Eloise's thoughts and fancies - SL in the Media

All change! - SLCC does it again

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 05:41:23 -0600

So, Philip's speeches at SLCC have rather put the cat among the pigeons again.

First he's announced that the teen grid is to be closed, no space (at the moment) for under-16's, 16-18 year olds into the main grid.

This isn't quite how I saw it all changing but overall I think it's a good thing. Others will disagree. For a group that still includes a lot of creative early-adapter types, SL oldbies are, en masse, remarkably resistant to change. It's easy to go and read archived email and blog posts in SLogosphere saying "OMG the sky is falling!" Just like the sky has fallen with the introduction of sculpties, the delay in introducing (or cancellation of the introduction, or the potential introduction of) meshes, the dismantling of the telehub system and so many more things.

I'm not an unthinking neophile, just as some of those opposed to this change are not unthinking neophobes. There are changes, some of them so well established that only the oldest few hundred or maybe thousand surviving active residents remember them, that I think were mistakes: they were changes for the worse and they restricted our choices about how we interact with Second Life. Some of the changes are newer too - whilst I applaud the shared media in the viewer 2.x line and I quite like the idea of inventory links (things that let you make multiple outfit for ease of wearing), the UI redesign of the new viewer is an absolute disgrace. I had to edit that line several times until I could resist my urge to swear throughout it. I am sure there are some proportion of people for whom this change is a disaster, possibly as big a disaster as the viewer 2.x interface. At least one of them has resorted to hyperbole essentially saying "OMG this is bad for me, so LL must hate all educators" - no, it's bad for you, and it's bad for other school-educators in your situation. There are other people who educate people under-18 who seem sanguine about it, positive about it, willing to wait and see and more. Some of them even working in the same project as the source of the hyperbole. Really that says it all for me: there is going to be a change, it almost certainly won't be the change that kills Second Life even if it kills some small number of specific projects. It will, doubtless, help others, probably more in fact.

There are people saying "OMG, they're taking away my playground where I can be safe from the kids" too. Some of this depends on your country and your ideas about teen sexuality of course. I live in a country where you can, and many are, be legally sexually active from age 16, you can watch "brief and discretely portrayed" sexual behaviour from 12 (potentially younger with an adult), and "nudity is allowed" - that's the wording in the 12A guidelines from the BBFC. Perhaps this make me blase about 16 year olds seeing pixel nipples and the like. It should also be noted that although I don't have any desire to seduce a 16 year old, unless I'm teaching them it is quite legal for me to do so. I don't have kids, if I did I don't think I could imagine giving them consent, but it's legal for 16 year olds here to get married with parental consent. Plus, of course, however imperfect they may be, it's quite possible for those who are worried to implement 2-way bans.

You don't want your kids exposed to nasty older people - put them on your island and hide it, lock it and throw away the key. If you do it properly outsiders can't even find your island in any version of search, let alone actually get there. Thanks to the Teen Grid (although I believe it was around before) Second Life already has the code to limit avatars to a specific estate and there are certainly the tools to limit where you can go in existence. If the estate locking is moved over (I think it's built in to RegAPI in fact so it should be quite doable) and probably moving to something I asked for ages ago with the creation of Zindra, the creation of PG and M as well as an A continent so you can't mistakenly land in a PG sim and pan into the next sim to watch the M activities and it will be reasonably safe and easy to apply. I'd be quite happy to see a D (for Disney) rated continent too, that's even more strictly behaviour and clothing controlled than the current PG rating.

It's going to be interesting to see how it comes to pass. And whilst there are a lot of people moaning about the terrible timing, I can't help but wonder if that's actually deliberate. Education on the Teen Grid has a huge Australian user base. It has others too, but there are a lot of Aussie schools using TSL and all speaking through a single unified project. Change over in December? Great, just in time for the new school year to start in January/early Feb down under. Smart move for them, even if less desirable for the Northern Hemisphere groups IF anything actually changes for them save their under-16's.

The second big change seems, at least on the radar that I have, to have gone more uncommented. Perhaps I'm just reading the wrong blogs. The development cycle is going to be really short and "aggressively include open source code and external coders." That might be fascinating to see. Which of the many extra features you can find in your TPVs will be integrated back into the main development viewer system and eventually into the main viewers? Bouncy boobs? Avatar radars? Spell checking and instant translation? Extended building tools? Encrypted IMs? Double-click tps? RLV in the mainstream as an option (or some subset of RLV - there are a lot of features that people who aren't interested in the rest of RLV like from the list, including changing clothes by spoken command)? Layered attachment points?

Sadly someone's got into the modern management lingo and it's going to be a "modified scrum process" - woo-hoo:S

Mind you, whilst I'm very cynical about the management buzz-words, if there really is a fortnightly dev release programme and a good, fast cycling of these back into the main viewer, along with the "few mandatory upgrades" rule being reapplied then maybe we'll start to see the more egregious problems with viewer 2.x fixed and SL will become faster and easier.

It does seem like SLCC becomes a point where LL choose to stir the pot. They did it last year, they've done it again this year. Sounds like an interesting place to be, in the sense of the old Chinese curse.

All change!

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:26:20 -0600

So, M Linden is out, Philip Linden is back in charge. To put it another way "The King(don) is dead, long live King Philip!" If I'd rolled some of my predictions for 2009 over to repeat in 2010 I'd look brilliant right now - especially numbers 5 and 9!

M's rule has felt, rightly or wrongly, like it's focussed on trying to attract big business into Second Life. Improved stability, the creation of Zindra, the new viewer, the Enterprise package etc. have all looked more than a little like that, and if looked at from that overarching goal all seem to make some level of sense. It also seems, from the outside, to have been largely unsuccessful.

Some companies, big or small, have made a success of Second Life. IBM is an obvious big one - they still have 22 sims that show up in public search via the map, a number that represents more than pocket change by most people's standards and has been roughly similar for 3+ years. OK, for IBM $6000+/month isn't going to hurt, but it's a big enough number they presumably manage to justify it to the accountants and shareholders too. But if M was trying to attract more business users, where are the new success stories from the business world? Noticeable by their absence. I suspect there are a whole batch of reasons for this, depending on the company and the situation: the global recession won't have helped, companies not being sure how to use Second Life will definitely not have helped, a few big crash and burn stories won't have helped, some of the more lurid stories about what SL is used for won't have helped, and of course a lack of success stories won't have helped.

Despite these reasons, the education sector has continued to grow, in some cases like University of Texas in a BIG way, more often in smaller ways. If you look at the case studies that Linden Lab have produced they've been almost all sourced from the educational community, which helps with one part of the reasons businesses haven't come in, plus educators look at success in different ways to businesses (even if university administrators don't), and SL has a lot of successes to crow about.

But, in addition to that, Zindra is thriving. Although numbers are hard to come by, I'd be willing to bet a whole L$1 that the Gorean community has more land than the education community - and at full price remember. The clothes industry and clubbing still do well in Second Life. Live music dissemination also does well from comments I've seen around the SLogosphere recently. And remember that this is all despite the focus of Linden Lab on pulling in the suits.

Diversifying your user base, if it works, makes sound business sense. But when the new user base fails to come and the user base you've ignored continues to grow, albeit slowly, you really have to wonder about the strategic vision. Whether M fell on his sword or was pushed, it's pretty clear his vision didn't gel with the rest of the world's vision about Second Life.

What will Philip's return mean? That's less clear. Philip is a visionary, I don't think anyone doubts that and I certainly have never doubted it. My doubts centre more around wondering if he's the right person to drive Linden Lab and Second Life forward from here. After their recent decimation of staff, Linden Lab is smaller, leaner and possibly more responsive. A visionary who can clearly articulate his vision and lead the group in a new way might be just what the doctor ordered. But Philip's record when he was in charge in the period shortly before M took the reins suggested that he's not the CEO of a middle-sized to large company. Perhaps he was just tired and needed a break and he'll come back rejuvenated after his time away, but part of me certainly doubts it.

Whoever the new long term CEO is, they're going to have an interesting challenge. I'm sure the money behind Linden Lab will want to see growth and happy residents. Do they, essentially, ignore the residents and focus on improving the technology, trusting that making it work better will drive retention and expansion of numbers? Do they juggle a million ways to try and meet the (incredibly diverse) wishes of the current user base? (Even educators, if you ask for a list of the things they 'need' to improve Second Life, produce a huge list with contradictory items on it, so you can't satisfy them all.) Do they look for another new market to try and attract? Meshes might make virtual tourism more attractive - visit Paris SL to talk to their tourist board and book your holiday to the real one. But maybe not.

By nature, I'm a neophile. Despite my sinophile tendencies "May you live in interesting times" has never sounded like a curse to me. But if it does to you, brace yourself. It looks like we really are living in interesting times.

Linden Lab's new direction 2

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:21:58 -0600

Whilst I'm still reeling from the news and wondering what the impact will be, Gwyn's posted a very optimistic piece on her blog.

Much though I like Gwyn, in fact she's my longest-standing friend in Second Life (there are friends I have who have been in Second Life longer, but I haven't known as long), part of me feels this a Kool-Aid intoxicated piece. That said, another part of me feels that if Linden Lab have really decided to move to focussing on making the experience for me-the-resident better, me-the-content-creator better and so on, and stop trying to drag us into a world suited for big business at the expense of the individuals then personally it might be a good move.

Reducing the support for education seems to be part of this drive - but I find myself wondering if they're improving the typical resident's experience they're hopefully looking at things like:

speeding up texture loading
improved IMs and groups
Fewer crashes
More stable voice chat (possibly, although not of interest to me)

None of these things will actually make Second Life any less attractive to educators - having students able to use Second Life faster and better won't be a disaster.

I won't, for the moment, speculate on the "SL in a browser" direction. It's not necessarily bad and there's NO information about what it will entail. It's rampant speculation and whilst that's fun, it's not particularly constructive. I might, after a few days, think about publishing a wish-list though.

Linden Lab's new direction

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:10:38 -0600

So Linden Lab announced, via both press release and blog post a massive restructuring programme. When I say massive - they're trimming 30% of the workforce.

Some of that is thanks to shutting satellite offices and the like which sounds and feels like a cut-back despite the "our revenue streams are strong" spin in the information offered. Mind you, restructuring like this after the worst of the recession seems both odd and rather like a kick in the teeth.

But some of it is clearly a much more strategic redirection - a number of Lindens that I know and chat to moderately often have been shown the door. I'm not going to name all the names, it's not fair for one thing, but to my mind there are two really notable casualties amongst the widespread carnage:

Claudia Linden, who took over from Pathfinder Linden as the education liaison some time ago, has rather more promptly followed Pathfinder into alternative employment. Educators in Second Life may not be a massive resource stream for Linden Lab but they are not an insignificant user group either. They do a rather good job of spreading both the user base outside the core demographic and the awareness of Second Life into a range of "respectable" areas that aren't reached by other routes. We have yet to see who the new liaison will be and how well they will be received by the community and what news they will have for us of the future. This comes at a particularly bad time for the Lab - there is a lot of unrest and disappointment on the SLED list for example - as a number of changes to various things over the last few months are still causing bitterness and doubts about the future.

Babbage Linden has also gone. You might not know Babbage, for one thing he's based in the UK and usually works an early UK-hours day, so he's typically wrapping up for end of the day when many of you are thinking about your second coffee of the new day. But Babbage is the person that led the porting of lsl from it's old engine to Mono. He has been, so far as we know, hard at work extending the SL-mono infrastructure to enable other programming languages to be used in Second Life. Presumably a direction the Lab no longer wishes to take. When tied in to the rather loose "developing for other platforms" I have to wonder what that means. Will Second Life be following people into something like Lua? It worked so well for Metaplace after all. Or if they are going down the browser based interface route, something more like Javascript or PHP maybe?

It has to be said that M's even-more-content-lacking-than-usual post raises a lot more questions than it answers.

"...improve our focus as a company on the projects that matter most to Residents[sic]"

...doesn't actually say what any of them are, nor how they will be assessed as "matter most" nor to which subset of residents. Educators, clubbers, shoppers, parents, blind residents, deaf residents, builders, scripters, professional developers, major corporations, conference organisers and all the other niche groups of residents (and yes, like me, you might belong to several of these groups) have different opinions about what matters most for the future.

"...we can invest in platform improvements, new products, and new lines of business"

...well you have yet to sell the idea and support it with any evidence that the new viewer is a good product or a platform improvement. There have been a range of (sometimes boring in the detail but interesting exercise in openness) quite technical posts about background changes to improve stability. Again not much hard evidence of the impact of that - anecdotally I'm not seeing much in the way of a change, but I've had a pretty stable Second Life experience for quite a while and I am only one small dataset. Platform improvements like the porting of SLEx to the new Marketplace experience? It appears they've sacked the architect of that brainchild too according to a post I read somewhere. Or maybe that's a new product that's been axed? What other new products are in the pipeline? New lines of business? Like what..?

I've seen too many instances of people running around screaming "The sky is falling" to believe that this is the end quite yet. But it does feel sobering and waiting to see what these new directions will be has me feeling unexpectedly nervous. As I'm sure I've said before, with Phillip at the helm I often disagreed with specific decisions but felt that the vision was quite clear and shared. Phillip would often come and explain the reasoning to us in a variety of ways. With M, I feel no connection to his vision because platitudes and posts that create more questions than they answer don't actually succeed in sharing it.

If you like Aristotelean dichotomies for your population, I'm in the neophile camp. There's a shock to you all, I'm sure! That's a camp that may pay lip-service to "may you live in interesting times" being intended as a curse but which generally doesn't really understand it. Today, that's not the case. It certainly qualifies as interesting times but it's with a fair degree of nervousness, even trepidation, that I'm looking forward to what's next.

Economics - Science or Witchcraft?

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:54:27 -0600

Economics is a topic that I usually avoid because it gives me headaches. Why does it give me headaches? Because it's presented as clear fact, incontrovertible fact even though everyone (well most politicians) can trot out economists or other experts that support what they're saying.

Consider the British economy, coming out of recession. There is a broad agreement across parties that we're currently in a lot of debt (there's arguing about whether we have got here but not much arguing that we are here, nor is there a lot of arguing about how big the problem is - every politician basically says 'they're still counting the zeroes'). They do, however, argue about the best way out of it.

The Tories argue we should cut public spending, mainly through efficiency savings. There are economists (including embarrassingly their main economic advisor) who have argued in a variety of peer reviewed papers that this is just not possible;
The liberals argue that a radical overhaul of income tax so your first £10,000 of earnings is free, but if you're rich you pay more, combined with some specific cuts in tax benefits will help the economy best. The poorest people will stop paying tax. Middle income families will get about an extra £700/year in their pockets. Not much, but enough to let them spend a bit more freely and feel a bit more comfortably off. £14/week doesn't sound like much, but it could be a family break, or a family night out, or an extra coffee every day. It puts more spending impetus back into the economy and that should help with the recovery. It's just not quite clear that the tax changes will gain enough to pay off the debt.
Labour think we should wait a bit, and then increase National Insurance to pay for this. Although it's being used pejoratively, it is more or less fair to say this is a tax on jobs. It's only paid if you're working and both employer and employee pay some of it. The Tories trot out the line that all (not strictly true, but close) major business leaders say this will slow the recovery.

So, some competing ideas about methods of helping us recover from the measures we took to reduce the impact of the recession. The BBC's experts say that all three methods have problems in there, mainly problems of lack of detail combined with not knowing how big the problem really is (there was an estimate floated by one of the BBC's experts this morning with a 40% error in it... doesn't sound bad to you? It's the difference between the size of the problem being £30billion or £70billion from the £50billion ±40% guess! But, besides the Tories' own economic advisor not believing their method can work, how can we tell? I'm also inclined to wonder why we're surprised business leaders are opposed to increasing NI. Let me phrase it this way: The very rich think that paying more tax on their profits is a bad idea. Colour me unsurprised - most people think paying more tax is a bad idea after all, even most tax inspectors!

This is my problem with economics in a nutshell. Depending on who you talk to, far more than what questions you ask, you just get different answers. This is a science?

To further illustrate my problem, we have a recent blog post from Linden Lab about the wonderful economy of Second Life in the first quarter of 2010 whilst Tateru has poked at the details and wonders just how wonderful the economy really is over on Massively. One of the comments suggests, not unreasonably, another completely different metric that might be useful too.

Second Life is a closed, high-information system. We don't know for how long Linden Lab keep their old transaction data save it's at least a month. Even with close to perfect information we really can't tell, can't agree, on whether it's a good quarter or not. What hope is there? Maybe we should just burn the economists?

Who has the right of it?

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:39:44 -0600

Today has seen two blog posts with very different messages.

Linden Lab have published information about their new user experience, along with the official release of the 2.0 viewer as the main viewer.

At the same time, Gwyneth Llewelyn, a long term resident (and friend), part owner of a Gold Developer Company, long-term fangrrl, and keyholder to the company gatorade has published an eloquent polemic about how Linden Lab is making a right mess of a number of policy decisions and customer relationship decisions and shooting itself in the foot.

At first sight, particularly with the "We Listened" and "We Want Your Feedback" splashed all over the place. That seems like good customer service surely? But Linden Lab got an F from the Better Business Bureau. They presumably know something about the subject?

The problem is, looking a little deeper, that they're talking about different things. Churn in Second Life - in particular those potential residents of Second Life that log in, get overwhelmed, confused, log out and never come back - has been a massive problem for, well as long as I've been there or longer, and Linden Lab has taken a number of steps to try and reduce this. If they can double the number of people they retain from not very many at all to just not very many... we'll see customer numbers start to grow again. Gwyn, on the other hand, is talking about established customers and Linden Lab's attitude towards them. What's the point of attracting new residents if you drive away all the content creators and there's nothing for them to do because there's no one to help them get started? It is, as Gwyn points out with rather more examples and passion, or at least it appears to be the case that Linden Lab takes a decision, puts it up for 'discussion' and then ignores the outcomes and comments that arise from that. Confident in the extreme that they're right and we're wrong. They're so right that they've driven away several of the 3rd party client development groups already with their new rules for developing such clients. People make alternative clients for love and because they don't like the main client for some reason. Making them legally responsible for all issues leading to litigation, even if they're Linden Lab's fault will scare, has scared, people away already. In other circumstances one of the developers might take Linden Lab to court, but when you do the development work without pay, unless you're independently wealthy taking them to court is not an option.

It strikes me as deeply ironic that a company started by a group of geeks, a group of geeks that often looked and acted like they were speeding through life on large doses of coke, managed to develop ideas, float them, make some deeply unpopular decisions (GOMmed anyone lately, Phillip?) and yet on others initially announce some deeply unpopular decisions and admit (more or less gracefully) that they'd made a mistake and that they would change (the rewrite of the Groups code when they expanded to 25 groups for example, involved a complete rewrite of their proposals in light of demands from the community). OK, they were smaller, in terms of their customer base and they could, at least at first, develop a personal relationship with almost all of them. All of that old guard senior management have gone now. They've been replaced with people with, on paper, slick histories, great customer relation credentials and the like, who you would imagine should be great at the customer relations stuff and perhaps less good at the techy stuff and suddenly the relationships with the old customers have plummeted through the floor whilst there are a number of fairly clear technical developments coming down the pipeline reasonably smoothly.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Will Linden Lab manage to suck in and keep their new customers? What happens if they keep them for a month or two rather than an hour or so but then they leave because instead of finding lots of exciting builds and activities as well as learning how to make their own, they find the wasteland that the uninformed often accuse Second Life of being as there are no residents over 6 months old - they've left in disgust at whatever the latest stupidity is.

Linden Lab ends its diet

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:50:35 -0600

Sorry, couldn't resist the pun!

The SLim client is officially no more. You might not even have known about it - it seemed like a real flash in the pan. The idea was to hook your SL client up to an IM tool. I vaguely remember it being really fairly complicated to set up - download a new client, then go somewhere on the Second Life website, then somewhere on someone else's website, then something else. If you want to read my thoughts at the time they're here.

And then, if a friend was also using the SLim client you could find some way to IM them.

Or, of course, you could sign up to your choice of ICQ, gChat, YIM, AIM, etc. and chat to them anyway...

Linden Lab claim they've learnt valuable lessons from the process and have new plans on the table. Personally I'd be surprised... although something that hooks your client up to IM tools associated with your registered email address might be interesting. Would I use it? Not sure. I never really used SLim because of all the reasons I put forward in that original post that still stand now.

I found myself then and now wondering what problems it was a solution to... but maybe that's just me.

Lessons in Journalism

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:45:47 -0700

Second Life, in particular science in Second Life and education in Second Life (and science education of course) have both been in the online media again this week.

Jeffrey R. Young wrote a terrible piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a fairly high profile journal. Randall Hand wrote a much better piece for Vizworld.

Both of these pieces are critical of Second Life; speaking as someone who criticises as well as supports I don't have a problem with that. But one article makes my blood boil, along with the several thousand other educators working in Second Life, while the other gets my tentative support and approval. Falling back to my academic discipline, the temptation to compare and contrast is immense.

So why is one good and the other bad?

Well, Young's piece betrays to anyone who has spent a little while actually using Second Life that he hasn't. Apparently, for example:

I regularly get stuck between pieces of virtual furniture, wander around aimlessly looking for the person I'm trying to meet up with, or lose patience as I wait for my online avatar to walk between virtual classrooms.

Well, very few people after their first 20 minutes or so regularly get stuck, and after an hour or so almost never get stuck. Why lose patience walking between classrooms when you can fly and teleport? Talk about getting off to a bad start: we're supposed to believe he's done his research when he's clearly not spent any time learning how to use Second Life. Come off it!

The list of mistakes, errors and bad choices of language continues to the point it is not really safe for my blood pressure. I'm not a jounalist nor a journalism teacher but if I was working with someone intending to hand this in for a mark on a journalism course there would be a lot of red ink all over it and a strong suggestion to do it again. Since you probably know something about Second Life if you read this, have a look and see just how many mistakes you can see.

The rest of the piece adds a fair degree of partiality that makes it clear that Young is rather opposed to the whole concept but also makes it appear he has a mate that works at Duke and is writing a piece about their new system - Open Cobalt. It might be great, but to describe is as "the most ambitious alternative" seems rich when compared to Reaction Grid, Wonderland, etc. which don't even get a mention. Similarly one or two failed experiments in Second Life are mentioned by name, with no mention of the successes - which are not hard to find.

And one I would not have caught if I hadn't seen others talking about it - there are a lot of anonymous comments cited in the piece. Aren't journalists meant to identify sources where reasonable to do so. Doesn't that add veracity and confidence? Of course getting the facts right helps too!

Hand, on the other hand, writes a more balanced and accurate piece. He had come to Second Life to explore and try to find things he considered science, and given the nature of Vizworld, his rubric being "science is visualisation and analysis of multi-dimensional huge datasets" should not be a real surprise. Nor should his essential failure to find many things that met all of this rubric. However, he explains why it shouldn't be a surprise in terms that are pretty accurate. Additionally, he does go on to say that there is a lot of science education and there is a lot of other science going on as well. Not science as he first thinks of it, but science is clearly there nonetheless. It is interesting to note that Hand talks about spending "several weeks digging around" - and makes absolutely no comments about the interface, difficulty in moving and the like to compare to the other piece.

He also provides names, links to various alternative systems and the like - plenty of veracity and making it obvious he has talked to people and that he has done his research.

Another interesting little aside - both pieces have drawn a stream of comments from Second Life educators. They're not entirely divided along the lines of my post: although it's very hard to find anyone supportive of the Young piece there are people saying "what about me?" in the comments to the Hand piece. It's worth reading the comments too if you want a fair robust description of the shortcomings of the pieces, particularly the Young one. But it's also worth noting that Hand has responded to the comments and added two addenda driven (in part) by the comments. Young seems to have submitted his piece and retained his pristinely closed mind.

There are plenty of valid reasons to criticise Second Life. A good journalist wouldn't have to dig very hard. But when they don't dig at all, it shows and it shows in ways that do a lot to undermine the credibility and professionalism of the author, the editor and the place in which it is published. Surely it's worth doing right?

Mixed reaction to SL meetings

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:02:48 -0600

A couple of UK-based travel groups, the Institute for Travel and Meetings and Eventia (UK trade body for events and live marketing) held a meeting jointly in Second Life and Real Life, then asked the delegates to compare the two.

Interaction between delegates scored 8% better in Second Life than at the NEC, and the virtual attendees saved an estimated 690kg of CO₂ by attending that way.

Probably not significant in the longer term, registration and joining instructions scored 11% higher for the real life event. Why not significant in the longer term? Well if it's the first time the hosts have tried to give instructions, they can improve them. If it's the first time people have tried to register for a SL event, they'll get used to the process just as you would guess members of these groups have with the registration process for RL meetings. So that's not something I'm worried about.

Something I am interested in, and something I'd also love to see compared to live video and audio streaming without Second Life, is that the delegates felt they'd prefer a flesh and blood speaker to attending the talk virtually. The original report didn't say how strong that preference was though.

You can read the original here.

Second Life College Fair 2009

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:18:23 -0600

Late October (the weekend of 24th and 25th) will see the 2009 Second Life College Fair.

Not being a representative of a college I won't be there in any official capacity... but if you'd like to know a bit more, sign up to be an exhibitor and the like can I suggest you head over to the relevant Google Groups page for the #SLCF09 event and find out more about what's going on, how to sign up and who else will be attending.

The "New Second Life"

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:01:17 -0600

Congratulations Linden Lab, you've managed to turn what could and to be honest should have been a triumph into a minor PR flop.

The "New Second Life" doesn't refer to a new Second Life, no real upgrades or changes (although the SLCC threads promise those to come). No, it's a redesign of the secondlife.com website. I have to say I quite like it. I'm not sure I should: it makes the page really quite busy with pages and buttons all over it and that's not normally regarded as good design. But it gives quick access to important information: friends online and bank balance, plus quick access to my account page and the like. All good. There's a central pane that gives a nice set of updates for the recent activities, there are a few blog feeds (a bit like a mini-RSS) and grid status updates too. All good.

The SLEx/XStreetSL website has been overhauled with the same brush so it's much more clearly part of the corporate family too. I have to say I quite like that and mostly for some small touches, like search finds and displays merchants more prominently so if you know the manufacturer you can find the product more easily. That could be bad if you get hundreds of hits on the name, but otherwise is good.

There's other stuff I'm frankly not bothered about. There are links to the video tutorials, SLEx etc. I understand why they're both there but I can't imagine using them.

And then there's a frankly confusing one. There's a list of my groups. It doesn't do anything useful, it just displays them in alphabetical order and shows the number of members in each. Um, what? Why?!

Overall though, I like it. I really do. I might have liked it more if I could choose which bits to display and where: iGoogle style, pick the modules you want and where you want to put them so you get a dashboard that's actually directly relevant to you (Yahoo used to do this too, haven't logged in to their site directly in years, they probably still do). I'd happily remove the groups, tutorials and SLEx feed for my RL account details and land statistics for example. I'd move grid status to the TOP of that list, then the RSS trigger and remove events. But it's a good redesign.

But, why, why did they decide to announce it as "The New Second Life" instead of "The New Look secondlife.com" I wonder? Particularly just (days for many places in the US to weeks for Europe) before the Northern Hemisphere academic year starts? The number of academics, who frequently have to have sweet-talk their IT departments to keep Second Life updated, who fainted, had heart attacks or similar is beyond counting. Well, not literally, but in the hundreds that I know of. Academia is one of the leading lights of turning Second Life into a respectable, long-term prospect. Pulling it out of Gartner's trough of disillusionment into the productive plateau. Making them swear en masse isn't the smartest move you can pull. It's not just academics, quite a few people I know from other circles in world were in the "zOMG FTW" mode after receiving an email inviting them into the "new second life" as well.

And just a little more precision and the same number of words if you're headline counting would have had the effect of making them all much happier and much less confused. Surely that's good too?

The joy of measurement

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:27:47 -0600

Ofcom, the UK's Office of Communications, produced a report last week that is supposed to accurately reflect the UK's internet usage. You can download the pdf here.

All good so far, but it shows UK usage of Second Life falling by 68% and the numbers of residents falling by 67% over the last year. Linden Lab claim both these figures are wrong, and that both have shown an increase over the last year rather than a decrease. In particular, Linden Lab say average UK usage is about 39 hours per month, the Ofcom report says about 9!

I'm fairly often critical of how Linden Lab present their data and the somewhat odd data they sometimes present us, but it's kind of hard to argue with their connection numbers and times. So why the disparity in the numbers? Well it appears Nielsen, who actually did the data collection for the survey, process the hell out of the numbers. They seem to believe that Second Life is a social networking website, just like Facebook and so exactly the same metrics should be applied. It's actually not clear to me that their incredibly processed figures are at all meaningful. It's not even really clear to me that they're meaningful for Facebook and I rather strongly believe that the same measuring tools are not appropriate based on how I for one (and many others I talk to) use them.

It also appears that Nielsen can't make their minds up. Remember the report they published in May? Second Life in the US gets a lot of usage and compared to games. It's actually hard to compare it to Social Networking sites from that report. Unless the US has very different usage patterns to the UK (which I think it does, but my experience would suggest there's a lot more widespread usage by UK residents than US residents) the change is presumably a change in the processing of the data.

It doesn't make you very sure of the quality of the data about Second Life, and as The Register goes on to ask, if it's this easy to question if they've got a meaningful measurement of Second Life usage or not, just how much would you trust the rest of it?

Serendipitous Sex

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:18:01 -0600

And no naughty pictures!

About a week ago, in an e-mail I mentioned to someone that I thought the adult content of Second Life added to its success. Yesterday a TED Talk called 10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm by Mary Roach crossed my RSS feeds. The two aren't necessarily linked of course, but watching the video (it's well worth it) and sleeping on it helped me formulate my thoughts, unpopular though they may be in some circles, into a more coherent form.

Within Second Life, famously or maybe infamously, you can pretty much find the gamut of human activity. There are churches, sex shops, kinky clothes shops in churches even. There are schools, colleges and universities, and they teach (not necessarily each of them, but across them all) pretty much every academic subject and a fair range of vocational subjects too. You can find therapists, tea dances, burlesque dances, belly dances and so on. There is, of course, shopping, lots of shopping. You might, like real life, not find that shirt and tie in quite the right shade of chartreuse, nor a kitchen with the right shade of teak veneer, but you can certainly find both of those and millions, maybe billions, of other products.

The point I'm trying to make is that Second Life closely mimic first life in the range of things you can do. Just like first life - you could swear a vow of chastity and never look lustfully on another human, or you could be the most amazing libertine - there are people in Second Life who are sexually active, and those that choose not to engage in such activities. Why is this important? And, I suspect much to the chagrin of many of the educators, important for the education and RL business communities? The simple fact that the participants know it's available if they choose to explore it will, I believe, lower the pressure. We are used, at work, in class etc. to keeping on going despite, or around our sexual urges, although we're (as a species) far from perfect as this - you, of course, dear reader perfectly control your inappropriate urges and never even notice them any more I'm sure. Sexual harassment is quite rightly banned in most countries, but the number of workplace romances still beggars belief even though this flirts (sorry, couldn't resist) with sexual harassment codes. Even in educational circles most of us know of a case (or several) where the professor has shacked up with the cute student - despite the fact that most universities say this is specifically a sackable offence.

My contention is simple - when we're in Second Life to work, we can use the same techniques we use in first life to focus on the task at hand rather than that gorgeous avatar. If we want, later, to consensually jump that avatar's virtual bones (to be deliberately somewhat crude) and they are interested too, then just like flirting in the office, we can run off together and do this. However, if we're in a space that forbids this - Lively I'm remembering you here, but not only you - there is that allure of the forbidden, the censored, the naughty. People can, and will, work around the limitations in some quite amazingly inventive ways. Knowing it's not forbidden lets us (as a group) apply that energy and creativity to the task at hand when we're working, and apply it to the avatar at hand when we're not - in much the same way we learn how to do as adults.

The obvious corollary to this: if we ban sex from Second Life (which isn't the same as the current proposals about the adult continent) we switch back to a situation more like Lively where the allure of the forbidden becomes stronger. Creativity, learning and the like go down, and how long would it be until Second Life follows Lively into closure?

There are a range of other things too. The sex market in Second Life contains a huge amount of innovation - if people want to do sex, people will find ways to let them and support them. Whilst not every tool to support avatar sex turns into a tool to support education or business in Second Life, quite a lot (not all, but quite a lot) of the tools that you find used in education and business settings in Second Life, have their origins in the sex industry. Even when they're duplicating tools that are used in RL education/business settings, the code in Second Life is often explored and refined in the sex industry in Second Life first.

So, there you have it. Second Life, in my opinion, gains from the fact that it lets the adults play as they choose as well as work as they choose. The fact there's a market for sex toys drives innovation in Second Life, and supports the business and education communities too. Although the press would, at least sometimes, have you believe it's a playground for perverts, so is the atomic world. But I do rather suspect if you remove the sex play entirely, you remove one of the things that, whilst it draws unwelcome attention, drives Second Life to be a success.

SLEducation news, and how to advertise in Second Life

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:57:02 -0600

Linden Lab, some time ago, announced a "Second Life in a box" beta programme where you can buy, for an as yet undisclosed fee, an entire package of Second Life: server code, client code, asset servers and all, to run behind your own firewall.

I should point out that, unless the pricing and technical specifications are incredibly low - which I doubt - and inter-grid teleports become routine, I have no personal interest in this service. For me, a significant part of the magic of Second Life is the size and diversity of the grid, its products and the myriad residents too. A behind the firewall grid won't ever have that. However, a behind the firewall grid does have some attractions: privacy and your own rules. I suspect some out there will like the control element too.

But, imagine a situation where you want to talk to patients about real problems. Currently you can get an island on the grid, block access to anyone except the medical team and the patient and discuss it, but some of the interactions are (almost certainly) recorded at Linden Lab. You may trust them, your patient may trust them, but it's a layer of trust that the lawyers might have a field-day with if anything does go wrong. Hide the whole thing behind the hospital's own firewalls, with computer support staff specifically employed on a "patient confidentiality comes first" kind of contract (as they already are) and the lawyers have one less thing to worry about.

Similarly if you teach across that awkward 18-year old divide, because children at school have a tendency to change from 17 to 18 in their final year, host behind a firewall, let the students work behind the firewall and all is well. If you want to mentor children in Second Life you establish your normal mentoring guidelines and protections for the children and the adults and let rip. Now, in the UK at least, mentoring programmes quite often require a police check anyway, but not always - there are various programmes where undergraduates mentor older school students without police checks for example, or go into the classroom as assistants and so aren't checked because they are always supervised, and this could be done easily in Second Life now.

If you want to know more about this, have a look at the Education in Second Life blog post about Case Western Reserve's private grid.

And whilst thinking along such lines, there's an interesting overview of US government agencies, particularly the armed forces using MUVEs (mostly Second Life, but some others) in a recent Federal Computer Week article.

Finally, and at a tangent to the previous parts, but not quite big enough to make a post of its own, we have the interestingly titled "Second Life is Social Media." This piece compares Second Life to the social media darlings of the advertising world: Twitter and Facebook, and whilst it misses out some important points (like just how engaged Second Life residents are compared to Twitter and Facebook users) it gives a nice succinct list of pros for Second Life when looking at the list of features people trying to advertise on Facebook are trying to leverage, and an honest appraisal of the down sides too. Whilst this may not be directly related to teaching, it does have overlaps as we move towards teaching in a Web 2.0 world.

Teaching in SL in the news

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:23:44 -0600

There's been a little cluster of these crossing my RSS feeds and email lists recently. So, here are the ones that have got through my very light screening process (that is, that I remembered what they had to say and thought to record the URLs!).

The Training Zone has a piece called Virtual Learning: More Than Second Life which, as you might imagine lists some potential alternatives to using SL. It also, however, gives a nice check-list for learning through sims/games:

... several objectives and requirements have to be reached to ensure specialist virtual learning environments are successful:
Draw people in and motivate them to keep playing and learning.
The environment has to have valid learning objectives.
Instructional design must blend seamlessly with game design.
Must include mechanisms to track, assess and validate progress.
Input from human factors integration experts to ensure usability for the target audience.
The level of fidelity is appropriate for the tasks represented or tested.

Although the list isn't aimed squarely at SL, quite a lot of what's there surely slides over for learning content in SL too.

Project Based Learning in Second Life talks about project based learning in the context of language teaching. Whilst it focusses mainly on this, there are some links and SLURLs to non-Language activities and enough material to start people interested in PBL in SL thinking about how they might apply it to their own teaching process.

Finally Wired talks about presence and tele-meeting through Second Life. It's quite a light piece, but supports the idea that presence in SL is stronger than presence in a video conference, as well as highlighting the cheapness of the system compared to video conferencing. Worth a look.