Thanks to a heads up from Scottmerrick Oh, it’s come to my attention that Fleep’s Deep Thoughts has been nominated for ISTE Blog of the Month! Wow! After checking out the other nominated blogs, I’m especially flattered considering the good company. Stop by the ISTE Blogger’s Hut in world to vote for your favorite blog, and check out the previous winners as well. Definitely adding some new feeds to the ole reader.. =)
Preparing to head out of town for the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2008 conference in Columbus, OH, where I and some colleagues will be giving a Second Life Bootcamp workshop and showcasing the University of Cincinnati island and talking about how we constructed the space. Will be back on Tuesday evening and will check email when I can. Hoping the workshop goes well!
posted by Fleep Tuque on OLN Island using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]
So in trying to get caught up on my feeds, I see that I’ve missed some things and now my brain is trying to resolve all this new info. First up, from Chris Kelley’s blog, Virtual manufacturing in second life, takes us to Salon’s video of virtual factory workers making real jeans. Wow. Chris comments it’s a bit “artsy” but still, I’m shocked to see something like this in world so soon. Worth getting the Salon site pass if you’re not a subscriber.
Then Malburns Writer and Tara Yeats are back with another great option to view SL video clips from all over. Mogulus channel: Metaworld. Currently playing, a Korean broadcast with subtitles. Oh and there’s Draxtor’s show. NICE! This really rocks, if I can get the embed code to work.
[Edit: I can’t get Mogulus to embed in WordPress at all, darn. If anyone has a solution, I’m all ears. Otherwise use the link above to get to Mal’s fab new channel.]
Finally, after reading about it for months, I finally logged into SL from AJAXLife, the SL browser that uses a plain old webpage. It is.. mindblowing. Going to have to make a post over on the new SLED blog about this one.
So you go to the webpage and log in with your SL credentials. Your avatar appears in world, according to friends, looking back and forth in confused fashion. You can’t see yourself, or indeed anything, since you’re using a flat web page interface, but you have access to your friends list, local chat, IM, inventory, map, you can teleport.. it’s like.. using Second Life but being blind – you can’t see, but you can “hear” and TP. It’s .. mindboggling. And definitely an interesting option for students who can’t run SL at home but want to participate in a meeting, or contacting friends from a machine that can’t run SL .. and perhaps might work better with screen readers? I have no idea, but you must check it out.
Today is one of those days where the metaverse just blows my mind.
Aldon Huffhines responded to a previous post with his own commentary, Philip Linden is ‘sad’. He writes:
“People have commented to me about Linden Lab’s method of dealing with conflict as ‘passive aggressive’. The ranks of people who are getting fed up with the way Linden Lab handles conflict seems to be growing, and the only thing preventing a large exodus is that alternative grids are still in alpha testing. Linden Lab has a little bit of time to repair the damage they’ve caused over the past year, but that time is running out.”
I’d have to agree that there is a level of discontent and disappointment that Linden Lab must address if they wish to keep a large contingent of the current userbase, because it seems like many folks are all too ready to jump ship and the only thing stopping them is that there is no viable alternative. For those who can see past the technical challenges and glitches into what virtual worlds have the potential to be, there is a great impatience for the future to arrive already and it can’t get here soon enough.
If 2007 was the Year of Restrictions, I hope 2008 will be the Year of Good Service, even if all of our desperately wished for improvements (stability, HTML on a prim, more than 25 groups, easy document importing) don’t arrive. For years I supported a thoroughly crappy software product and I know how much goodwill you can buy with truly excellent customer service. Fast, timely, personal responses; acknowledging what’s broken without glossing over the inconvenience it causes; providing work-arounds and alternate solutions – these things can make your customers love you even if the software you’re supporting is total crap. Be in the trenches with them, don’t pretend you care, _actually_ care, and show it.
And that’s where, I think, Linden Lab has failed. Aldon goes on to say:
“This ‘passive aggressive’ nature seems to reflect on a CEO who is ‘sad’ about what is happening and incapable of making any substantive changes to improve the situation.”
I think my take is quite different. While the head of the food chain does set the tone, and has enormous influence over the personality and culture of the organization (if organizations can have such things as personality), I’m not sure I can chalk it all up to a personal failing on Philip Rosedale’s part. Passive-aggressive behavior is avoidant, negative, and deceptive, but I haven’t read Linden Lab’s “personality” as passive aggressive at all. Rather I think there was an element of naivete involved, when SL really hit the hype cycle they weren’t ready. I read much of the last year as a desperate scramble to keep up with the interest, the challenges, the inquiries, the questions. If you’ve ever been the victim of your own success, you know that sudden panic when you realize you’ve reached the tipping point, it happened when you were too busy to notice, and now your whole paradigm has to change to cope with the new reality in a _re-active_ rather than a proactive way. And it takes some time to get back on your feet, to get things in place to be proactive again, and to repair any mis-steps made while you were in full damage control mode.
That’s my take on where things stand, and I hope this year will reflect a real commitment to the users who have helped make Linden Lab and the Second Life platform relevant in our institutions, our workplaces, and our social circles. The best PR is still “word of mouth” and sincere testimonials from people you trust, and a company who has the good will of its heaviest users benefits exponentially from their expertise, their evangelism, and certainly all the free technical support they (we) give.
Loyalty can’t be bought, it can only be earned, and it isn’t a one time deal.
We’ll see what happens moving forward, and I could certainly be wrong, but what I’m hearing in Philip’s (and to some extent Mitch Kapor’s) remarks isn’t passive aggressive, incapable, ducking the responsibility b.s. I heard someone reflecting on a difficult year and acknowledging that it was difficult in spite of the “Philip is ‘sad'” remarks it was sure to generate, and that’s the sort of thing that can go some distance in earning _my_ loyalty. It doesn’t go as far as filing a support ticket and getting a quick, accurate response, though, and the proof will be in the pudding.
Dusan Writer has an excellent essay on alts in Second Life and I am reminded that I promised someone an essay on identity some time ago and have never gotten around to writing it. It’s probably too early in the morning to write anything coherent, but suffice to say, my Second Life alt experiments have been a dismal failure for anything other than functional purposes since I can’t share friends lists, inventory, or permissions in any meaningful way, and without my friends, my stuff, and access to my builds, it holds no appeal for me except when I need to do research or work on something completely undisturbed.
Still, Dusan Writer’s essay The Place of Alts in Virtual Worlds and Second Life: Possession or Expression is worth the read and sometime when I’m more awake I might get around to that long overdue essay myself.
Live on Reuters island in Second Life, Adam Reuters interviews SL CEO Philip Rosedale, currently discussing entrepreneurship. Philip disagrees that there is a PR strategy problem, and says that transparency is the way to go, but pre-discussion of policies may be more damaging than just announcing policy changes when they are made. He also suggests some sort of currency/billing changes by May 1st, but I missed that part of the conversation.
posted by Fleep Tuque on Reuters using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]
Additional edits post crashing, not sure if any of the other bloghud posts got sent:
Rosedale said the two things limiting SL growth is the stability of the system and people’s first experience with it, and that he wished they could go back in time and capture more of those people, but the one thing LL can’t control is what people find when they get in world – the people, the things users create, the things there are to do – and expects that as SL matures, more people will stay as more things are offered. (paraphrasing)
In response to a question from Adam Reuters, Rosedale says his purpose for attending the World Economic Forum is to serve as not just an evangelist, but also to explain that Second Life is fundamentally about the people, it’s not just an advertisement or a website, and that there are opportunities for entrepreneurship.
I missed the first half and then crashed, sorry for the lousy reporting! Hopefully Reuters will be doing a much better job, and Hank says to check their site for the schedule and more interviews coming up.
Some commentary:
Well that was hectic, thanks to iAlja for the tweet that brought me in world for the interview, sad to say I missed most of it because of Time Warner Cable’s flaky broadband connection at my house. Grrr. At some point in there, Adam Reuters remarked that in some ways, 2007 was the Year of Restrictions in Second Life, and Philip responded that it really made him sad every time they have to restrict behavior, and that despite these changes, SL is still an incredibly open platform.
Two thoughts about that, the first is that I can’t help but believe him when he says the restrictions make him sad. I’m always interested in the individual, the person, at the center of these zeitgeists, and I’m always listening for clues to Philip Rosedale the person, rather than Philip Rosedale the spokesperson in these PR stunts. The consummate professional never sounds really _human_ in my mind, humans admit to mistakes, humans recognize their stumbles, while talking heads and empty suits admit no error and promise an ever more perfect future. I don’t hear that from Rosedale, sure there is the evangelizing, but when he said the restrictions made him sad, that’s such a funny thing for a CEO to say. It sounds almost hokey, and that if anything makes me believe its sincerity.
The other thought is that I haven’t commented much on the restrictions and changes in Second Life, not because I don’t think they are important or controversial, but because it seems to me the issues are so incredibly complex, I’m still trying to figure out the implications for myself. The banking restrictions on their face make sense to me, that the company took a position to say hey, you can’t come in and claim you’re a bank and be completely unaccountable, that’s a good thing. Was this specific implementation a good thing? I have no idea, I’ll leave that up to those who consistently give good analysis of such things, like Aldon Huffhines and Beyers Sellers, but I do think _something_ needed to be done, and Philip’s presence at more events like the World Economic Forum will hopefully help better inform him of the options when considering these major policy changes in the future.