Stillpink Sandgrain

A fellow tiny, Stillpink Sandgrain passed away on February 14 2010 after a long battle with cancer.

She was a good buddy. We didn't meet up every time we were both on together, but I took great pleasure knowing that she was online and might (and would!) drop in unannounced at any given moment! Her energy would have you thinking she was a teenager enjoying their first day in SL. And it was infectious.

The last proper adventure me and Stills shared was in November 2009. We spent an hour or so sneaking around the houses on Cirano. Biggy houses, but not just any biggy houses - Linden houses! We got busted by Alexa Linden, but she was nice enough to invite us in, where we both aired our grievances about XStreet.

Then she was gone for a while. I understand she really fell ill towards the end of 2009, with Akay Utu (Tea Gupte's RL partner - Stillpink was Tea's RL mum) telling me that they didn't think Stills would see out the year. To her credit, she did, and then made a few more appearances online just after New Year.

Now, I'm sad, because I won't be able to have the same type of fun I did with Stills for a long time to come. But when I do see her, I hope we're given the chance to go and sneak into someone's house in Heaven! I'd like that. Stills, make sure you go house-hunting up there, but don't go sneaking in without me yet!

The picture above was taken when Stills introduced me to Bryn Oh's sims. I caught her at just the right moment. To me, this image typifies what Stills represented: someone cute, full of light and fire, lighting up every room she ever graced. A blog post has been posted here at Raglanshire.com.

Otters Are Golden

I hosted the Raglan Shire Film Festival last night; was great fun, and I was really honoured to have lots of tinies in attendance but also to have a couple of machinima veterans in Pooky Amsterdam and CodeWarrior Carling come along and watch the show too.

I debuted my latest - 'Mummer's Dance' - with Songbird1028 Sorbet, which was very well received. I picked up two Otter awards - for Best Film (Over 4 Minutes) and the Audience Award, for which I shall be eternally grateful. Songbird was also voted Best Actress for her work in this film (based on the fact that she had so much to do!), and a lot of people were mightily (and rightly) impressed that she sings too!



The overall line-up of films was fantastic. I'm so proud that the community were able to really get their paws and claws into trying some machinima, and the pay-off was that they were all well-received. There was a nice variety of music, shorts, remakes and original stories in there. For a few people, this was their FIRST attempt at machinima, both in terms of filming and editing, which is just amazing. Great job Shire!

And The Nominees Are...

Looking forward to the Film Festival at the weekend! The theatre has been built, the seats have been cleaned and fresh popcorn is popping in the machine! Last September, in an effort to try and get some more people just trying to film some machinima, I announced we'd hold a festival just before the Oscars to celebrate tinies on film. A lot of folk were immediately enthusiastic about it, but once the New Year hit, and I began chasing folk up about it, it became obvious that that enthusiasm had waned over the Christmas holiday period, and there didn't seem to be that much on offer.

But I've been pleasantly surprised over the past few days. Some people have been able to turn out little 2-3 minute clips in a matter of a week. They've been asking for advice and tips, which I've been more than willing to help with as best I can; and I've been genuinely pleased to see some of the things people have come up with! I've also been sourcing judges to look over groups of videos (split into certain categories), so that we can award a few of the filmmakers with their own golden statuette - the Otters!

However, it was never about giving out prizes. It was just about encouraging people to have a go; and they have, and for that, everyone will be rewarded with a host of brilliant and cute tinycentric movies. I'll also be showing off my new machinima on the day, keeping it tightly under wraps until the event itself.

Avatars Unite!

Well, I've spent the last 15-20 minutes looking across Avatars United, and so far it seems little more than MySpace for virtual world characters.

Still, that didn't put me off from signing up! There seems to be a frighteningly lack of security or verification though. I can't see where it wouldn't have allowed me to sign up as Chaffro Linden if I had wanted to (in retrospect, that might not have been a good idea, but still). I understand that Linden Lab have given this site some blessing - either by buying it, or just acknowledging it, I'll investigate further - but I'm becoming a bit of a sucker for social networking, despite the problems it can often bring. I've actually made many new genuine friendships from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and SL. Not just 'online acquaintances' either, I've spent time with these people in real life and continue to maintain those connections.

If you do sign up, as me as a friend! This is me!

EDIT: OK, it turns out that the Lab have acquired Enemy Within, the development company behind Avatars United; hence the massive upsurge of interest over the past few days.

It's a strange beast. To be honest, there seems as though there's little to actually explore within the site. Presumably it's meant to serve as a virtual world info-hub; I can import RSS feeds of blogs I follow (which, if they weren't virtual world related, would be pretty pointless). Like Facebook, you can send gifts to your friends and contacts, but they're going to cost you 'coins'. It also costs you coins to upload a custom background; if you don't want to invest any real-world money into the site, you're stuck with a choice of three or four. The 'upside' is, is that if you choose to have your background public, you can sell it (but only reaping back a lowly 7 coins per purchase, and there might be a sales limit per background).

Hopefully the Lab will start introducing some cross-network potential; and I'm hoping someone will come up with a Twitter-functional application, to allow shouts to appear on the Twitter timeline or Tweets to appear in your shout box. That could be interesting.

I wonder how long M Linden would keep people on his friends list then!

Traffic Signals

Yesterday I received an IM from a long-time friend in SL. He asked if I had some time to come see him and his SL/RL wife. I was running late for work anyway, and had to offer my apologies. "Why, what's up?" I enquired. He replied that he and his wife might have to leave SL permanently; not at their own accord, but because Linden Lab are on the verge of suspending their accounts indefinitely.

Why so? Because traffic at their shop site is high.

So, they must be using Bots right? Well, yes and no. They do use a couple of bots, but the majority of their permanent visitors are actually real people hanging out in a place they like. Bots are definied as 'non-human controlled agents', or scripted agents. Essentially they'll be accounts that someone has set up for the express purpose of just hanging around somewhere, in an effort to increase traffic (footfall) numbers at a particular location. It means that if someone were to search for a particular place - let's say in this instance "clothes shop" - and filtered their results by wherever has the highest amount of traffic, that shop would appear nearer to the top of the list. This is known as gaming traffic, in that its not real.

To quote Linden Labs: "'Gaming traffic' is purposefully having avatars on a parcel that is listed in search for long period of time for the purposes of increasing your traffic score. Whether their is a human behind them or not, if their purpose seems to be to inflate traffic then it is considered gaming traffic. If there is a genuine purpose to being there (like a model) then that account needs to be registered as a scripted agent so it does not count toward traffic figures."

So basically, even though you could actually be a person hanging out in a clothes store you love, with other like-minded people, and are rewarded by the store owner for your support in trying to help their fledgling business grow and develop in SL, you have to turn yourself in as a drone? Not quite, but that's the underlying threat relayed to this particular situation. Another question that was asked was, is the key definition concerning traffic gambling because you're paying people to be there? No, according to the Lab. The key definition is the avatars are there for the purpose of increasing traffic and for no other reason; but surely a model, modelling clothes is promoting a service, not just pushing the numbers up? "They can be models and you can use models and compensate them however you wish," sayd LL. "They just need to be registered if you do."

"If it is an avatar that is in the parcel listed in search for long periods of time, for whatever reason, it should be registered as a scripted agent so it doesn't count toward traffic", says the Lab. However, they followed this up by saying "if they have a legitimate purpose to be there other than increasing traffic, then registering so they do not count should not be an issue."

So, if you register yourself as a NON-scripted agent, you're fine then? Presumably. But if you don't, and somehow you're determined to have spent a particularly long amount of time on one sim alone, you'll be accused of being a Bot and threatened with having your account suspended.

I spend most of my time on the Raglan cluster. I could be logged on for 10-14 hours on any single day sometimes. What would happen to me if I didn't register myself? How am I tracked? And how would I ever know I'd have to register until I was threatened with suspension?

And what's the big deal with traffic anyway? The formula for determining traffic is so obscure, its bound to be manipulated every which way, even if it takes bots of of the picture. And I've been around SL long enough to know that if I'm searching for something, I tend to ignore most of the top traffic ranking places because they either won't cater to my needs precisely, but have used keywords to their advantage; they will probably be so overwhelemed with people I won't be able to move for lag; they'll probably be managed by people who are only interested in claiming they have "The Number One Jazz Club/Nightclub/Fight Club/Book Club" and not really care about their offer.

A better system that says one individual pair of feet on a sim within any 24 hour period counts as 1 traffic point. Failing that, why not have places listed in Search by votes? Vote for the quality of a sim, vote for its craftmanship, vote for its content, vote for its community, its layout, its music; if any of these things are worth a vote and good citizens want to share the experience they've enjoyed and allow SL to flourish with beauty and wonder, they'll visit there often and vote on it. That seems a lot nicer and a lot fairer. Quality wins - and therefore, so do we.

2010

Happy New Year everybody! 2009 was a fabulous year for me in-world, for a number of reasons, but none of it would have ever happened without the support, co-operation and challenges provided by others. Many thanks to ALL of you who I have crossed paths with over the last 12 months; I hope I was able to enhance your in-world experience to the same degree that you enhanced mine.

Ex Street

This blog, when I first conceived the idea, was supposed to chronicle the exciting things I discovered around the grid; instead I find myself once again Linden-bashing. Which is just as entertaining.

Colossus Linden announced last week that he and the rest of the team responsible for managing XStreetSL (from this point on to be referred to as XSt) had devised a brilliant and watertight new pricing system for listings on the virtual e-commerce site.

Until now (well, actually for another 30-60 days) XSt has been a free listings service. Anyone who had created any content that could be used within the Second life Grid – be that textures, scripts, prim builds, sculpties, hair, clothing, even Island files – could list these creations for free on a giant, searchable online marketplace. It started out as a private enterprise - (called SL Exchange, or SLX) but last year Linden Lab threw a big fat dirty cheque down in front of the creators, who in turn eagerly handed over the keys to the office to the Lindens.

The idea was that you could list your stuff to save residents the time of trying to figure out how to use the easily manipulated Search facility within the viewer, teleporting all over the grid and finally trawling through vendors trying to find exactly what it was you were after. And it worked brilliantly. I have purchased many things from XSt over the years, from vendors who I may never have found in-world. Because the listing was free, many vendors actually relied on XSt to manage an income, being unable to afford shop rentals or find a suitable location that would guarantee them optimum footfall. You paid a small percentage fee in commission, but I never kidded myself that ‘free’ meant 100% free. Someone somewhere would have to pay to maintain the site, maintain hosting, etc. And if those enterprising people made $1L profit (after all of those costs) out of each sale I made of a $50L, so what, I thought, well done to them.

But then The Lindens got hold of it (primarily so that they could have the revenue, rumoured to be around $1million USD). It didn’t matter that they were already a multi-million dollar company, they were still going to charge commission, to a maximum of 5% for those nice costly items. They set about changing things. Just small things at first; they tried to make it look like they were doing things to help merchants and customers alike by integrating the Marketplace within the main SL website. They’d send out e-flyers (if you were lucky, just once. Unlucky folk would get two or three of the same promotion mailed to their Inbox). We’re making it better, they claimed!

But there was a problem; some pesky folk were listing items for free, but charging $0L for them. Some folk were throwing out low-free priced marketing tools. Some folk were giving away stuff because they were kind. Obviously, trying to take a percentage of nothing meant that the Lab made, er…nothing from each of these sales; yet the customer would still walk away with something useful in their pockets.

Some merchants objected to this; if someone else gave away for $0L that was similar to something that they’d made and were selling $250L, they had obviously lost out on a sale. Not really true; for example I, as a customer, have spent a good deal of time before looking for a carefully-crafted and lovingly textured house build than some free slap-dash affair. Nonetheless, The Lindens took these objections on board and decided that because they shared a common concern (i.e. they weren't making enough money), that they’d try and do something to rectify this issue. So, they held a meeting. Well, actually, they decided to discuss it as part of their regular office hours meeting.

Office Hours are times when Lindens decide to log into the Grid. It’s only a couple of hours a week so undoubtedly they can tolerate sitting with their buttocks and teeth clenched for that amount of time, listening to the concerns of a carefully-considered cross section of residents. Only, they’re not; because usually the only people who attend office hour meetings are people with an agenda, a point that they (the Residents) feel the need to try and hammer home to the people (the Lindens) who actually have the power to change something. Heck, the tinies of Raglan Shire are guilty of doing it! For three weeks in a row when Group Chat was shot to hell after an ‘update’, they turned up en masse to protest the lack of action to resolve the problem. Happy days!

The XSt issues were considered so important that they were discussed across three separate Office Hour meetings (no fanfare given to any). Colossus Linden reported that thirty-five (yes, 35) residents attended the meetings to help round out the proposals. Except not 35 at each – thirty-five IN TOTAL. That’s about 0.0000035% of the total population of residents. A fair cross section? Not really, is it? And as there was little fanfare given to what actually is a very important issue for a great number of people, unless you were regularly checking to see what was happening in those meetings, many people would have just taken them for granted.

The plans (as they stand) now amount to LL charging anyone who lists a free item (of $0L price, guaranteed return of, er $0L) a staggering $99L per listing per month.

Anything over $1L will now cost the seller $10L per listing per month.

Oh, and you’ll still need to pay that commission. A minimum of $3L. So don’t even think about putting those freebies up to $1L – we’ll still be taking $3L of each one you sell, they’ve said.

So, if (like me) you have 41 items listed, it will now cost you $410L per month to list all of your items. You will need to make about a minimum of $450L per month to come out with any profit, after commission. And then instead of coming out with the $427L you used to, you’ll now walk away with a paltry $17L. I consider $450L in revenue a good month for me…

Paraphrasing, the Lindens’ reasons for these taxes are: it will help the marketplace easier to search through; the marketplace will be less cluttered; customers won’t be directed towards freebies and those who are trying to make some money will finally be able to make money.

Well, in some regards, they’ve succeeded already. Thousands of items have already disappeared from the marketplace, pulled from the listings by disgruntled merchants who have already anticipated that they absolutely cannot afford to cover the new costs. I myself have reduced my offer from 41 items to a mere 11, and have made a point in my listings’ descriptions to tell anyone looking why there isn’t as much there as a week ago, throwing an SLURL in there to direct people to my in-world offer for good measure. I’ll probably see how well I sell over the next 30-60 days and see if I can make enough to cover my first month in a listings fee culture. Then I’ll pull the rest down.

There are so many better ways that the problems with XSt (which have only intensified, in my opinion, since the Lab acquired it) could have been resolved. Arrehn Oberlander has pointed out just a few in this post, which seem perfectly logical and easily achievable. The assessment of the reaction of the Lindens is also spot-on; they’ve become defensive and have blamed the merchants posting all those freebies and not properly managing their inventories for allowing XSt to become the mess it is. Um, what? I used to be a manager for a popular chain of coffee shops; I didn’t demand that customers pick up their crumbs or drink every last drop of their beverage before they left. I let them in, they paid me for a service already. That’s it, job done. Whatever they leave behind becomes my problem, so I deal with it. If that means throwing it out, so be it. Free items - heck, anything $10L or less - could easily have their own listings section, seperate from the higher priced stuff.

I felt myself fortunate that Colossus Linden took the time to reply to an IM I sent to him in-world; I expressed a huge concern that merchants who make niche items for a niche market (I make musical instruments for tinies: small market within a small market) would be driven away from XSt, and possibly be driven out of business altogether. Unfortunately, his response amounted to “we’re not trying to drive out nice merchants” and an even less useful “why not put your prices up?” Well, it might not have been your intention, but without thinking about it, that's precisely what is happening. That doesn't help me; I can't guarantee I'll sell something at $250/300/400L, so what chance is there that it'll sell at twice that price? How does that help my customers either? I'm not stupid, I price my items in line with what I think they're worth. If I charge a customer over-the-odds, what benefit does that have for them? Nothing: we both lose.

When the whole Homestead sim fiasco was announced a couple of years ago, it also resulted in a massive resident backlash, that the Lindens seem to be genuinely shocked about and reacted to. Back then, they compromised. They admitted they’d made an error by not garnering feedback from residents beforehand and revised their announced policies. However, this time around, there seems to be no retractment, no amendment and no concern towards residents. The only concern seems to be making enough revenue, propping up the loss felt from downgrading Premium subscribers so that the Lab can look forward to a healthy end-of-year bonus. It's another turn for the worse for resident faith in the Lindens. Personally, and I know this also goes for several others within the Raglan community, I couldn't trust any more than two or three now.

Happy Thanksgiving M and the rest of the Linden Mafia (which does not necessarily include all Lindens); thanks for nothing.