New World Notes

What you're looking at above is from an astounding compilation: It's the top twenty types of Resident violations of Community Standards/Terms of Service rules, as noted on the Lindens' Incident Report page. It covers virtual crimes from June 2007 up to now, with the total number of each kind counted above right. We have this information thanks to SL analyst Tyche Shepherd, and an anonymous volunteer. "I have a program which crawls the Incident Report page and stores the results in a database," Tyche tells me. "A lot of the back data came from someone who has been collecting the RSS feed from that page back to June 07."

Tyche has the full results with exhaustively compiled graphs available on the SL Universe community forum, and they count a total of 21,665 published incidents over a period of just over two years. I'd estimate about two-three million people have been in Second Life during that time frame, which means less than 1% the total user base for that period perpetrated these metaverse misdemeanors and felonies. As you can see above, most of the common violations fall in the garden variety griefer category; no surprise there. What is surprising, especially given recent controversies, is how few content theft-related incidents were reported.  You have to scroll down for those:

• Copyright Infringement 17
• Terms of Service: Trademark Violation 14
• Failure to Comply with Intellectual Property Notification 1

So over two years, just a few dozen content theft violations among tens of thousands. Several possible interpretations to that sparse number: Content theft incidents are under-reported, or under-enforced. Or, of course, content theft as an official, community-reported and Linden-enforced violation, are relatively rare.

Other interesting data points: Ageplay violations, a controversy which exploded in 2007, are also extremely rare: 182 total. Incidents of Camping Chairs, a more recent controversy, rarer still: 63. Strangest incident category: "Second Life: Respect, Pets 5". (Sion chicken slaughter, perhaps.) What's your read on this data?

Image credit: Tyche Shepherd. Hat tip: Daniel Voyager, who has more analysis here.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Second Life has a virtual economy, but it's not mandatory to participate. Do you still feel social or cultural pressure from your peers or random avatars to do so? (So I don't mean pressure from in-world advertisers, or anyone else with a direct stake in selling you a specific product; that excludes messaging from the Lindens, too.) Please choose and answer above, and feel free to discuss in Comments. Results and more conversation around this topic discussed tomorrow!

What's the best way to get people into an immersive 3D world? To get new users into the King Tut virtual experience offered via Heritage Key, UK developer Rezzable (disclosure: a sponsoring partner of this blog) offers two options: Register and create a customized avatar, of choose a "Fast Track" option that immediately downloads Heritage's OpenSim-driven viewer, then launches the user directly into the Tut world as a generic avatar. (Users are still given the option of creating a personalized avatar afterward.)

"Issue is that people don't want to commit to something until they understnad what it is," Rezzable CEO Jon Himoff explains to me. "So Fasttrack is a taster and chance to invite people to full experience."

So is this option working? "I would guess it is," says Himoff. "5:1 people choose Fasttrack right now." He still hopes to encourage unique user registration, but with Fasttrack, "At least they have [the] download which is half the issue." My bias aside, this strikes me as a smart option, taking new users straight to a compelling experience, bypassing the several hours of avatar creation and orientation. Think it would improve usage rates with Second Life, or other OpenSim-based worlds?

The screenshot artist and sexy bastard known as James Schwarz presents this gloriously squalid Tableau called "Breakfast For One". (Click through for larger sizes.) "I created it," he tells me, "by taking a separate photo of my avatar on a backdrop and then merged it with a snapshot I took of the dining area of the trailer which I live in." (Yes, he lives in a trailer, at least when he takes the time pull it out of inventory.) "The WindLight setting I used was just some random tweaks and the colors, lighting, and shadows were enhanced in Photoshop." See much more from Mr. Schwarz here, and see the rest of the Tableau series here.

A lot of the best conversations about Second Life happen not in SL, but in online forums like SL Universe, on microblogging sites like Plurk, and in the walled garden of the official SL forums. What's the best conversation happening now, and why? Include links please!

The machinima master known as Mescaline Tammes has been busy in the real world lately, but he found the time to scrabble through his hard drive to whip up this super-suave video composed of Second Life footage he's shot over the last two years for various projects. "It's really a mish mash of lots of things and lots of techniques," he tells me modestly, but it also shows his evolution as a machinima maker, and is a showcase of what a good editor can too, especially with post-production techniques. He shot the real world footage at the very start with his iPhone, for example, then merged to an SL shot with After Effects. To get a full Tammes experience, here's his classic "Pipedream @ Hambone Flux".

The positive re-appraisal of Second Life by Web 2.0 marketing exec Chris Abraham I mentioned last week is now being run on the website of Advertising Age, the ad biz's leading publication. Combine that with the recent Industry Standard's report that Second Life is superior across several metrics to top social networks and more importantly, the apparent end of the real world economic recession, and it's likely we'll start to see some real world advertising campaigns return to SL soon. (For those just tuning in, Second Life experienced a mini-dot com boom of RL advertising sites for most of 2006-07, but reached its nadir in 2008, not simply because most campaigns failed to generate decent ROI, but also because as recession approached, experimental advertising was usually the first thing cut from marketing budgets.)

It's doubtful Second Life will ever see as huge a marketing push again, unless or until it becomes a truly mass market platform, not with hundreds of thousands of regular users, but millions. However, it's likely we'll see some small baby step campaigns, especially by the high-tech companies already using SL as an enterprise/conferencing system. If that happens, I hope advertisers return with humility and the wisdom of lessons learned. Among the many points of advice I'd give, would be this one:

Market to the Web 2.0 Ecology Around The Virtual World: Because virtual worlds are by their very nature dynamic and synchronous, a tremendous amount of activity related to them actually takes place elsewhere, in the Web 2.0 content-sharing ecology — screenshots sent to Flickr, machinima uploaded to YouTube, blogs and conferencing systems where users discuss their latest experiences.

This is true of all virtual worlds, and especially true for Second Life, where 133K users account for 90% of all monthly in-world activity, but where external Web 2.0 channels provide the full breadth of SL culture. (17 million pageviews from Japanese SL blogs alone.)

If you're also a veteran of the metaverse advertising boom/bust cycle, what would you advise, if and when the ad dollars return?

Second Life programming guru Opensource Obscure just told us about the supremely cool project he's working on, using the new HTTP-in feature added to Second Life's code base: a virtual building called Chromutate, that dynamically changes based on user interaction "by rezzing things, changing colors, moving its structures. You can even interact with it and send messages to in-world visitors from this web page: Chromutate - make things happen in Second Life from the web!"

Video of the place in action above. SLurl teleport link: LOL (12,34,56). I asked Mr. Obscure to explain how he used the new HTTP-in. Full geek monty after the break:

The official Second Life wiki has a page devoted to "Machinima Friendly Sims" with owners who encourage and allow people shooting machinima on their regions, usually with no explicit restrictions. (At least one has a Creative Commons 2.5 license, allowing Share and Remix, as long as creators attribute the source.) Would love to see this list expand.

The RMB City Photo Contest is now closed, so please, no more submissions. Thanks to all who participated; we received over a hundred entries in two categories, Natural Virtual (no post-processing) and Synthetic Virtual (Post-processing OK), and many are just amazing. Here's some above -- see the rest here. Winners to be announced soon!