Well, I'm not a suck-up like gopher-inventor and failed Croquet virtual world-dev Mark McCahill (Pixeleen Mistral, editor of the Herald), so I'm not in that new press group the Lindens made (I used to be in the old one, but I quit it in protest, and it turns out it was disbanded anyway; now there's a new one). I asked to be in the new one, but didn't get an instant "yes" and got mumbling from Pete Linden about how "we have a lot of applications" and they are being "reviewed". *Chuckle*. Ok. Take your time, Pete.
Pixeleen made a fool of himself obsessing about Rodvik's shoes (does Pix have a foot fetish? I notice he's done that before, it's really a tired gag). And little is to be learned from the account as a result.
And I'm also not on the even cooler kids' list who didn't bother to come into an inworld press conference, but got their own personal audiences (Dusan Writer was one; Tateru Nino was one, printed here. These interviews are limited and restricted -- Rodvik's new, only 3 weeks old, and marketing and public relations want to protect him.
So I'm left doing "half an interview" -- where I think up the questions, and then...I wait for the answers. Some day. Maybe never LOL.
I'm not very good at camping spawn and beating bosses and waiting on game gods. So it might be that these answers never come. That's ok, my job (and yours) is to ask the questions. So here goes:
1. Do you understand why some of us who came from the Sims Online to Second Life were at first repelled by SL and went back to TSO -- only to finally emigrate from TSO permanently? And bring all our friends?
2. What did you like best about the Sims Online?
3. Why do you think user-generated content and real income failed there as systems?
4. Can we have job objects in Second Life to help newbies adapt?
5. Have you ever read C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength? Would you be willing to? What was your favourite science fiction novel?
6. If you had to pick a world empire model to work with from real life, what would it be? (i.e. "Ming Dynasty" or "Roman Empire" or "Catholic Church" or "East India Company" or "Soviet Union" or "Ottoman Empire" or 'Hapsburg Empire"?
7. Who was the most influential person on you in your career?
8. Can you tell us what your own personal political philosophy is? Capitalism? Communism? Libertarianism? Parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy? Transhumanism?
9. Why did you remove voting from Second Life? Don't answer by saying "it wasn't effective or the Lindens didn't do what people voted on"; explain *why you don't think voting is a good marker for public opinion in an online community*.
10. What system in Second Life captures your attention every day first: 1) architecture 2) code 3) marketing 4) governance
11. Do you believe that people who have "flamed" or "trolled" on the forums repeatedly and have been permanently banned from the forums should also have their inworld property confiscated, their accounts and inventories seized, and their avatars permanently banned from Second Life?
12. Do you have any plans to create a better disciplinary action review system, i.e. an ombudsman or resident review board? Would you consider reinstating the police blotter, and even add the names of major cases of residents disciplined, the name of the resident who filed the abuse report, and the prosecuting Linden? If no, what are your objections to such a system?
13. Why does Woodbury University have a hold over Linden Lab? Have they hacked a database? Is one of their trustees a golfing buddy with one of your board members? What's up? They've been banned twice, for ample cause, amply documented, but now they're back again on two sims called Red Square and Revolution in a group called Soviet Commuter College. No accident, comrade?
14. Do you have any plans to institute a system of certified merchants who must provide their real-life information and proof of ID in order to have higher status at the SL Merchants system, i.e. faster response to trouble tickets, or better protection against copyright theft?
15. Have you heard of the Feted Inner Core? What do you think of a system whereby the company creates privileged user groups filtered to talk to only certain people, or creates systems, even merit-based, such as the Gold Solutions Providers, or gives discounts only to certain land dealers, i.e. the Atlas program. Do you think this kind of favouritism is justified?
16. When you go to TechCrunch cocktail parties or TED conferences or Sun Valley or other Silicon Valley watering holes, do the other tech guys laugh when you introduce yourself as the CEO of Linden Lab? Do they commiserate? What do you tell them so that they don't laugh or cry?
17. Are you going to get a pet in Second Life?
18. Do you think the adult content of SL is a liability, and that the extreme lifestyles found on the grid can harm the overall project of growing and making more popular the SL experience?
19. If you were asked to come and testify in Congress now about Second Life, what would you tell congressmen from both parties?
20. What makes you qualified to run a virtual world like this? What college degrees, life experience, etc. do you have that makes you fit for this job?
21. Have you examined the search issues in SL? Do you think the Google Search Appliance is appropriate for this virtual world?
22. Have you been brought in to slim down/shape up/flatten out Second Life for sale to another company?
Well, that's all I have for now, thanks Rodvik.
The quest to force creators to divulge information they already divulged to be premium is nothing but an attempt at racketeering to thin the herd. SL would be nothing today without creation freedom.
You sound like Ami there prok.
As for content protection? Not happening. It is physically impossible. If you can't deal with the ramifications and risks associated with publishing content on the internet then don't publish content on the internet.
And LL can't do takedowns any faster than they already do anyway despite certain peoples' pipe dreams. It is a legal process. If a creator wants the process sped up they can pay their attorney $500 to write the letter. The action will be swift. So that right there is exactly how creators can get expedited service. By paying lots of real dollars to a real lawyer. There is your DMCA Elite. It is already established.
And ask me if I think LL will obey their new CEO as per his recent comments the answer is no. Humble appears to be nothing more than a Baghdad Bob PR guy.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 15, 2011 at 07:05 PM
Oh, I oppose the merchant certification program. I think it's wrong. I think everyone should have equal protection before the law, and no one should have to supply this information to make a living online. I'm asking it as a question.
The trade-off that the Lindens might imply is that if a designer certified, they could have fast-tracking on DMCA notices, or maybe they *would* put in a watermark system, or something. Don't think they don't discuss this...
I don't believe your constant claims about the DMCAs in fact being done in a timely matter. I know lawyers who have been paid and have filed them and go through great frustrations. You don't have any scientific data on this any more than anyone else. I have anecdotal info one way; you have a hypothesis another way. But you have no more basis to claim anything that I do, then -- and I at least have anecdotes.
I just don't know yet if he can exercise leadership. It's hard to do when you come into a place where the culture is already so entrenched.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 15, 2011 at 07:44 PM
I cannot discuss the cases I am familiar with that were dealt with promptly and exactly according to the DMCA timelines due to lawyers being the intermediaries.
If you are serious and have virtual content worth that much then register copyrights and use lawyers is the only suggestion I can make. A lawyer can explain why.
As for Humble? He is supposedly the CEO. Why can't he give orders and they be followed or else? A purge of hostiles is always required to assert dominance. Nice guys that are great CEOs usually hire an axe man for 6 months to be the bad guy. IMHO anyway based on personal observation and participation.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | February 15, 2011 at 08:16 PM
Then how can you account for the fact that certain lawyers do NOT get prompt attention?
I really think there is selective attention. And I do think that they need a procedure that they educate people about and explain the limitations of easier. There is indeed an abuse report system that is shy of a full-fledged DMCA takedown, and the Lindens do indeed just act on that basis at times, which raises expectations. And indeed they should, when there is obvious evidence. But they need to explain the dividing line.
If a purge of hostiles is required, why is Soft Linden still working there?
And how do you know that the guy hired to do the purge wasn't M or Philip himself? Because a lot of them are purged which represented that early anarcho-coder culture more than some do now.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 15, 2011 at 08:46 PM
i took this from his interview for taturo.
"my goal is to enable our customers’ expression and creativity, beyond that, let us see where the journey takes us all. The residents of Second Life are smart, communicative and creative. They are going to take this in all sorts of directions. Our job at Linden Lab is to set solid foundations, create the tools, and then get out of the way as much as we can."
two things of note and therefor no surprises...
1. he over and over refers to sl viewers and "customers".. not "residents" or "citizens" or "transhuman conduits"...but CUSTOMERS.
2. he talks about offeing creativity and expression... hes making LEGO.... hes making EA LEGO 2.0
Hes NOT speaking about "civic gov2.0 systems" or "IP issues of ownership and fair economic systems for those who "provide" user-cattle- based content for the few who OWN the pipes and can via TOS sell them. scrape them, or repackage "everything" uploaded to their servers....at will.
Ginsu once called SL as it was.. a buiness and called you all customers... many of you attacked that very non meta idea....
well its again , openlly expoused.
SL is a vegas casino, your only a customer if you sitting at a table dumping money into the till... and when the day is done, they want you to leave their house as quickly and as better for them as they can arrange it.
The meta consultants or advertising are gone,those who took their place now they try story games and original IP pitches sold as service for hire..
plus a few teachers trying to keep valuable as states and gov now kill all edu budgets to pay for more guns and oil.
the chance to grow SL die in 2007. open sourcing and closed buisness models chocked the "accidental" blogger hype and IP DRM CMT luck that LL had stumbled upon vs all other web3d/ vc backed media startups from 2003-7
There, Keneva, Metaverse,vivaty,lively, so many more.
except for red light, who still grows...and their casino stuff as well.
no surprise...sex and gambling are as human and non meta as you can get.
Posted by: cube inada | February 16, 2011 at 01:23 PM
Well, I disagree. I'm all for big commercial platforms being politically neutral and merely trying to provide tools and letting self-governance occur to the extent it can. But a lot of the big platforms have a very limited service -- tweeting, pictures and chat on Facebook.
SL is very much in the round, very much encompassing every aspect of human life, and very much a simulation of life more as a whole, not just as a chat and a share.
It's a smaller community by far, and more complex and more rich. So I don't see anything wrong with asking that it put in more governance tools and services.
It already has a jurisprudence of doing that. The abuse reporting system works far, far more extensively than on any other platform. Just try sending an AR on Twitter or FB -- you might wait weeks for response, and even if you get a rapid one on a serious matter, it's a crap shoot. Not everyone does.
Many AR's "go nowhere," but if you file a report against an avatar that crashes your sim or copies your house, you pretty much are assured of action by Linden Lab within a reasonable amount of time. It might be 48 hours or 3 weeks, but it pretty much always happens. That's pretty extraordinary.
So yeah, Ginsu is right it's a business and Rodvik seems to be taking the "customers" thing very literally and understanding that he's in the entertainment media space but that doesn't mean that this particular brand of software shouldn't have a high component of user involvement.
The JIRA isn't shut down for feature proposal and bug hunting; only the voting is.
There's no JIRA on FB or Twitter or the Sims Online.
While the Lindens prefer only their own hacker types to get involved in their product, they do get a lot more because they're forced to play the "open game".
The structure of the ap engineers at FB or Twitter is quite different.
Posted by: Prokofy | February 16, 2011 at 04:55 PM
sadly, human rights are like so 20th century... and the 21st century is all about the few giving mechanisms the rights to manage other humans.
How else does one accept -FACEBOOK AND TWITTER as Freeing Egypt;) ?
Freeing them to be what? just servants to build virtual pyramids for "shinier-windlit" skys.?
http://www.mediabastard.wordpress.com
Posted by: c3 | February 16, 2011 at 06:05 PM
You reminded me of something a friend of mine said deep in the thrall of what was happening in Egypt. Facebook is no more responsible for the success of this revolution than gas lanterns were for the success of the American Revolution.
Posted by: Velvet Bikcin | February 16, 2011 at 08:06 PM
Well that's retarded. Of course it is. And Wael Ghonim, the Google engineer, would be the first to tell you how important it was. Of course, it was also about him and Google, and also about him and his friends going into poor neighbourhoods and chanting slogans.
The Committees of Correspondence and the pamphlets printed by people like Thomas Jefferson were vital to the American Revolution and they were the technology of that era. You couldn't conceive of any history or analysis of the American Revolution without them.
Yet technocommunists constantly become available like Bikcin either to overpraise the technology or undermine it so that they can make sure it doesn't become widely used except by them.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 16, 2011 at 08:18 PM
which "brand" of lamp was that prok?
what was its TOS... was it like Apples, that will destroy the light from the lamp/or doc written under than light, if the manufacturer dosant like the use of the lamp?
note- apple/ibooks deletion news of today..etc.
anyhow- my point being- just as MIPS allows too many to allow LL to sucker them into a relationship that isnt, so does the media machine in purposely attempting to confuse a technology with a product and its reality for being.
cube3 productions inc. cube aka c3....;)
Posted by: c3 | February 16, 2011 at 09:36 PM
Forgive me for having more confidence in the spirit of the Egyptian people than in a social network.
So I'm a technocommunist if I oppose technology, and I'm a technocommunist if I favour technology?
Okay, I know where I stand.
Posted by: Velvet Bikcin | February 16, 2011 at 10:47 PM
In your case, absolutely, because you're a communist originally, first and foremost, and you use tech to promote communism and communism to promote tech, so it cuts both ways.
Lamp?
Technology is a product. You are stuck on thinking it's a medium only.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 17, 2011 at 12:08 AM
technologies (so far) are augmentations of humanity.
they/ it CAN be a product..
it can be for commercial trade, it can be a service via license agreement, it can be offered free.
How its transfered or packaged creates a medium.
King George Had no technology to prevent the lamps usage or existance of the papers created and printed beneath its light. If such technology did exist, as KING im sure he'd own it, branded it, and only allowed it to do his or his partners bidding....and that probably would have kept many in line way before they ever thought of writing letters to each other about "freedom".
just saying youll go to hell, wasnt going to be enough...;) that's why god game us knives and guns...
and now computers...;) that was god right?-- or was that google... maybe ill ask gael...;)
Posted by: c3 | February 17, 2011 at 12:53 AM
http://www.mediapost.com/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145085
http://www.mediapost.com/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145185
good to know that the simple "telephone" system of the 20th century America and the freedom to call grandma on sunday, isnt going to be altered by all this simple product.;)
Posted by: c3 | February 17, 2011 at 01:15 AM