I’ve been a great fan of Alexa over a decade ago when this traffic-ranking site appeared, under different forms, and with a different purpose. Now, among the 2 or 3 billion sites in the world, it shows the pretty traffic these sites have.

New World Notes recently made it to the “top 100,000″, meaning they now get a traffic graphic updated every day. Way to go, Hamlet With all the polemics about numbers and statistics recently, it’s nice to see that even if we’re only a handful of silly avatars, Second Life is still generating a lot of interest in the world blogosphere and overall media — or people wouldn’t be reading all those sites!

Incidentally, the Official Second Life Blog is one of the 1,500 more traffic-intense sites all the Web… which is next to fantastic!

A new SL newspaper — another one in PDF format — has recently been launched in SL. The AvaStar, with the motto “Your World. Your Voice.”, is published by Gregor Ginsberg (chairman of German publishers Bild.T-Online AG & Co. KG), and is a professional tabloid newspaper for the residents of Second Life. With the latest news, entertainment, style and advice - the AvaStar keeps its readers informed about the vast, diverse and ever-changing world of Second Life (from it’s About page).

The format follows the popular German tabloid’s Das Bild and promises the same level of juicy news as the RL counterpart — dealing with controversies, scandals, fashion, griefing, scalability issues, and sex — it even has a column for cybersex advice

Oh Christmas Tree….Oh

Originally uploaded by Tigerzeye.

At this point, I think it’s appropriate to wish you all, faithful readers, the season’s greetings, have a very happy holiday, hopefully with your friends and family, and quote my own father on this: “Enjoy yourselves and don’t spend too much”

As for my wishlist for 2007, Linden Lab has already given me that

This started as a “joke” between Mentors (volunteers in Second Life that are willing to spend some time with new users and answer their questions…), but soon it became a FAQ of its own. Yes, most of these are indeed “first ever questions” that almost everybody starts to ask as soon as they rez on Help Island

Note: the weird icons below are actually links to locations inside Second Life, I just copied & pasted this text from a notecard I usually give to new users in-world. I might get these links to work from here as well… one of these days… perhaps
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Back in early 2006, Cory & Philip kindly gave us a preview of what they would be doing during 2006 in terms of development of its platform. Everything except in-world HTML (Havok was not on the list) was deployed, mostly during the summer of 2006, thus giving us all a good confidence that Linden Lab was being able to deliver what they promised.

Linden Lab is not the “30-ish” employee company any more that it was in late 2004. They have grown to perhaps 250 people or so, with different arrangements with the company — from employees, to freelancers, to outsourced work, even to some open source contributions (the always controversial libSL team, which provides a thousand good tools and reasons for existing, and just one bad one which attracts the media’s attention ). Managing all the projects around this huge team is not easy to coordinate, nor even easy to report on.
Cory, however, made yesterday a serious and honest attempt at giving us the timeline for 2007. Most of the things will be “under the hood” — people will just see an SL scaling better, and dealing with more simultaneous users more easily, and probably increasing their client’s performance here and there. But there are a few good reasons to look forward to this great year of 2007:

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I’m have been accused of being an “intellectual” because I have a blog and actually use a spell checker to verify my ortography

So, to make sure nobody takes me seriously, I have become suddenly inspired by reading yet another Dilbert book by Scott Adams, and, blatantly copying his style, here go a few intelligent tips for making your Second Life® more enjoyable: (more…)

Extropia DaSilva is back with another essay, and this time, she’ll be “going quantic” on Second Life. Explaining complex science using Second Life as an example, she’ll take you through a voyage through time and space, making you realise that “common sense” and “quantum mechanics” cannot be employed in the same sentence together. I hope you enjoy Extropia’s musings. Have fun! — Gwyn
Have you ever stopped to consider how the impossibility of logging off from SL might ultimately reveal the quantum physical nature of time?

Probably not. Quite a few people, though, have contemplated the relationship between the abstract space of SL and the physical world in which they live. In other words, SL challenges some people to consider the nature of reality. But in ignoring the concept of time, such speculations cannot help but be impoverished. Reality is, after all, comprised of space AND time.

Perhaps the reason why time goes unnoticed is because the way we experience it in SL does not differ from our experience of time in RL. Therefore, we are not challenged to define reality in a temporal sense in quite the same way that the different experiences offered by SL questions the spatial dimension. But that is a shame, because our everyday concepts of time appear to be quite contrary to the laws of classical physics, but the quantum cosmological concept of time appears to have interesting analogies with the metaverse.

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[UPDATE 2007-01-07] Prokofy Neva and Torley Linden (thanks guys!) reported that the comments were broken — they would get some sort of redirection to the homepage and “lose” the whole comment. Sorry to everybody who was unable to post any comments. I found out what was seriously wrong: I had two conflicting OpenID plugins trying to “take over” the authentication! The new plugin I’m using is far easier to install! (It might very well become the reference in OpenID authentication plugins). Being silly, I totally forgot to delete lots of old files from the other plugin I had, so, while I could authenticate myself to the WordPress backoffice, the comments section was still trying to use the old plugin — and utterly failing to do that! My serious apologies to everybody who tried to post comments and couldn’t, or lost their long posts just because of my failure to correctly remove all the references to the old plugin.
Hopefully everything is working now!

[UPDATE 2006-12-18] The broken permalinks are truly a nightmare, since I have a very old structure that was “imported” from a previous content management system, and all sorts of links pointing to it. Also, the nifty WordPress-to-WordPress plugin that was supposed to make a swifter and easier transition does not respect the posts’ IDs. The result: dumping the old database, reimporting the data (without touching the table structure and the new things I’ve added, like more links), fixing things like wrong character sets… hopefully everything is working better now. A few things were lost in the process, though.
I’m still not overly happy with the layout. I’ve tried to tweak it a bit, but it didn’t provide me with the results I was hoping for. Ah well. The tweaking will continue
[UPDATE] This should be “sort of” working now. I’m afraid I’ve lost the relationship with previous blog entries. So, “permalinks” are not really so “permalinky” at all. Ah well. The next upgrade will at least use the new structure If this really bothers you, just let me know, I’ll try to fix it…
In an effort to update some things at this blog and make it more easier for me to maintain, as well as adding here and there some tweaking, I’ll be making some changes. My apologies if this means that the site might go down for a while…

There are so many uh “professionals” claiming that all Linden Lab does is incompetently handled and amateurish and that they don’t know a thing about how to deliver updates, or maintain a grid, or develop software overall…

Well, I also claim my share of professionalism Yes, I’ve worked for ISPs dealing with a few tens of thousands of simultaneous users — with far less servers than LL’s 5000 virtual servers or so, though. And yes, my application to work for LL was rejected, very likely because my 12+ years of experience running relatively complex network/server operations were not enough. And they’re right: SL is far more complex than anything I might have worked on It shows, at least, that they’re raising a very high threshold when accepting new people to work with them on the mission-critical issues.

Some recent comments on LL’s blog are indeed naive and show a lack of understanding on how the grid operates. Linden Lab does stress-testing. They do have QA procedures — they used to be publicly available on their old wiki, and they even invited residents to suggest and implement new QA procedures (there were not really many who raised to the occasion — and the ones that did, are very likely employees of LL these days). They have a whole grid for public testing purposes. They have at least another grid for internal testing purposes.

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A very interesting comment on what the future of virtual worlds might bring us:

http://www.dansdata.com/gz064.htm

Fun to read