL, media, sherpas like his company -- and then just "residents" (walk-ons). So his lumbering old media dinosaur has in fact reduced us merely to "residents" -- not inworld businesses, not people on any kind of equal footing with the Sheep.

We're supposed to fall into line, and merely consume the Sheep content.

Dusan Writer explains it far better than I ever could:
http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/csi-in-second-life-ok-tired-of-disneyland-yet/

This is totally eloquent -- the contrast of Dusan and his group's own 'crime scene' sort of RP content, the superb quality, and the Disney like dumbed-down content trying to solve the problem of the wonky SL interface AND the low-level of ability to navigate a story line in general from passive TV waters.

shava23, you are such a fangirl. You will not be hearing those numbers any time soon, even if you imagine yourself "plugged in". And if you do, they will be lies.

The ability to mouse-hover or an island and automatically get the island count was broken or disabled in the days before the supposed CSI influx.

The front page counter had to be out of whack -- I watched it diligently for 3 hours and it only went *down* from 41,000 to 38,000 concommitant log-ons during this supposed "rush".

I personally estimated no more than 4,000 on the islands, because I could count the green dots. Cocoanut Koala went out and counted them manually and got about 700.

Problems at the CBS sign-up page are being blamed, but CBS is long practiced in huge influxes to webpages tied into TV shows -- Zuiker bragged about this at VW.

Problems may have developed at the OnRez viewer download page -- but surely they had backups. I just think they have to admit that they didn't get the rush they expected, and that a lot of the people showing up in fact were Sheep staff, networks, and rubber-neckers anyway.