Second Thoughts

Belkin and Verizon DSL Annoyance Fixed!

I spent several days trying to solve a Belkin annoyance, and found numerous geeky help forums with sometimes elaborate prescriptions for assistance, that people kept finding didn't work.

I kept contacting Belkin by email (where they are more stupid) and by IM live (where they are very delayed and distracted) but finally I got a recipe that worked.

Not before being told elaborate solutions like taking a paper clip and poking it into the router to reset the addresses and following numerous screens, or by seeing geek-to-go help forums prescribing elaborate changes or resetting or generation of the MAC address, etc.

If you call Verizon DSL, they will tell you to call Belkin. If you call Belkin, they don't tell you to call Verizon, mercifully, but they tell you completely extraneous stuff. They may be running bots. If you say the phrase "pop-up" as I did in my help request, "The Verizon DSL connection menu keeps popping up," then I get a recipe about how to get rid of pop-up ads. If I say I can't get out of a menu routine, I get back a response about fixing Parental Controls. That's why I gave up on the email help, and got the person online.

Here's the story. After you connect the Belkin G Wireless Router to your main computer running on Verizon DSL with a Westell WireSpeed modem, and then have a second computer access that wireless network you've just established, even while both computers are perfectly well connected, the main computer keeps popping up a "connection to broadband" menu. If you click through it, it generates error messages about not reaching the remote, but in fact since you're already connected, it doesn't matter. It seems impossible to make this thing go away (resetting doesn't work) because each time you open a new email or move to another page, it comes up again.

So here's the solution!

1. Click on START and go to CONTROL PANEL
2. Select NETWORK AND SHARING
3. Select INTERNET OPTIONS
4. Go to the tab CONNECTIONS and make sure the button on is NEVER DIAL A CONNECTION
5. Select LAN SETTINGS and make sure NO boxes are checked off, i.e. are left empty
6. Click OK and OK again to save.

Typepad Annoyance

Typepad has had this bug before.

Each time I post a comment to my own blog, for some reason, all the blogs of that past week reprint on the feed.

So it seems as if I am constantly and repetitively spamming sites like World of SL, but in fact this is not deliberate.

So until they sort this out, I may not be posting comments to others but will aggregate them in another blog post. Annoying.

Perverse Engineers

I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the apology of libsecondlife.

Not only is it too little, too late, it's completely misleading. It implies -- just like all the other times -- that there are only "a few bad eggs," and that the problem is not a group problem -- or a Linden Lab problem -- and that it's something that will be taken care of -- just this once more! -- by excising the bad person who was alone, isolated, doing that bad thing. Let's all hate on Baba Yamamoto, because he's the only evil person in libsecondlife! Boo hisss!

Bullshit. The transcripts all show the spirit of cameraderie, aiding and abetting, and most of all responsibility of the leadership of libsl for what was going on.

There's been too much focus on the selling of CopyBot, as if all that was wrong was reselling the capacity to do damage. There's been far too little focus on the malicious planning and execution of the device -- and the true motivation -- which, as it turns out rather sordidly, according to one unreliable but plausible source, turns out to be a gig on hire from the Electric Sheep, to make armies of mannequins for a big, unamed apparel company. Crashing the grid and the economy for fun and profit.

So many people have come off looking really bad in this incident -- and as the weeks go by and it sinks it what was done, more will come off looking even worse. First of all, Linden Lab itself.

Where is Jauani Wu?

Jauani Wu is missing from the People list! And word has it that he is sitting in bannanation, waiting for his fate to be decided.

Jauani Wu is one of the most odious and cunning forums posters, of course, and he once delightedly posted that he liked making people cry.

Over and over again he would harass me on the forums, claiming falsely and outrageously that I ran a pyramid scheme against newbies merely because I took tier donations to my group for rental discuonts (huh?!).

Nothing would stop him; the Lindens seemed to love him. Ben Linden gave Jauani, in RL a budding not-yet-licensed architectural school graduate, a job as a builder of one of the new welcome areas, for Germans -- he turned in a very polished and baked castle.

Jauani dealt in real estate for a time then got out of the business; he was going to develop islands with Cyberlands after merging with them but then was eased out; he went back to doing...what, exactly I don't know, but in between Linden jobs he would stir up trouble on Resident Answers.

And evidently for this, he is now being perma-banned by the Lindens from their already scrubbed and sanitized forums where it's almost impossible to post as it is, and he is discussing the invocation of what has become (falsely) known as "Prok's Law".

Everything thinks Prok is exempt from Prok's Law, but in fact Prok's law was invented, and conceived as a means of a) permabanning Prok from the forums, and then b) a few days later, to keep the FIC in check that the Lindens couldn't bring themselves to permaban, to threaten them with banning from SL itself if they became repeat offenders with their foul and vicious mouths.

The Lindens and their docile resmods went on to wilt and wimp out and never permabanned any of those Toxic 20 that I could see.

Don't forget that I was permabanned after only one informal warning, one inworld 3-day ban for swearing in PG, and one 7-day ban from the forums -- an incredibly short rap list that Jauani and some of the other current frequent flyers on the ban rolls have surpassed many times. So it wasn't that I was exempt from a law that didn't exist when I was permabanned but allowed to remain inworld; it's that it was announced later as a means to keep control over a Five-Percent Forums FIC to whom my head had been fed.

Suddenly, somehow, Jauani's formerly greased Linden pipelines seemed to have dried up. Apparently they are actively considering "what to do" about Jauani Wu!

This is awful stuff. You don't have to like somebody (I have Wu-had on mute), nor appreciate their speech (all lies and provocations) to defend their right to exist.

And for any governing body to pursue the route of "seditious libel" -- claiming that it can remove property, freedom, and even life over critical comments about the state or its favourites -- is death for any political life or free economy.

The equivalent of such draconian punishment is to strip people of their assets in SL and ban them from even logging on to their pixelated homes, land, stores, and inventories.

This is dead wrong. Speech should not be criminalized and given such heavy penalties.

Let's hope with all this huge media and big business attention pinned on SL now, they won't dare to do anything so stupid as kick somebody off the grid permanently merely for their speech on the forums.

If they dare to do that with someone who has also built a Welcome Area, for God's sake, under their favouritism system, then they are more stupid than I thought possible!

I caught a glimpse of a 'Jayant Wu' mentioned in connection with Motorati, the Pontiac island, but I don't see that avatar in the list, and can't be sure that isn't a mispelled version of Jauani.

Bring back Jauani Wu! (I'll keep him on mute).

Get Rid of These People

FlipperPA Peregrine is busy cross-posting from the odious Second Citizen (a disgusting, obscene, scatalogical, brain-dead, cynical, griefer-supporting forum that I'm glad I've stopped reading, much less posting to, completely) about SLCC. That's indicative in itself -- that he and his RL wife Jennyfur are among V-5 W-Hat griefing assholes who harass others and devalue and destroy their property, and that they are also helping to prop up other frequent-flyer nasties like Weedy Herbst or Hecktor Hannibal or even the insufferable second-rate pod-caste Cristiano Midnight -- and that's his first stop for where to publish a notice about how to organize for SLCC 2007.

In this post (below the fold), Flipper airily notes, "in our yearly tasks" -- as if it's perfectly fine to assume that Jennyfur and her husband FlipperPA can just go on ruling our world and ruling these vital community conventions. Quite a few are unhappy with their leadership, yet through indifference, fear, lack of resources, they simply let them role on.

They're unhappy with the piss-poor performance of FlipperPA last time, when he refused to care or troubleshoot or provide for the inworld segment of the conference.

The Blight is Ebbing...

FINALLY the griefing oblivious idiot who held this 512 for more than a year is gone, evidently abandoned to first land? Because instead we now have Jen Bekman Gallery, which is related to a RL art show in New York on display this month. You can find screenshots of the world artfully taken to provoke thought.

Then pan out over the lovely view in the Barton dam, lovingly protected by your faithful correspondent who fought off the Bush Guy and all the other extortionists, even campaigning here with the Anti-Extortion kit...to await this moment when the blight could ebb. Let the people know their history...

I'll be honest (excpect no less!). The screenshots of the game wprld are ok -- nothing really brilliant, but OK.

The gallery itself looks like the typical concrete box brought out of modernesque modern life in the real world into SL -- and you wonder why? Could be something different. It's funny, all those architects ranting at us on high-falutin' forums all the time that SL is despoiled with suburban tracts ought to focus on the meming of concrete boxes. It's a little scary.

Still...I'm overjoyed and I decided I love this concrete box. For more than an entire year, some idiot bought a 512, put out some leveld up floors as if building some stupid newbie tower, and left it there. He was oblivious to IMs. Perhaps he bought a year-long subscription and forgot about it? Or perhaps he just felt he should get to do WTF he wants and leave unfinished plywood on a lot for year? Or perhaps it really was abandoned ages ago and the Lindens never notice?

Anyway...now we have art, I'm so happy, finally I can try to rent the parcel next to it instead of hiding blight with trees...

The Real Ravenglass

Hadrian's Wall, part of the World Heritage sites of Roman legacy in ruins to be found in West Cumbria.

I"ve been reading quite a bit and thinking about the corporate invasion of SL -- an intrusion of Real Life that began much earlier, really, as all kinds of people began to brag that they were doing "RL in SL" projects.

Virtuality is getting rather tattered at the edges when you can see legions of corporate suits now on cement stadiums chattering about interacting with their brands.

But what of those smaller companies that will seize on the beauties and possibilities of SL because it could mean leveraging their limited PR budgets and saving significantly? Just like at one time they got themselves a web site?

Google newtrackers brings tidings of yet another "first" in SL today -- a Western Lake District tourism company in UK that evidently does RL tours of the real-life localities of Ravenglass, Maryport...wait, are these names sounding familiar to you?!

The Lindens name sims after all kinds of things as they thumb their way through Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever it is they use. At one point in December 2004, when they fashioned new mainland sims, they named dozens of sims after lakes, and that's how the Hidden Lakes area of SL sprang up with names like Alston, Maryport, Ravenglass, Furness, Seascale, and Egremont.

My first whole auction sim was named Ravenglass; eventually I formed an inworld company called "Ravenglass Rentals".

I remember nearly passing Ravenglass up, thinking it sounded too much like men-in-tights -- I didn't know at first it was named after a place in the real world. But I fell in love with its majestic rolling hill, stony coast, and steep-sided mainland island -- a rarity at that time in SL. I successfully bid for the sim, and sold off parcels on the open market. I had custom houses built on the parcels, and sold them with a notecard that we'd try to keep the area residential. It was among the first or even the first of the experiments of its kind selling an area to strangers, rather than a tight-knit group like Slate, and hoping to keep it as a distinct community.

The UK news story says the tourism group in West Cumbria has opened an office in Ravenglass, but curiously, I see no sign of it. I looked around the neighbouring sims where I own most of the land and didn't find it. I'm puzzled. I look forward to finding the new company and asking them if they need primland lol.

Yet another first for Second Life, and opening up some interesting questions. What if people from the real -world localities mythically taken for the Second Life sims that often bear no resemblance to their namesakes show up, looking for even more real-life exactitude than the existing residents of SL seem to require?

Over the last two years, Ravenglass has been populated with everyone from Goth princes to furries to elves -- even a mermaid! Somehow, I never imagined it to be the destination of middle-aged ladies in sensible shoes, readers of Barbara Pym, briskly taking a walking tour.

UPDATE: Wow, am I ever amazed! Turns out this company or agency is my tenant in Ravenglass Hall market! I saw a new avatar move in named Travel Go take one of the shops on the docks. He proceeded to move in some lovely RL pictures. I glanced at them and figured he or she was one of a legion of newbies who figure out quickly that the first business to get into easily is the replication and sale of public-domain art -- many people like to decorate their homes. I saw the words "Keswick and Western Lake District Cumbria," but being American, didn't put two and two together with the word "Ravenglass".

Now I'm clicking on the pictures, which aren't newbie sale items, but links to real-world locations (!). Here's one: "This is Muncaster Castle, which is less than a mile from Ravenglass in England. It was home to the famous jester Tom Fool who is said to be among the Castle's many ghosts. Today, it is the only castle in the world which still appoints its own jester."

Hehe this is great stuff : ) Come check it out, pick up a picture of a RL Tom Fool actor for only $5 L, and order a real-life tour of this real-life place -- I plan to save up for it next summer!

The Real Totalitarian Vision

In Patagonia

If you think this post is yet another Prokian conspiracy theory or yet another wrangle between individual people, I'd like to invite you to at least skim and see the larger issues -- it's about what is valued in the virtual world and the Metaverse, and what will go on surviving virtuality to remain a value taken from our first life. That's really what it's about; it involves you and your values, too, so stay tuned.

Some of you may have seen this endless rant of csven Concord's on Clickable Culture, going way off topic from the underwhelming Ben Folds event, and going into the usual SL forums-style personal attack, character assassination, and heavy snarky faux analysis. I give as good as I get on these things, as you can see, and csven is a frequent flyer. Most times when I try to post a critical and accurate remark on Clickable Culture, csven tries to engage in character assassination to try to discredit what ever point I'm making. He's infuriated at the idea that he might belong in the FIC (Feted Inner Core of early adapters with insider connections) or SIC (Superior Inner Core of later adapters with insider connections) -- but of course he's neither. He's not a FIC poster because he arrived too late and didn't butter up the right people. He's not SIC, either because he's neither done anything demonstrably impressive or even claiming to be impressive in SL, and he's not a metaversal consultant.

So who is csven Concord? He's just a grumpy guy -- there's lots of them -- a tekkie of a certain age frustrated at being in on the ground floor of the big techno revolution of our time, but unable to make a mark except by arguing in the most literalist and narrow-minded fashion. He's a typical "type" you see on forums and blogs, endlessly obsessing about the meaning of a word way, way past the sell-by date, and insisting with red-faced, angry umbrage, for example, that if you say he characterized something as "exclusive," and he used the phrase "privileged" to make the point, you've all wet because he never used the word "exclusive" literally. I find this a kind of disease of the mind -- perhaps it's even a syndrome on the autistic spectrum, who knows, but these types abound -- and the main point to understand about them is that you can't let them take over -- you do indeed, as I often say, have to push back.

Do's and Don'ts for Big Business

I've got a great but long-winded article below about advertising in Second Life, analyzing the interesting piece by David Berkowitz who suggests that SL should be "optimalized". If LL does nothing else, they should put the SEARCH button in a more prominent and easy to see place than at the bottom of the screen. Meanwhile, I'll put the rest of my concepts in pictures -- reposting from yesterday due to typepad mess-ups.

1. Don't be afraid of billboards. There are already a lot of ugly ones in SL -- buy one out and put up something better which also dispenses freebies and info -- don't use these land-extortionist ad sellers -- use your own ad budget -- gigantic by contrast with the micropayment world -- to rid the world of this vermin.

2. Don't think your cute little dorky guy that you have as a logo or mascot in RL is going to fit in the virtual world just because it's cute and dorky.

3. Give avatars something to click on and do and interact with on your fancy branding island that isn't just about the brand -- to make them stick

Advertising in Second Life

A fellow named David Berkowitz who is director of strategic planning at 360i writing for something called "Search Insider" by MediaPost Publications has written about Second Life.  Like a lot of SL'ers following the media hype around SL, I've been following my Google newstracker to all these media industry blogs and publications (with which I was previously unfamiliar) and seeing SL through the eyes of these first-timers, some of whom don't even bother to actually come inside SL.

David has got enough things wrong here in a very intriguingly-titled article "Second Life Optimization" that I'm going to take it apart -- though I do appreciate he has made a really good running tackle at the world.

Of course, we're all hoping that advertising capacity will increase in SL, overriding the hatred of billboards that a tiny sectarian group of tekkie-wikinistas espouse, and overriding the received wisdom of everyone from Philip to Cory Edo on down about how companies will be stepping flat-footed if they use billboards.

Of course they should use billboards. And if Philip Linden wasn't saving himself for billboards when he unflappably protected the rights of the odious Bush Guy all last year, then what was it all about (we'll be forced to say he just liked seeing an "Impeach Bush" campaign underway, even if it meant land extortion to buy back the view).

Billboards are fine -- we need some regulations to get them out of our prime waterfront views and back up on the roadsides, and they need to do stuff like deliver movie trailers or Nissan cars or samples of stuff like t-shirts in order to have a new-fangled Second Life.

Where else can you advertise? (Beside on my Picks, hehe).

Well, this media market guru dude takes a hard look at the client in SL and here's what he says:

WHEN YOU WANT A NEW pair of shoes, you might head to your favorite shoe store, mall, or online retailer. Maybe you're not sure which store you'll visit or how to get there, so you'll turn to a search engine. Yet what happens when your avatar needs a new pair of virtual shoes? This probably isn't a problem for you. Yet there is a minority out there, numbering one million users and growing by hundreds of thousands of users each month, that may well care about that virtual fashion crisis. They're members of the virtual world Second Life, and when you consider all the places you need to reach consumers, this is by far one of the strangest.

Amen -- and it's time that all the media hypesters grasp this basic fact of Second Life: there's no mass media inside the world, even if you use the old-fangled old media like the New York Times or Wired magazine to hype the world itself. Some of these new Big Business companies say they are "following their customers" into virtual worlds but since they already have their customers on the Internet, television, radio, magazines, and RL billboards, why do they need to follow them in THERE for?

    

As an example of how this works, let's meet DavidBen Daniel, the avatar I created. He doesn't have too many inherent needs. He has some basic clothing that he can customize as often as he likes, and he's free to wander around most parts of the Second Life universe. He can talk to others and join their networks. He can also engage in some salacious activities, the likes of which we won't get into here, but let's just say you don't need to leave too much to the imagination when visiting a virtual strip club. (DavidBen doesn't frequent those clubs; he's more likely to be found perusing the landscapes created by Intel, Reuters, Sony BMG, American Apparel, Wired, and other real-world brands.)

$25 Plus rating for behaviour on this avatar for his decision to actually make an avatar and go in the world, something not all the media market writers are doing. However, under the old system, we might have to neg him on building or something if all he does is hang around these big companies where there isn't an awful lot of content that avatars can actually use. He'd be better off ditching these real-world brands that haven't gotten their feet wet yet and have hardly any traffic on their lots (more on this to come) and looking at actual high-traffic SL brands.

Last week, DavidBen decided he needed a new pair of sneakers, so I helped him search for the Reebok store. Reebok pays a monthly fee to own real estate. It can recoup some of its costs by selling shoes there. New shoes go for around 50 Linden dollars, which amounts to around $0.20 in real dollars. You can enter a credit card when you sign up for Second Life and replenish your virtual bank account whenever you want so you can buy clothing and real estate, or spend it on slot machines and lap dances. The exchange rate, currently around 275 Linden dollars to the US dollar, can be tracked at the homepage of the Reuters Second Life Bureau.

Well, that was thoughtful of him to hype Reebok -- geez, I didn't know they were there -- but I'll bet they haven't really bothered to do stuff that all of us know how to do who really live there:

o put the store in SEARCH PLACES for $30 a week

o buy a classified ads

o have some avatars put the store in their Picks

o have a SLURL built into a blog or news story

o have landmark givers at yard sales

o have a stall at a mall or boardwalk or other location where people actually congregate

I'd also rather DavidBen track the Linden on the LindEx page just because he'll be able to gather more information about how it's doing. Let him put in a buy order for less than the prevailing rate and even wait 2 hours, or 24 hours, and he might get lucky; let him also realize that buying on Fridays is a bad idea when rates are higher as everybody logs on for the weekend; buying on Tuesdays when many people both try to sell their stipends and cash out before the game is down Wednesdays is a good strategy.
    

What happens when you're looking for shoes or sneakers in Second Life and don't know where you want to buy them? Right now, searching for such terms won't bring up the Reebok store, which is only optimized for its brand term. This is why marketers will need to engage in Second Life Optimization, or, on a broader scale, virtual world optimization.

Erm...did they put it in SEARCH? It can't search itself, you know -- you have to go on the about-land menu where all this is done and click off the right boxes, put in a picture with all permissions opened up to make it go in the land (that means "anyone can copy" etc) and also write a coherent description. Some people favour going right for the maximum sort of search count by cramming in one long line like this in the description box: sexyposesballscuntwhoredickpenisBDSM -- works like a charm. Others favour more coherent sentences that work like this: "Elegant ball flexi-prim gowns for sweeping down the stairs into the arms of the man of your romance dreams," so that ball gown, man, romance, dreams might all get hits, let's say.

Also, putting in classifieds really makes sense too -- it's really working great for sales now and it generally more than pays for itself in a week I find to the point where I almost feel LL is extracting a tax of $50 on my every rental because putting it in SEARCH for $30 is not enough anymore, people use classifieds.

The discipline can mirror search engine optimization in many ways. Here's an incomplete list of Second Life optimization tactics:

Many of these are already available?

Title Tags: The title of the virtual location should include a few important keywords, just like title tags for Web sites. Reebok, for instance, could choose the name "Reebok custom sneakers."

Erm, that's what they do by clicking the box on about-land and making the SEARCH ad for $30 a week -- including key words. They could call their store in the title in the about-land template for this purpose REEBOK and then they could write a description line like jumpsneakerskicksexycoolsports or whatever they need to do.

Descriptions: Adding keywords to the description can help virtual stores come up for relevant searches, similar to how descriptions and meta tags work for Web sites. American Apparel's virtual store, for instance, says, "Clothing for men and women, male and female fashion, socks, underwear, t-shirts, dresses, hoodie, track jacket." Thanks to this description, a search in Second Life for "hoodie" brings up American Apparel.

Yes, we know. Key words have to be done with care. I still tell tenants to make coherent sentences, however, because many people like to browse the classifieds and the ads while sitting on their camp chairs or pose balls and like to read a coherent line of an actual sentence, not a search-cram.
 

Link Optimization: Link development strategies are trickier in Second Life than they are for Web sites, yet I expect this tactic will become more important in the virtual setting. One of the first link building strategies marketers learn for SEO is to have their affiliates and partners link to them. In Second Life, if marketers own multiple properties, they can include billboards for visitors to teleport around to each one. Sony BMG and Reuters both allow easy ways for visitors to teleport within each of their worlds. As marketers expand their presence and enlist partners to join, offering teleportation will help the virtual world visibility.

Here again, I'm puzzled why DavidBen isn't getting that we already have this. It's called "point-to-point teleportation". You press on the SEARCH or CLASSIFIED ad, and on the bottom on the right hand side it says TELEPORT and you go there instantly. If you have multiple stores, you put them all in your Picks on your avatar. This is a social game. It's living people and groups. It's all in the avatars and the groups. It's not in the yellow pages.

Everybody scans the avatars -- people always sniff the avatar pages like a dog when they first meet you. That means profile, picks, classifieds, etc. and these all need to be deployed to good advantage. A lot of these media marketeers are committing one of the worst faux pas you can in SL -- they are leaving their avatar profiles blank! Nothing marks you as a day tripper dilettante and clueless newb that no picture on the profile and nothing anywhere in the profile and picks.

I'm actually not so happy with the Reuters building tbh. It's huge, cavernous, and awkward to fly around. It's a kick-ass realistic RL building built to spec by Barnesworth but it is not really an avian-friendly building. Points for its high ceilings but...it needs to open up all the windows and roos to be walk-in, fly-through and rearrange the levels and furniture. You knock around inside like a fly in a bottle looking for stuff on the levels. You fly around in circles like an idiot and look at giant, pointless pictures of RL newsmakers and only one SL newsmaker (glad to see it was Cocoanut with her Save Our Stipends! sign), but you can't find stuff. The teleporters may work, but they land you at the same white-orange-blue set of couches and pillows that make you feel like you're at a highschool football game cheering for your local Mustangs -- the different levels could be colour-coded.

I have a great set of scripts which are all free which I used in Memory Bazaar and other places which I originally saw used by Anshe and then commissioned variations on that have 1) boards to teleport to any specific location by pulling up the map and showing a bullseye to p2p; 2) boards that have random generated locations to visits by loading up landmarks; 3) a bus-like thingie Lewis Nerd first showed me that shows names of "stations" that generates a landmark you click on. Having the map pull up before the chat even comes off the object is a bit disconcerting but good to peruse to see where other interesting builds are.

Advertising: Search marketing firms recommend that marketers conduct their paid and natural search campaigns together, either with the same company, or by opening up the communication channels among the different parties. Similarly, marketers should consider how advertising can tie into virtual world optimization. An advertising network for Second Life, MetaAdverse, allows property owners to post billboards, and marketers can advertise on them and track the visitors. As with link optimization, this won't help the Second Life search visibility right now, but this will help the marketer's general visibility there.

MetaAdverse AFAIK closed its doors long ago, unable to make it on micropayments and laggy sims, I guess. There isn't anything that replaced it. I urged Static Sprocket, a scripter, to make a networked notecard giver to enable notecard and screenshot delivery across sims to try to break the lame InfoNet barrier. Each one of these kiosks to generate notecards, however, upon touch (spamming is not allowed) has to have land under it. So these big companies will finally figure out that they need to rent space in malls. Right now they imagine it's stupid, micropayments are monopoly money, and they listen to Reuben Steiger who tells them it doesn't matter if there are 4000 or 4,000,000,000 in the world or 39 on a sim or 399 on a sim, what matters is the immediate old-media hit.

But in time, they will come to see that worming their way into the interstices of the SL inworld virtual economy has to be part of the mix. There are all kinds of ways of doing this. It's not going to be pretty seeing them stagger around like clumsy giants when they do get at this. There will be a lot of animosity toward any of them that put up billboards from this tiny but vocal sectarian bunch.

Still, they should persist, buy land, put up boards, have the boards give something interesting, and also do things like sponsor all kinds of events, activities, builds, etc. if they want their logo seen. As I keep saying, just as towns don't mind Coke labels on the boards at their local hockey rink, so Second Lifers will not mind these boards at large venues like clubs and such because they will enable these club-owners to go on surviving and providing micro-entertainment for micro-payments.

Multiple Engines: In Second Life, there is one dominant search engine, accessible for every user from a search box that resides at the bottom of the screen. There are also outside efforts to improve the Second Life search experience. For instance, Second411 allows Second Life store owners to list all their items for sale, and then invites consumers to access its search application. When DavidBen added it, he typed "/411 shoes" to see all the relevant products, rather than just the stores and locations that showed up with the main search tool.

411 is ok, but it is useless for things like rentals and doesn't work for every product, either. You have to rez out a cube and then maintain it and it also chats and bothers people as it updates. You have to fill it with the product itself, risky I'm told in terms of permissions, or at least empty boxes. This gets clunky. It's requiring you to deploy an actual object inworld just to find something, rather than have you send up info using a HUD to simple get words into a list. There has to be a way to get HUDS working to send up words to a site where they are sorted and you search for words and a SLURL link rather than deal with rezzing out objects.

If there is one single thing I'd change about Second Life RIGHT NOW and I consider a MUST CHANGE it's the location, look, and feel of the SEARCH button. Right now the search button is hidden in a blue/white little button at the bottom of what I like to call "your game screen" when trying to steer puzzled newbie tenants. It can easily get mixed up and mistaken for your Windows task bar buttons. It blends into the underpinnings of the clunky interface and you never figure out on your own how to get it. I find many, many people unable to find it or use it. This seems incomprehensible to geeks, but trust me, the thing I must say a million times a week to newbies is "go to the search button...no your other search button...at the bottom of the game screen...no right there in the middle...ok now press on it and find PLACES at the top...no in the middle...see it there? Right..."

All of this sounds pretty strange, with teleporting, customizing avatars' sneakers, virtual lap dances, and all the rest. Yet as with so much of emerging media, I've learned to stop questioning why people use it and to start embracing what can be done with it. It might not make any sense, but it's a new frontier of search. If the critical mass keeps building and it's where your target audience is searching, the universal principle of search engine marketing applies: You want to be there when they're looking for you.

I'm not sure anybody is really looking for these brands; it's true to a certain extent that people want to pursue private social lives and affinity groups and don't want too much brand-invasion.

But frankly, people in SL love to shop even more than they love to have sex. This is a fact. They don't mind malls and even lag and they don't mind brands at all the way the FIC commenting so disdainfully and smugly about this all the time think they do. I would urge all these media marketers to just look past that static coming from the blogerati and actually around and use the capacity of the world.

Philip assures us our eyes never need be soiled by a brand because they'll stay on their own islands. Bullshit. They won't -- and they shouldn't give their agenda. It's unsettling to think about how much they might invade, as I've explained extensively, but possibly they might break open some of this anti-business utopianism you see in SL if they can do it tastefully and do it right.

The way they will get the word out has to be in part by following the very hard-won trail of existing indigenous businesses. They really are worth paying attention to. And this means events, groups, venues. Right now, I see these companies relying totally on their marketing companies like ESC or MOU to do the heavy lifting of opening, keeping, adding to, and filling up groups with content. But already we saw a long complaint from Moopf Murray about trying to get a Nissan out of the dispensor and then having to contact someone who sounded almost like an NPC named Toast Alicious (evidently not Toast Bard lol).

For the world to grow, the companies have to find a way to integrate naturally. Philip, a geeky leftoid utopianist himself, is thinking he will keep them sequestered off on islands somewhere and is promising his beta buddies they need never see a billboard.

This is fucking ridiculous. All those screamers about billboards don't live in the world we actual business owners live in -- billboards all over every road, hill, and roadside on land set to exhorbitant prices. If I see one single Coke or Reebok billboard replace those dumb Mr. Lee's Hong Kong  signs that have blighted the view for years, I'll boycott these products just like the leftist utopians because they will have helped keep alive land extortionists.

But if they deploy well-built tasteful billboards or ads on the sides of buildings or in kiosks or markers along roads and public venues, and pay me and other mall owners for mall and stall space, we could only welcome their contribution to the microeconomy of the world.