The Lapdog Journalist Hamlet

Hamlet gets all googly-eded about these /barf "frickin cut" Rezzable fish.

Bring me my barf bag -- here's Hamlet on Rezzable: "These look fricking cute: I just noticed that my NWN partner Rezzable added a 7Seas Fishing game to the pond in Greenies Lawn, the backyard addition to the giant-sized playworld."

Has Hamlet's brain gone as marshmallowy as his treatment of geeks and the virtual world industry usually is? No, he's merely got a new "Partner," as he describes it -- Rezzable -- which I *think* means that they pay him to write infomercials or advertorials of that "fricking cute" nature, and also carry the more conventional ads with links to their stuff. We must have heard 10 times now about how Hamlet visited the Rezzables in London and was wined and dined there and bonded tremendously. Yes, they really are birds of a feather, Himoff and Au, because they are both essentially cynical and exploitative about virtual worlds while pretending to believe in them, and heavily critical of certain aspects of them, as I suspect they see them as a threat to their own power. RightasRain has been particularly hostile to LL lately, whining about their use of a land model for business (he hasn't been able to get his sims to pay because he won't put in rentals ROFL), so he's stalked off to what he calls a "Private Grid". I always said open source=closed society LOL. Hamlet, for his part, has been barking at LL a lot more lately since the opensource fiasco -- but who says lapdogs can't bark?!

Judging from their breathless ad page, Rezzable has decided to hawk content more, in the belief that content is the greatest money-maker in VWs -- not land (the Lindens could explain some things to them about that LOL). The problem is, content like that doesn't come cheap. That is, somebody has to create and make it. Then either you have to pay them a real salary, as they will do this full time, or let them keep the proceeds from the sales. So it's hardly a model even to get tier paid, you know?  I should have added to my 2009 predictions the forecast that Rezzable will pull out of SL, because it's going bust, but it will do so making it seem as if it is over "performance issues", and then it will languish on those dumb opensim grids for awhile, and then move on to other enterprises like kids' games or perhaps a new online men's magazine or something that will help fan RaR's ego better than VW's can. That is, if the cash holds out.

And will it hold out for Hamlet? I really have to wonder who this entire show is sustained. Who pays for it? Oh, I quite understand that Hamlet gets other gigs. He's got his, um, huge proceeds from his book, which is, er, what ranking on Amazon.com? Yet, I seem to see the Millions of Us sponsorship now missing from that blog. I'm not sure when that dropped out, but it was likely a prudent recession measure. Now there's still a Federated Media ad (they were the ones who took Hamlet off the Lindens' hands back in the day), a Koin-Up ad (a start-up that enables you to endlessly put up your screenshots for free, which has no subscriptions, and apparently only IMVU ads, so it's hard to see how it will survive), and now Rezzable. There are so many Google and Amazon ads on there that you forget that with, say, only 94,000 on Alexa, and traffic rank falling in the last three months, you can't expect income from those (or can you? perhaps someone knows).

Yet, the show rolls on. Lately, Hamlet has been more insufferable than usual. He's an exasperating combination of a cloying, unreflective booster of Second Life -- that is, that part of the old Second Life that you might call the early adopter/creator fascist/tekkie wikinista -- and he's completely docile about Linden policy that aligns with his own technolibertarian viewpoints, but whiney about things that seem to mitigate against the hippies and the commies. It's a funny brew, but all the way around, it's sycophantic, reactionary, tribalist.

So why am I bashing Hamlet, and making it personal, which will only make the little weenie bastard saying something even more nasty than he usually contrives whenever he sees me at a Metaverse Meet-up? Well, because I really think we have to demand accountability of the press. We're stuck with Hamlet in this very niche industry called "virtual worlds" and he sits across the mindshare bandwidth like a troll or a dog in the manger. So he simply has to be challenged and pushed as hard as possible until somebody can come up with a viable alternative.

A case in point is his irritable -- and irritating -- report on the alleged "shrinking land mass" of SL. Hamlet has heard such a din from all his little friendship card pals about their precious OpenSpaces, and he is still trolling around looking for romantic "resident rebellions", that he's just not using common sense and logic.

If Linden Lab shows a negative number of islands in recent months, it's because 3 or 6 months ago, people took their one island that held 15,000 prims, and converted them into FOUR openspace islands, each of which held 3750 prims. Duh! So...one converted to four! Duh!  Then....they converted them back! Quite a few have converted, rather than abandoned -- in fact, they are merely converting back to what they had originally owned.

There's a great deal of nonsense in the comments to this piece -- there always are at Hamlet's comments! -- and even Salazar Jack, who should surely know better, is falling for this idea that there are "a great many" who are "porting to other grids". What he and Hamlet and others making this claim (Rezzable's RightasRain) are failing to grasp is that when people go have a look-see at another grid, they don't dump their SL holdings much of the time. Oh, there might be some dramatic defectors. But most people are exactly like me. They go and look. They may even buy a sim!  And then they leave. Because those new grids aren't ready yet ROFL.

Sure, there are less islands because the great inflation got busted. Overall, next month, there will be more islands than there were last year at this time ROFL. Please. If the world is REALLY shrinking, we'll know, and it can be reported faithfully.

That makes it look like the world "boomed" for a few months, but it was misleading, because almost as soon as people began scurrying to try to deal with their suddenly crashed-priced full-prim private islands by dividing them into more-lucrative and cheaper openspace sims, the Lindens suddenly jacked up the price of OS. It was the damnedest thing! But that really does screw up the numbers.

So you really have to look at what happend after May -- and yes, it only because in about May -- as a kind of giant real estate bubble that broke. Lots of greedy people thought they could flip budget low-prim islands to people desperate for cyber bunkers or "a blank canvas" for their creativity, i.e. a club or store. Because the Lindens *made* you have to already own a private island to be eligible to purchase open space sims, ostensibly merely to place 'stretches of water' around your island, that created a huge arbitrage opportunity that many greedy get-rich-quick land barons (and those pretending to be "more refined" than land barons like the rapacious Lili Yifu, who declared herself as merely "managing a revenue stream") immediately exploited -- they could buy an island, get people to pay the entire purchase price immediately, then get them to pay slightly more rent than they themselves had to pay -- and even billed by the Lindens and handled administratively by the Lindens! -- so that all they had to do was...nothing....and collect anywhere from $5 to $30 per sim. Naturally, with those kind of numbers, people bought 100 of them instantly to turn over.

So the Lindens' *real* mistake wasn't even in making higher-prim sims, or allowing them to be "abused" with too many scripts. That's what the endless squabblers in the forums don't grasp.  Their real mistake was a) making it possible for the billing to go to a Linden by designating an "estate manager" who wasn't an owner and b) not enabling people to buy the sims unless they had an island already. The combination of those two factors created a class of OS flippers who are responsible for thousands of islands being purchased, chopped, and maxed out to the hilt as flat pancake cheapie rentals, sometimes 16 or more to an openspace sim. THAT was the problem. There's no question that back in May, if the Lindens had said you could buy the island WITHOUT owning the private island first, there would NOT have been as many purchased because there'd be no arbitrage to exploit, and no false situation to make hay over.

The Lindens put in that requirement about ownership of an island because if they didn't, the land market would have crashed even further. Indeed, it might have, but there'd still be LESS openspace islands with end user owners than there in fact occurred because greedy land barons, God bless, them, so a chance to get rich quick.

And God knows why the Lindens put in billing systems that created more work for them -- but it was a great blessing to people facing doubtful and fearful customers who hated feeling like the landlord could screw them at any minute and yank their land. Paying Lindens directly gave them peace of mind.

All of this was not destined to last -- arbitrage never will under the Linden sun -- but Hamlet keeps yapping, along with all the other yappers, that the world is shrinking and creativity is killed. Baloney. There are many new sign-ups, more businesses and educators than ever using SL, and real people will go on buying the islands. There really is 'always another guy to buy the island," as Kenny Linden so inimitably put it to the protesting Random Unsung.

Whatever bubble and bursting mess and statistical spit-up the Lindens faced for a few months, it will right itself and then the yappers will look stupid. Of course, it's always possible that I will look stupid and be proven wrong, but I'm happy to be. But stick to the facts then. Don't claim that the world "shrank," because a bubble that was wildly inflated burst.

Hamlet remains hopelessly mired in that era of early adapters that Mitch Kapor likes to describe as the "misfits" lol. Here he is bitching -- like a cranky old lady going deaf and thinking the young 'uns don't speak up anymore  -- that the Lindens have GASP failed to put on their spiffy new website a shill about coming in and creating and building in SL. Well good! FINALLY they got over that crap! FINALLY they realized that 90 percent or more of the people coming in will NOT be accessing the tools and building, and THAT'S OK. There's enough stuff in the world and they can now...consume it. That's how economics and worlds normally work lol -- unless, of course, you become psychotically attached to some fictive early, idyllic stage where you must go on glorifying workers forging steel for the rest of your life (Soviet Union, anyone?).

Hamlet also bitches that his creator friends like AM Radio aren't credited for their work on the front page, which the Lindens show shamelessly hustle in their bid for new sign-ups. But wait. You *do* sign your rights away on that one, as the Lindens have a TOS that says they may snag your work and use it to promote their site any time. So tough luck there. They aren't required in that TOS to give you a top billing, and share it with themselves. So they don't? Should they? Of course. But this is yet another example of what happens when Lessig uses the Creative Commons bullshit to erode private property and capitalism, but then doesn't stick around to follow through (Lessig was an early adviser of the Lindens, and Hamlet is hopelessly enamoured of him, to the point that he even made a fan group for Free Culture in world -- where *is* my barf bag, flight attendants!)

Ultimately, no matter how cloying, sychophantic, and precious Hamlet is, he likely still has a significant following. Because he flatters all those Not Possible in Real Life people to the hilt, so they back him on their Plurks and whatnot. His endless rounds of events publications are self-serving and self-replicating FIC reinforcements -- and everybody's happy. Except, not everybody gets paid.

Comments

[Qie Niangao]

I think it's possible that the resource problems posed by OpenSpaces may have been less severe with direct ownership, but I don't follow why there would have been fewer of them, as in: "There's no question that back in May, if the Lindens had said you could buy the island WITHOUT owning the private island first, there would NOT have been as many purchased because there'd be no arbitrage to exploit, and no false situation to make hay over."

Presumably, the end-user demand for *unshared* OpenSpaces would be about the same whether owned directly or rented through existing Estates. In fact, there would likely have been some added demand for more desirable direct ownership, but perhaps that would have been balanced by less unused inventory held on-spec by the Estates. (But unused inventory wouldn't contribute to the OpenSpace resource issues.)

For *shared* OpenSpaces, how would direct ownership have reduced demand at all? Why wouldn't the Estate managers have continued to capitalize on the astoundingly cheap space, and diced and flipped rentals on them to fill the same demand, regardless of whether others could own complete OpenSpaces directly? (Indeed, might this not have created a whole explosion of inept micro-flippers buying single OpenSpaces to slice up?)

Is the premise here that the Estates acted not just as arbitrageurs, but also as advertisers creating artificial demand (the "false situation to make hay over")? Or am I just missing it?

[Ann Otoole]

One of the biggest differences (aside from the obvious lack of visitors to my blog rofl) between Hamlet efforts and mine is that Hamlet gets paid and I don't. I won't fault Hamlet for making a buck. I don't care for Rezzable and their describing the work of the residents of SL as "a pile of crummy prims". That sounds like Rivers Run reed's comment that SL is full of "shoddy content" to me. Odd. those 2 companies make a lot of money. Maybe if I start calling people names I might start getting paid.

And Hamlet's is not the only blog with paid advetorials. At least Hamlet is not concealing it.

Is there an acronym for blogging payola? It is becoming quite common. We need an SL specific acronym for SL blogging payola.

Some people make money to pay RL bills and the rest of us foolishly starve. I expect to see more people developing "partnerships" since money is becoming a scarce commodity.

Honesty and Honor are traits of the poor.

[Prokofy Neva]

Qie, you are complexifying a simple point. If end users could buy the sims directly, they would. They would have no need for middle men. Then middle men wouldn't have the false sense that they should buy up a lot of sims to flip as rentals to those wanting whole openspace sims. Then they'd have no excess inventory that they'd be motivated to slice up into 16 and hawk as cheap shared os sims.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, Slogola, that's the issue, and that's what is irksome. Advertising isn't the problem, if the ads have a box around them or they are in a space that says "this is an ad".

What I hate are the advertorials and infomercials that are disguised as reporting, or honest assessments, like somebody writing an "article" in which they say something is "fricking cute" because they are paid to do so. Such an article should have a box around it that says ADVERTISEMENT. And yet they pretend it's spontaneous.

[Prokofy Neva]

My blog doesn't violate the Typepad Terms of Service. Making a critical and truthful statement to the best of your knowledge isn't "libel".

And as you know you are in violation of my basic rule here, and have no credibility, and as you demonstrated prior knowledge of that, I'm not required to carry your post.

[Anon]

Ask yourself: What did Hamlet do before Linden Lab scooped him up? He wrote game reviews for gamer blogs. Nowhere have I ever seen Hamlet ever have journalist experience or training, yet he certainly is happy to let people think he is one.

He's a game reviewer. Once one think about it that way, a person shouldn't be surprised his lack of any sort of idea of "investigating both sides" or "not playing favorites with commercial partners and buddies.

[Prokofy Neva]

Anon, in order to post on this blog, you must use a first and last SL name, RL name, or blogger's name.

[M2life Paravane]

To be known, some people don't need skills but only acess to information ;-)

[Razrcut Brooks]

The most interesting thing Hamlet's blog is his photograph in the upper left corner...he is posing in the same manner all of us guys do..or did back in 7th grade..You know what I am talking about..the old trick to make our arm muscles appear larger by crossing them and then flexing hard AND pushing the flesh outward toward the viewer. Nicely done Hamlet.

Razrcut Brooks

[Anon]

More laptop journalism, a la Tateru kowtowing to RRR: http://www.massively.com/2009/01/13/immersive-workspaces-expands-with-immersive-planograms/

[Melponeme_k]

"But wait. You *do* sign your rights away on that one, as the Lindens have a TOS that says they may snag your work and use it to promote their site any time. So tough luck there. They aren't required in that TOS to give you a top billing, and share it with themselves. So they don't? Should they? Of course."

Well, I suppose everyone can profit off the Andrew Wyeth mystic in a CC world. But I noticed on Wyeth's official website that all his images have a copyright symbol not a CC symbol. Hmmmm.

[Prokofy Neva]

To get a glimpse of the "Mixed Reality" that you can find on Hamlet's site, check out this post:
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/01/where-to-buy-a.html

In the comments, Hamlet appears and tells someone asking a question of someone else that their "interlocutor has been permabanned" because he "crossed the line one too many times".

Huh? What happened? Who? Where? anybody know?

It looks like -- but it's hard to tell -- somebody asked why it was Hamlet was flogging somebody's map book on his blog, and whether that had an undue affect on the economy when Hamlet did that. Well, der, it does. But...it's hard to reconstruct in the memory hole dark. Would love to know what that was all about.

[Sigmund Leominster]

I'm fascinated to see how the development of new grids goes. I have had a look-see at one, which was not much different from the SL grid except that there wasn't much there. At all.

I can understand the desire for folks to create their own grids. First comes the disillusionment with Linden Lab, then the "I could do better," and then the "Hey, if they can make a fortune, so can I" moment.

The proliferation of small wannabee grids will be fun to watch. Of course, given a finite number of people with a finite amount of time, the splintering of the metaverse could end up with hundreds of sterile little worlds, each populated by Bob, Sue, their three friends, and a primmy dog called Yippy.

Setting up a grid and running a sustainable business are two very different things. Unless there is full interoperability between grids so folks can move from one to other as easily as TPing from one sim to another, the sharding of the metaverse is ahead.