It is Mera's Rez-day today. She's been in Second Life for a whole year now, and is officially all growed up.
In the past 12 months, few people have made as much of a positive difference in my life as Mera has.
Love her, as we all love her. and there will be joy.
Here's a handy rule to live by, one that will guide you just as well in the physical world, as it does in Second Life.
If you suddenly think you've found an easy, quick way to make a lot of money ... please, get professional help, counseling, whatever. Get a friend to talk sense into you.
There actually is no secret that 'they' don't want you to have, other than hard work, inspiration and persistence pay off. Put in the work required, and you stand a good chance of earning. Don't, and you won't. Holding that notion in your head puts scammers, con-artists and grifters out of business.
Being presented with the notion that you can 'get rich quick' or 'make money fast' means that someone is conning you, and that person might be you.
I'm not kidding about this, you know. If you want to be the organiser of Second Life's fourth Anniversary, you really need to start getting ... you know ... organised. Soon.
There's a lot of work, and a lot of preliminaries that you really need to get sorted out months in advance, otherwise it just makes for more work and poor results.
Who is up for it? How about someone who didn't appreciate the way I did it last year? Anyone?
By popular demand, reworked (from the ground up - I foolishly managed to not save the layered artwork from the last one) and recoloured, as requested.
I had a lot of fun making this one for another post. Click for the large version.
SignpostMarv Martin has kindly provided a corrected image which we think should fix the problem. It has been dropped into place, and looks fine provisionally on MSIE7 and Firefox.
With luck, all will be well.
Incidentally, I know the banner doesn't really render correctly due to bugs in the way Internet Explorer handles CSS (cascading style sheets).
As near as I can tell, Internet Explorer users see it as shown in the top half, and everyone else (Firefox, Netscape, Safari, et al) sees it as it is in the lower part.
Barely 3% of you are using Internet Explorer, however. Is it something that needs fixing?
I've started dissecting and summarising the court filings over on SL Insider. I'll be posting one each day, until we're caught up with the documents. Thankfully, I've got these written up in advance and automatically scheduled (most of my stuff is right now), because my condition still isn't very good at the moment.
Well, if my day is anything to go by, the Open Source release of the Second Life viewer is most certainly a disruptive technology. I'm flooded with IMs and emails. My machine's gone ping a dozen times typing the first two sentences.
In case you missed it, go take a look at Patchouli Woollahra's Patches of Insanity strip. There are two there at the moment.
Anshe Chung will likely be remembered by many as the "cyber rape porn star" over coming months and years, thanks to Guntram Graef. "Cyber Rape Porn" is just too memorable a triplet of words to sink out of sight. It's the sort of thing most people call a meme. It's going to leave a mark.
The contention is that an avatar is a copyright body of work, and as we all know, a copyright body of work may not be duplicated or derived from except as granted by the copyright holder, or as provided by law.
Guntram Graef considers this grounds to suggest that an avatar's controller has the right to exercise editorial control over images of that avatar.
This raises the question whether a photograph of a copyrighted work is a derived work or not, because there seems little doubt that an avatar is a copyrighted work, possibly a work that is composed of works of others, and thus a derived work, but a work nonetheless. Is a photograph/print of a painting a derived work? Surely, though the law allows some personal-use exceptions in some places and locations.
Internet Rule of the Sandbox digression: Would anyone turn up to an open press conference if the interviewee demanded full editorial control over all text and images?
I think a more interesting question is raised. Is this a work of parody, and thus potentially an exemption to the DMCA?
Is flinging flying penises at a copyright image inherently satirical, in this context?
If so, then there's potentially no breach here, and Graef's emails about "cyber rape porn" are misrepresentational, while still remaining an indelible mark on Anshe Chung.
Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be thrilled if that were me up there. I've had enough penises flung at me inworld, thankyou very much, as well as quite a few offered to me for one reason or another. The first person to whom I showed alt-mousing the camera took a snapshot up my skirt and spread a few thousand copies of that image all over the grid.
I wasn't very happy about that, no, but it's not something I was going to treat as a copyright issue.
Anshe, I'm sorry that this incident happened to you. I'm sorry that Guntram has attached 'Cyber Rape Porn' to your name. If he hadn't, everyone would have forgotten all about this by next week. You're probably stuck with it now.
Various companies have learned since the inception of the DMCA that it is a double-edged sword. It needs to be handled carefully, and with great delicacy, or it does more damage to those who use it than it does to those against whom it is used.
So..are these images and videos construable as parody? And has Graef done more damage to Anshe's long-term image than the images and videos ever could?
All of these are from the last couple days about the Second Life numbers controversy.
"Linden Labs[sic] recently released figures to"
"wrings realistic Second Life data out of Linden Lab"
"Yesterday a reporter ... got the numbers from Second Life owner"
What's wrong with this picture? Well, nobody got any new information. Nothing that hasn't already been sitting on the web, easily accessible, in some cases for months.
For all the sudden touting of new, real, recent, we're talking about preexisting data that journalists and bloggers have been able to turn up with Google (et al) for quite some time.
I wonder just how many calories that hype cycle burns, pedaling it so breathlessly and all.
Point goes to Clay Shirky - assuming he can stop pedaling. And a bonus point to Bill Thompson of the BBC for reading and listening to it all, and presenting some clear, reasoned thoughts that actually add something to the broader issue of online identity.
And don't throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When ev'ry thing old is new again
Second Life is something of a phenomenon, in the way few - if any - virtual worlds have been since their inception, two decades ago. There's considerable debate as to quite why this should be, and somehow we always come back to numbers. Numbers are easy and quantifiable. Or are they?
Well, as we've seen lately, no. Everyone's talking about numbers, and what they mean and what was intended by them. Some of the numbers are making sense, and some of them tell a surprising story. Growth is what most people are stuck on, but with the aid of Tristan Louis, we're going to talk about money.
Tristan's 7 Million
As Wagner James Au pointed out, Tristan Louis presented the results of tracking Second Life economic data - Something I don't track myself, keeping mostly to population figures, signup rates and concurrency.
Now, Tristan's data is lovely, though I disagree a little with his 7-million projection. I've currently got that pinned on my calendar in September/October 07, rather than the April 07 that Tristan's got down.
I'm pretty conservative in my estimates, however, and Second Life has always grown ahead of my predictions, so somewhere between Tristan's date and mine.
Moving money
One interesting thing Tristan's seen in the data is the movement of money. There's a figure on the Second Life front page that lists US$ Spent Last 24h. Now, don't forget that Second Life is a virtual world. You didn't, did you? Good - it'd be embarrassing if you mistook it for a real place with it's own borders and laws.
Now, that virtual nature makes things a little tricky, what that figure specifies is the transfer of funds from one account to another, whether or not goods change hands, or a service is performed, or the money is handed back. More than once, I've gotten into a cash-match with someone who has given me L$ for something I'd intended to be free. They give me L$. I give it back, demurring. They hand it to me again, "No really." ... and so on. Every one of those transactions counts.
The way money moves in Second Life with tip jars and alternate accounts and refunds means that probably about half of the value given is double-counted. That would leave us with roughly 75% that we could count on, but let's go the highly conservative route and say a mere 40% of that figure represents actual meaningful transactions, where there's a net change in the distribution of funds that is inline with the stated figure.
Averaging out Tristan's weekly samples for December 2006, and then applying our own conservative 40% figure to it, we get a daily movement of L$ equal to $269,848 USD.
Consulting Linden Lab's figures for December 2006, we find that 534,738 accounts logged in during that period. Reasonably assuming a relatively flat distribution, that yields 17,249 logins per day, which gives us a very respectable motion of currency within the system of $15USD per account per day.
That's a lot of currency in motion, there might only be somewhere between 42,400 and 58,000 premium accounts in Second Life right now (Estimate by applying November's growth rate to the population figures current at the end of November to yield the as-yet-unknown figure for December 06) but that just serves to increase the interest factor in the number.
Let's say SL is a try-me virus, as some have said, and decide that 90% of the accounts are statistically insignificant from a cash perspective (free accounts, with no payment information starting with no money). That means we're talking about $156USD per account per day. Does that make you feel any better? Taking the conservative view and all, I mean - Or did that just make your eyebrows go up?
We're not just talking about virtual gold-pieces or somesuch here where you get a cease-and-desist order for trying to trade in them. The L$ largely goes around in circles like regular paper and coin currencies do. A certain amount is manufactured by Linden Lab, but most of this is moving the regular way - by convincing someone to part with it for your product, service or charity, and those L$ can quite reasonably be turned back into US Dollars on the exchanges by selling those L$ to people that want them.
On the Linden Lab Lindex currency exchange in the last 24 hours, there was demand for almost 42 million Linden Dollars ($156,700 USD).
It's hard to go back to the old sources about the choice of the term Resident for Second Life signups, as most of those sources end-of-lifed over the last six months, however there's still a surviving reference, but there seems little point in wrangling about the intended meaning of the term.
Second Life isn't riding a wave of hype because of perceived growth, or imagined popularity. It's riding the wave because something's actually going on in there. There's actually a lot of things, but most of them aren't directly quantifiable by numbers. The numbers are just the teaser.
And if you don't want to understand, well you won't. That rule's not exclusive to Second Life.
Dr. Heywood Floyd: (Looks through the written data) I don't understand this. If this data is correct, then there's something down there. (No response) It can't be correct.
Vasali Orlov: It is correct.-- 2010, Odyssey 2.
Well, that's kind of, sort of, a bit fixed. I'll need to completely rethink how that's being generated, but it'll do for now.
Linden Lab has reduced the frequency of updates to concurrency data. It looks like the figures are now only recalculated once every 3 minutes. This will make the login deltas look pretty odd. I'll see what can be done about those.
There was a small issue with the database that stores the statistics, and it wasn't responding to data insertions for approximately 40 hours. This has been corrected, but some data was lost.
I suppose there's no point in asking if anyone else keeps any of this data. I'm assuming not.
David Kirkpatrick over at CNN Money is a bit miffed with Clay Shirky, and goes on to point out that:
Ouch.
Shirky responds, first-to-comment but does so obliquely, dodging the Kirkpatrick's main points and either ignoring or failing to research the available data. Double-ouch.
Monty Python's black knight comes to mind here, bleeding from stumps but still full of ineffectual fight.
I've got to hand this one to Kirkpatrick. Shirky's response seems to confirm Kirkpatrick's point, and makes Shirky look like he's carrying a specific grudge. He knows that no MMO or virtual world or web-services company can address his first basic question on which he predicates all the rest of his arguments, but he's hammering on just the one company.
How many people (real unique people) have created a gmail account?
How many people (real unique people) have created a World of Warcraft Character?
I don't see him kicking up the same fuss about Blizzard or Google, so ... what's his beef with Linden Lab? He's entered into what looks increasingly like a personal grudge-match with Linden Lab, with reporters and journalists being used as simple cannon fodder.
How many people (real unique people) read Shirky's posts on Valleywag? Answers on a postcard.
Well, today I've been flooded with little congratulational notes, like this:
"Congradulatons on all your hard work being rewarded at last!! You deserve it. Why did you pick Amber?"
I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm not Amber Linden. I'm not even in the right country, if you check her profile, she's on the other side of the world - which might give you some sort of clue about why we're not online at the same time. Yes, quite a lot of you know my association with the word 'Amber', so that's another easy (if wrong) piece of evidence to apply.
I know it's tempting to jump to conclusions, but please. I'm not a Linden or a liaison. I don't work for Linden Lab in any capacity.
Is there a word for being told you deserved something that people think you got but you didn't? Thank you all for caring so much, but how about you send Amber some congratulations of her own, huh?
Writing about Second Life is ... fun. Surprisingly fun. I started pretty slowly and made a bunch of mistakes, but it's getting there. It's also nice to be able to get all my legal material fact-checked before I publish it.
The last few days have been pretty bloody awkward, since I've not been able to sit for very long, and I've had to rely on the fact that most of my articles (except the news pieces) are drafted days in advance, where possible.
It's interesting to wake up and feel like you want to write, first thing, and to have that urge last throughout the day. More of a problem to not be able to do it. That sucks.
Thanks for your support, folks. It keeps me going.
Some days it feels like the most common object that causes me trouble in Second Life is the penis. In that, I suppose, Second Life rhymes with Real Life, where the common penis has often been problematic in one way or another.
Give people the tools to create or draw what they want, and then apply the urge to offend or amuse (others, or only themselves) and it's the penis that keeps returning again and again.
A pity we can't all agree on some common, cross-cultural symbol that means "My intent is to offend you." We've got assorted hand gestures for that (though their meaning varies through different cultures); Another for "I'm using some offensive iconic in an ironic/sarcastic/amusing way."
Because, frankly, I'd love to write fewer news pieces involving a phallus in 2007. I'd like to see fewer people dressed as them. I'd like to see fewer jet-packs shaped like them. Fewer towering structures umm... erected in the shape of them. Fewer guns that look like them.
Less of that stuff, pretty please. Give me towers of ice and frozen flame, bridges of light and plasma, rings of sound. Be original. The basic penis image as 'funny' is a punchline that's about 65,000 years old. As a species, we need a new joke. Honestly.
They're certainly there. They're about as amusing as any other part of the body (being that like all comedy, the humour vests in other aspects) the phallus has a bit of a head start in a couple of elements.
I'm totally ready to move on. Elbow humour! Spleens! Gall bladders, even. Listen to Dave Allen talking about Adam and Eve and the nose, now there's a man that could make any body part funny, and on television.
Sad, perhaps, that most people are more offended by a phallus being boldly presented, than a gun.
