You all saw Jon Stewart’s parody of the Second Life® world shortly after Philip Rosedale was at Congress debating virtual worlds, “Avatar Heroes“. Jon Stewart’s style of humour, of course, is legendary, and the sketch is really lovely to watch and laugh at — but it’s also clear that nobody at Comedy Central had ever been in Second Life. Still, it attracted people’s attention to Second Life (much better than not talking about it)!

Now Beyers Sellers from the immensely popular Metanomics show in SLCN is making a challenge to Stewart & Colbert. He challenges them to come to his show in SL, visiting SL (probably) for the first time, and discuss why, for instance, it’s so silly to work in non-profits using SL and bring the issue to Congress.

Beyers Sellers’ skill of parody is pretty much a parody of Jon Stewart’s, but… the challenge is real!

So will he accept? Even if the Daily Show does a parody of Metanomics, think of the success that would be! And, of course, even if Jon Stewart comes to Metanomics to make fun of it — what an opportunity for promotion!

Let’s get the ball rolling and demand an answer to the challenge

Worth watching too: Glitteractica Cookie’s answer to Jon Stewart:

When the Metaverse Roadmap was released last year, people were excited. For the first time in history, several different technologies were planned out for the next 10-20 years, and their convergence — desired, or undesired — laid out and discussed openly, surveys were made, presentations were given, and a lot of documentation was produced. The Metaverse Roadmap is not a “prophet’s tool”. It sort of gave directions and guidelines; it tried to “define” what people’s expectations of a “metaverse” should look like, and how to slowly proceed to implement it. Although the Roadmap could and was criticised — for instance, it appealed to people’s participation on surveys; it extracted information from existing technologies; but it didn’t plan to implement anything — it was better than the alternative: having no information on what a “metaverse” should look like.

During Virtual World 2008, what suddenly happened was that the Metaverse went through an “identity crisis”, as Hiro Pendragon so aptly named it. Put into other words: apparently, the industry is not aligned with what the “Metaverse” is supposed to be. They have forked and gone different roads.
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I’ve just been pointed to this nice sharing tool, a way to share PowerPoint, PDF, or OpenOffice presentations via the web. I’ve just shared most of my presentations vaguely related to the Second Life® environment and platform, and, who knows, some might be useful to you.

The Spirit of Second Life® itself, Torley Linden, recently wrote about his experience with reading what journalists have to say about Second Life. I don’t know if he had just read how badly misquoted Philip Linden had been early this week and, like so many others (Philip included), got very frustrated with the image that was presented by Linden Lab to the media.

It’s true that not every journalist has taken time to spend in-world like Draxtor Despres, who fully assimilated the Second Life culture in able to understand what people are doing with it:

Well, Drax, it might not be as dreadful at it seems. After all, even if some companies are not understanding what the journalists are telling in the media, the marketing and management consulting agencies are, as this Times Online article shows.

And with Linden Lab’s new CEO, Mark Kingdon, coming from a management and marketing — not technological — background, things will definitely change, and hopefully sad stories such as Tateru reports on Massively will be a thing of the past soon…

[UPDATE] According to the comments, Philip was not misquoted, his words were only taken out of context. Quoting Reuters’ European Technology Correspondent:

He (Philip) felt that the way I used his remark about bad weather, oppressive regimes and poor economic conditions being things that make a SL user implied that he thought these things typified SL users and that he had a negative opinion of them. In fact, that’s neither what he or I meant to say.

I’ll retract my own comment above claiming that Philip was “misquoted”.

Laurap Linden thankfully replied on the Official Second Life® Blog to our plea for clarification on some of the more subtle issues of Linden Lab®’s policy on the trademark usage.

In fact, the most important question was not exactly about the trademark usage; after all, the complete guidelines for their usage are spelt out on their Second Life Brand Center. Any lawyer should be able to read through all of those and say what is allowed and what is not. Similarly, graphical designers — such a large part of Second Life’s population — are by now used to similar guidelines for their other customers; as well as communication and marketing specialists. There is nothing new on the guidelines for anyone that is used to deal with them. For the rest of us, Linden Lab took pains to write a reasonably detailed FAQ, which should be enough for anyone wishing to use LL’s trademarks on their texts.

No, the two most important questions were about banning avatars from non-compliant users and “grandfathering” the existing use of the trademarks in the past four years thanks to a gentler policy. (more…)

Shortly following this post, my blog is joining the 3-day strike as a protest against the lack of clarification on some of the issues regarding the new guidelines on the trademark usage.

Notice that Robin Linden’s Office Hours are going to be later today (11 AM SLT at her place in Ambleside) and she might have some answers from the questions placed last week. Depending on those answers, the strike might go on in full force, and I’ll also announce a small rally at the Governor’s Mansion next Sunday, at Euro-friendly and US-friendly hours.

The new page for the strike will be up in a bit… as soon as I can squeeze out some time of my insane agenda to write it!

[UPDATE: Robin Linden's Office Hours were sadly postponed; she's actually given advanced notice]

[UPDATE 2: RL media's picking up on the strike]

[UPDATE 3: Rheta Shan is keeping track of the list of bloggers on strike]

Back in 2005, a group of residents were a bit tired about Second Life®’s homepage. It advertised Second Life as a game and was clearly targeted to the market of young creative geeks. Second Life was a MMOG back then, and Linden Lab® did not do much to make people think otherwise. But even then, it was quite clear that SL was being used for far different things — like it is today.

This group had a surprising proposal to Linden Lab. Since the world was all created by SL’s residents, why shouldn’t the homepage for “Our World” not be created by us, too? At least, we suggested to launch a second website for SL — one addressing people interested in the business and social aspects of SL, not the youngsters. The major reasoning, of course, was that SL was not captivating many users in the 18-25 range — even then, the average resident was much older than that — and clearly LL was targeting the wrong people with their website.

A lot of groups, organisations, and companies never even linked to SL’s main webpage when talking about Second Life as a technology product allowing innovative uses. They preferred to use their own websites to talk as Second Life as they saw it being used. But none were “official”. (more…)

I usually stay away from the more tough discussions on the land speculation in the Second Life® world. The major reason for that is truly believing that land, in Second Life, is a pretty good example of a free market, where demand and supply are two key factors, but the ability to set your own price and reap a profit due to your selling skills and ability to manipulate the market is way more important. This is the good, old, capitalist free market at play. And, from my point of view, this is exactly how it should be.

Yesterday morning I got to attend a 2-day international conference on Venture Capital, where I happened to be one of the very minor speakers on pitching Second Life as a valid investment opportunity, but being realistic about its advantages and pitfalls. The audience were all veteran businesspersons, I would not be able to get away making promises — I would need to present statistics, metrics, and how to get a return on investment. I believe I made a serious effort to explain that any business in Second Life is risky — and that anyone claiming otherwise is simply a fool, an ignorant, or a plain liar.

Of course I had seen the recent announcement on Linden Lab®’s plan to drop the cost of entry for new islands — both on the auctions and for private islands. I was so glad! Finally, nobody could complain about a decrease on the pricing. Everybody wishing to buy an island now to create a new project in the Second Life environment, would be able to do so at a much reduced investment. These were good news!

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Robert Pirsig’s classical masterpiece on the philosophy of quality, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, written in 1974, opens up with a very interesting discussion. Bikers (allegedly) come in two types. One group is constantly fiddling and tweaking with their bikes — they enjoy as much tinkering with bikes as they actually love driving them. Both aspects are part of the overall “biker experience”. A true biker has to fully know how to tweak their machines to be able to enjoy the ride.

The other group really thinks that “tinkering” should be done by specialists — the garage mechanics. When they wish to fully enjoy the glory of a ride, they wish their bike to be at top performance, a well-oiled and tuned machine, to give them maximum pleasure. They don’t have time to tweak with the bike, they want to ride it!

Both groups, of course, start from valid assumptions. Which one is right, which one is wrong?

Pirsig starts from this assumption (read the book, it’s worth it) to philosophically conclude that what we experience as “quality” is simply not possible to define logically and rationally. The irrational arguments always pop in somewhere. These have to be fit within any model that tries to explain what is perceived as “better quality”. And irrationally is part of our human experience — we might hate irrational arguments, but we cannot avoid them. At some point in the discussion, we have no way to avoid saying “because I like it” even if we cannot say why we like it.

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Introduction

Linden Research Inc., a company incorporated in Delaware, United States of America (”Linden”), doing business as Linden Lab®, developers of the Second Life® virtual world platform, owners of not only the Second Life® registered trademark (in the US, Europe, and other countries), and the eye-on-hand logo, but also of several recently registered trademarks (including, but not exclusive, to the words “SL”, “SL Grid”, “Second Life Grid”, “2nd Life”, etc.), has launched, in May 2004, the “Second Life® Fansite Toolkit”, which was later reinforced with referral programmes like “Viva La Evolution”, to positively encourage the widespread use of Linden’s trademarks, so long as it was quite clearly displayed that no infringement was intended, and a disclaimer to non-affiliation to Linden.
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