Reach smeech... Second Life won't cut it with Nielsen yet, but it is POWERFUL in other ways

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I was Twittering just now, and up came a twitter from a favorite follow of mine, Chimera Cosmos (aka @LDinSTL_Chimera), that read: "Yes! RT @metaMeerkat: inSL: @cybergrrloh says if one does not talk Second Life® when talking socialmedia, one misses an opportunity for REACH."

While I didn't attend @cybergrrloh's presentation - and I'm sure she provided many compelling ideas - I don't think for a nanosecond that Second Life is a tool worthy of consideration for advertising and marketing, not even exponentially... yet. However, I do believe in the power of the platform. Let me give you an excellent and very recent example:

DB Bailey (aka David Denton, AIA, in Real Life) is an architect in both worlds. I've blogged about his very virtual, very Not Possible IRL buildings many times here.


DB Bailey in front of a building he created for Stanford University

Not long ago, DB teleported me to a shopping mall he had created in Second Life. Given that I focus primarily on quality content in virtual worlds that would Not be Possible in Real Life, this was unusual, but it turned out to be a worthwhile trip. It seems that DB had been working with a potential Egyptian client, and the two had gone back and forth for two years... but DB had not been able to secure that client's buy-in on the project. One day, out of frustration or a creative burst... who knows, DB logged into Second Life and recreated his proposed shopping mall down to the plants. "I'm surprised how fast I did it," he shared with me.


Photo courtesy of The Arch Network

What happened next will underscore the point I am trying to make. The virtual platform of Second Life - where user-created content is possible - is mostly untapped and extremely powerful: DB showed the virtual and three-dimensional shopping mall to his client, and within three days he was on his way to Egypt to work on the Real Life project. He's there now. You can read about it here.

My Twitter handle is: @Bettinatizzy

New answers and more questions regarding the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I learned considerably more about Blue Mars last night, which is not named after the science fiction classic by Kim Stanley Robinson, despite the fact that its founder, Henk Rogers, is a big sci-fi fan.

...

By the time he left his secure job where he’d been managing business development for the division, nearly 28 million units of Microsoft’s X-Box 360 had sold worldwide in just over three years. The global economy was imploding, and still Jim Sink packed his belongings in rainy Redmond, WA and hopped on a flight to Honolulu where he would become vice president of business development for Avatar Reality, the company that has been developing Blue Mars since December of 2006.

There, he joined interactive game luminaries Henk Rogers (creator of Tetris, Blue Lava Wireless and founder of the Blue Planet Foundation, among other things), Kazuyui Hashimoto (formerly vice president of technology at Electronic Arts) and 21 others, all working at breakneck-speed towards the Beta launch this June of a new virtual world.



Until recently, not much has been known about Blue Mars except that it will be significantly different from both Second Life® and OpenSim in that it will be powered by the bleeding-edge game engine CryEngine 2 that boasts unparalleled and nearly photorealistic graphics, and that end-users will not be able to create content in-world.

Many Second Life die-hards consider this last point to be a deal-breaker since user creativity is at the very core of Second Life’s raison d'être.

More information became available last week regarding the free-to-play and free-to-download “massively multiplayer virtual world”:

* The world was built for Vista-based machines.

* The company is confident that many thousands of users will be able to simultaneously log into a single “city.” If a particular server gets so popular that it reaches its limit and performance begins to suffer, they can “shard” the server. (More on this later)

* Software Development Kits (SDK) are available for download to registered developers for free so that they could begin creating Blue Mars-compatible content offline. Both the development kit and the preview editor are WYSIWYG.

* Despite rumors to the contrary and in regards to performance, the company stated that most 3D cards on the market today will be able to run Blue Mars, and that even ATI 4850 cards that go for about $120 after rebates can “deliver a strong performance.”

* There is no geographic continuity between places in Blue Mars. Each place or city is a node in the Blue Mars network. Each place is usually around 2x2k. Places can link to one another but you can't fly across a contiguous space above a certain size. When you move from place to place, there is a loading screen.

* “Easy to program” artificial intelligence will be offered to developers who are interested in having conversational NPCs (non-player characters/bots). Avatar-Reality has created an AI gateway to allow third parties to link to their own AI servers. They hope to catalyze the development of game AI by “providing a platform for people to integrate their AIs in an affordable high fidelity real time online environment.”

* The Blue Mars Dollar (pegged to a fixed rate against the US dollar) is a single integrated currency system that “lets developers easily and securely charge for items and subscriptions.” End users can buy packs of currency through the Blue Mars client or through a web site. They can use a credit card, Paypal, or retail Paybycash cards to buy Blue Mars currency. There are no refunds on Blue Mars currency and end users can't cash out. However, if you are registered as a developer or vendor with Avatar Reality, you can charge Blue Mars dollars for goods and services and get paid in US dollars or your local equivalent currency through Paypal.

* Gambling will not be allowed.

...



I spoke at length with Jim Sink last night.

Your business model is that of providing a platform to developers so that they can turn around and create their own Cities, RP games, or sublease land to others. What about government? What are your Terms of Service? Will each developer rule his or her fiefdom? Will each developer be responsible for newbie education in that environment?

We’re still working out the ToS, but yes, developers will control and set content rules for their regions. There are two ways that developers can get started: they can manage their own City/game server in the Blue Mars network or they may choose to sub-lease land from an existing City developer, which could be a City block, for example. Avatar Reality charges a setup fee and monthly fees to keep your place online, but rather than set our fees based on land size, we charge based on concurrent user capacity (CCU.) It works like the minutes plan on a mobile phone. Our promotional pricing is available under NDA and our public pricing will be available later in the summer.



In August 2008, Avatar-Reality announced that Virtual Space Entertainment, Inc. (VSE), led by the much celebrated artist and concept designer Syd Mead for films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron had become a third-party developer.

Will users have access to voice at launch?

No. We’re working on that and realize that it is important. When rolling out a complicated platform like this, we need to first make sure that it is stable and secure.

I understand that Blue Mars was built for Vista based machines. I’m working off of Windows XP. Will I be able to run it? And what about Mac users?

Yes, no problem for XP, but Cryengine doesn't run on OS X, so no support for Macs. Boot Camp works if you want to dual boot, and server-side rendering services like Online should help expand our market to netbooks and Macs.

What about integrating the web to your world, such as HTML access? Any unique offerings in that area as compared to Second Life?

We can’t render HTML pages natively, but there are multiple ways to work with the web. You can display Flash-based content and the data can go in both directions, so you can update a page out world with content that is going on in-world and vice-versa. When people want to draw from a database, in other virtual worlds it has to go through the hosting service. In Blue Mars, the client can connect directly to the data source and doesn’t have to go through our servers. For example, a movie that is screening in-world is not streamed by Blue Mars; that movie is pointed to an external server. Video will be handled using Scaleform, a flash compatible middleware package that we use for all our UI.

What about scripted objects? What language will you use? Can developers introduce their own scripts?

Yes. LUA-based scripting and our own Casual Games API to give developers a head start.

You say that Blue Mars will be scalable for thousands of simultaneous users per region, and that you have the option to shard a server if it gets too popular. Please describe, in lay terms, what “sharding the server” means?

If it got to the point where 10,000 simultaneous users got to be too much for that region - and we won’t know until we get there - we will probably want to mirror that region (make a duplicate of the region).

How easily will people be able to rejoin their friends if a region gets sharded? What if people are having sex or giving a presentation, teaching a class, or waiting for a purchased item to be delivered? Will they be separated from their friends? And while we are on the topic, will you allow sex in Blue Mars?

We haven’t decided yet on the sex question. As for sharding, it wouldn’t work like that. The developer could instance the entire server and call it “New Honolulu.” You would add that server to a list of several Honolulus. We would never split it and take half the users one way and half the other way. We will also integrate messaging tools so you can join your friends in the different shards of the single server.

We’ve heard about developers, RP gamers, and shoppers from you, but are you also targeting business?

Businesses tend to be excited about Blue Mars for a few reasons. A lot of people in real estate have all these terabytes that are stuck on their hard drives. Instead of creating a new way to build 3D assets, we’ve created import tools. Using a CAD program, they can bring those terabytes into Blue Mars with very little effort and then show off model homes and model communities in an interactive environment. As for advertisers, much depends on building a critical mass of active users.

How about educators?

We will be providing a safe and controlled environment with deep scripting and monitoring support that will give developers the ability to test and track actions and choices made in their region.



You tout robust security and content management. How will you protect developers? Content theft is a significant issue in Second Life and OpenSim.

Anyone who would say you never have to worry about content theft doesn’t know about history. What you do is build methods for the eventuality of dealing with it. Everything is encrypted in our world, and we’ve made it very difficult for people to reverse engineer the system. Say you create a new dress that you want to offer at your store. Every item, when it is uploaded into the system, gets a unique registration stamp and a time stamp. Even if someone just copied an item “visually,” the original creator can submit their code and comparing it against the time stamp, we can determine if it is in violation of the system.

Will there be an approval system for each piece of content before it can make it into the system?

No approval process.

What, in your view, is the special allure for Second Life content creators, assuming of course that they are already competent with the Blue Mars-compatible software and not just working with prims? Will they have to cozy up to the game developers to adhere to their planned environments? Let’s say you make a living creating furniture in Second Life. How might this translate to Blue Mars?

By the end of this week, there will be two editors that Blue Mars provides: A full-development environment that is completely free, though we are limiting the number of people we’re offering it to at this time. We are also releasing a streamlined sort of “sandbox” that would be ideal for a furniture creator. They can take the model that they created in 3ds Max or Maya, for instance, import it into the sandbox editor, and see exactly what it will look like in Blue Mars.

From the get out, the platform has been created with an ear to content creators and artists. “Why can’t we just continue to use the tools we normally use? I don’t want my stuff copied.” They want a reliable system to monetize their work and a universal payment system. Most digital content creators don’t work in prims. They didn’t want to create proprietary content with creation tools like prims or have to relearn how to create content.

After June, we will be providing templatized shops. Developers will sub-divide land and sublease it. Create a space, fill it with your furniture and offer things for sale. Most people will want to set up shops somewhere that is popular. We will probably be offering a limited number of sub-divided parcels to give to developers and operate a test “Demo” City in the beginning where we can roll out new features and offer a limited number of spaces in that city for people to experiment.

Will you have a web-based sales model like Second Life’s Xstreet?

Not at this time.

What about artists? How will they benefit from creating sculptures, for example?

If it is just a matter of a public space where they can share their work, they can lease the space from a City developer and put their content directly into that City. They deliver their data file to the City director and it will be up to the City developer to determine how frequently the content updates will take place, which will not be as frequent as they are in Second Life (real-time). Some might do it every day, while others might update every two weeks. Each city is condensed into a pack file that includes all the geometry and textures. The file they deliver comes in a single pack.

I realized then that we were thinking about two entirely different things. Jim talked about a coming Art Competition that will launch on April 20th. He spoke of fashion, furniture and other practical items that might be exhibited - in addition to paintings, sculpture and particles - with each participating artist receiving a 3m x 3m x 3m exhibition space in a shared virtual gallery to display their work. I described how the mixed-realities Brooklyn is Watching gallery/art-critique space in Second Life had begun with a small land parcel, thinking that all of the art would be rezzed directly on the ground, only to learn that the artists would ingeniously go underground or have their art pieces begin at ground-level and soar as far up as 3,500m in the sky. I told him about ZeroG SkyDancers and how the choreographed dancers wear cascading costumes that are many times larger in size than the avatars wearing them as they move about the sky. (More on art later).

Oh, you won’t be able to fly for the most part.

Won’t be able to fly!?

If a developer wants it, their avatars will be able to fly, but the standard locomotion is not flying. You can get into a vehicle and fly but the framework for people to locomote isn’t flying.

So each developer would have to introduce the animations and fiddle with the physics? What about teleporting?

Teleporting is a balancing act for us. Teleportation to any place at any time is a mistake for a developer. It reduces the potential for the social fabric of a place. You don’t want to make people walk everywhere though. If I want to get from point A to B there are several options beyond walking or running. If I need to move two kilometers away, it is silly to have to wait for a bus. If you have a home, you will be able get there. People will experiment with a lot of different methods.

What news have you for musicians?

People will be excited to use Blue Mars for music, a place for self-expression and community. You want to be able to create events that will draw a crowd and not have the appeal of the event be diminished by the crowd itself. The Blue Mars platform scales to support thousands of simultaneous users per region, so if you are spinning music or creating a place for people to congregate, this won’t be a concern.

Will real-time jams between musicians from all over the world be possible?

They will.

Any advantages for virtual architects?

CAD will be importable, but of course, the further you are away from 3ds Max and Maya, the more steps you will have to take. Keep in mind that you don’t need the plumbing geometry for a real-time rendering. The bottleneck isn’t the polyganol count, but the textures that are the problem. The rendering will be perfectly accurate.

I understand that you will have real-time analyses of player activity. How will marketers be able to use this excellent information?

Each City developer will set some policies. We’re not sure yet how the implementation will run out but we do know this: If it happens in world, it can be tracked and reported on in real time. How many people sat down in Toyota’s new car, for instance, along with any demographic information the users are willing to share.

That raises a number of questions regarding user privacy. Can we assume that you will protect each user’s personal information?

Yes.

Speaking of demographics, what about men playing as women, or folks who prefer not to be gender-specific? How will that play out?

It will be a matter of how they registered. We aren’t going to verify gender.

What about alts (alternative accounts)? Will you allow that?

We haven’t decided yet.

Will developers be able to limit what users can take from their City to another, or what can be introduced to their City?

You can limit what can be introduced. If you are Sony Pictures and creating a virtual Monaco and it is a black tie-only space, when a user gets there, the system can prompt that user to let them know that this is a black tie-only area and provide information about the only costumes that will be available in that region. You don’t want people running around in Speedos in your James Bond world.

...

UPDATE: Soon as you're done here, you might want to skedaddle over to Dusan Writer's blog where he has an interesting discussion going and his initial analysis on Blue Mars... plus he called me a Goddess! Well, he can't be right all the time. :)

Reacting to Rosedale on LL press strategies and more

Thank you, Robert Bloomfield (aka Beyers Sellers) of Metanomics for creating an opportunity for me and my fellow bloggers Wagner James Au, Christian Renaud, Tish Shute, Ben Duranske, Nic Mitham and Dusan Writer to address key points made by Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab’s founder, former CEO and current Chairman of the Board, during your recent interview with him.

I’ve never met or spoken with Philip, but I look at photographs of his luminous face, radiant with an almost transcendent beatitude, and think about the immersive world he championed - and that I have such an insatiable appetite for - and I just want to thank him from the bottom of my pixilated heart. Moving forward though, I have a personal stake in Second Life®’s success, so I’m not going to pull any punches.

At Robert’s suggestion, I will speak to Philip’s responses regarding Linden Lab’s strategy for balancing the needs of all its communities and how it deals with the press, which you can read in context here.

Philip, I know that you were caught up in the conversation about security features and controls that folks from enterprise and education are asking of Linden Lab, and I realize that you had no way of knowing that your words would be scrutinized under the lens of public and community relations.

A little about myself: I’ve held senior positions in domestic and global marketing, public relations and community relations on both the agency side and in-house, representing companies and organizations in many different fields, including but not limited to high tech and entertainment. I’ve also managed accounts that became media darlings for whatever reason, to the extent that the coverage and the demand for information and interviews far exceeded our ability to manage it all, so I can well understand what it must have been like during that period between spring 2006 and summer of 2007. It’s a little like trying to stay dry when it’s raining sideways.

I’ve been vocal about my criticisms of some of Linden Lab’s marketing, media relations and community outreach tactics in the past and my feelings remain unchanged in some areas but are happily much improved in others.

* My biggest beef with Linden Lab is the way it lets loose some eye-brow-raising dictums to the community and then acts like it didn’t. Case in point:

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: But you do have some control over the perception. I know, for example, there were controversies over the Second Life fifth birthday celebration where certain groups were in, and then they were out, and then they were in, and they were out. It appeared at least to be Linden Lab attempting to manage then and reduce the perception of not safe for work behavior.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Inevitably, this is such an exciting new space that there is a lot of media hype, so I think we do sometimes try to tone things down a little bit. I think we need to do more of that as time goes by, to just say, “Hey. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” Reasonably speaking, here’s what the picture looks like. It’s not all one type of content. It’s not all business use. It’s not all marketing. It’s not all any one particular type of thing. It’s funny, mostly our PR strategy has simply been to help connect and embellish the stories that kind of come from the community anyway. I mean, for every stressed-out story about people’s love lives or infidelities or whatever in Second Life, there’s a story that’s equally good about people meeting in Second Life, or some people learning in Second Life, or whatever.

I am pretty unclear on what you just said here. Do you mean to say that Linden Lab needs to restrict participation from events like SLB5 more or that you need to tell the media that it’s a diverse community and to get over it?

Many Resident groups labored an entire year to make SLB5 the best that it could be only to be informed that their participation was not welcome, and then that it was, and then that it was but only in certain ways… Again, Second Life is as diverse as the Real World. How hard is it to make both PG and mature sims available for an event of this nature? Linden Lab’s management and communications in this regard were disappointing, polarizing, and unnecessarily hurtful. As Chairman of the Board, I would have liked to see you step up to the plate here and address this situation more fully. An apology would have been in order, too.

• We're different, diverse and we like it that way.

You say:

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I think that you’ve got to let people broadly create content in as open a way as possible. There’s a meeting in the middle. I think enterprises will recognize that the utility gains that they can get from taking advantage of virtual worlds are very high, and they’ll be willing to tolerate the fact that, yeah, if they wanted to kind of brand approve their neighborhood, the fact that they’re in a virtual world, and, yeah, there’s content they don’t like in a virtual world, they’re just going to have to live with that.

What are you doing to communicate this? Taking a pro-active stance would save you a lot of trouble, time and money.

* Since you are making a big push to attract corporate participation and monies, I think it would be beneficial to develop ways to better inform incoming companies and organizations that are just getting started in Second Life about best practices.

For example, you might show them the difference between an in-world facility that has ongoing avatar representation and events, and one that simply builds out a sim and then expects people to come running. Tateru Nino over at Massively just wrote a good blog post on the topic of unstaffed versus staffed virtual presences. Two excellent examples of companies that are succeeding in this regard are Warner Brothers’ Gossip Girl and Languagelab.com. In fact, why not build out a tutorial for companies and educational orgs to show them what works?

Must your website depict everything in such a bland state? Why not occasionally offer corporations some alternatives and ways to rethink their virtual environments, like images of Syncretia by Alpha Auer? Or meeting areas like Sugar Seville’s incredible auditorium seating at the Odyssey? Help prospective clients to see what the future of education, architecture and business looks like. Ravenelle Zugzwang just addressed one aspect of this in an excellent blog post about alternative seating.

* Regarding press management, Rob asked and you replied…

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: [T]he Wall Street Journal had that big article about the guy cheating on his wife in Second …. Is that something you guys are trying to manage so that it doesn’t stigmatize Second Life for the enterprise community?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, again, I mean I think the answer there is yes. Certainly, when I talked about security being a requirement for the enterprise community. And I think that content restriction and separation and insulation is a part of, is kind of a close cousin to that part of the problem. So I think that we’re doing the right things, thinking about how to better support the enterprise in looking at how to move Second Life more behind the firewall if we can, add security features, add controls for those users. That said, http, the web protocol, moves around a lot of different types of data, some of it certainly objectionable to enterprise users, and enterprises still use it. So I think that there is a future where, again, there’s a single standard; maybe the branding is a little different, but there’s still a single standard for how you use virtual worlds and how you interconnect them. I think that’s going to work out because, again, I remember the early days of the web. There was, of course, a real concern that corporations were being stigmatized by building websites because there were so many other websites that they thought were objectionable or adult content or whatever. So I guess I’m not kind of giving you a clear answer because I don’t think there is one.

People take up new technologies as a means to a way that will stimulate and nurture their own varied interests. You stand to benefit if you pro-actively demonstrate and pitch stories to the media to show them what’s cool in the way of user and 3rd party content and concept development. In this regard, your media relations strategy appears to be reactive in the extreme. There is no way you will be able to stifle all the empty sim and sex stories, and yet an ongoing proactive campaign about cool content and in-world initiatives will make the bad press much less visible and important. It isn’t hard to identify great content and stories if you just follow the blogs, and I know your staff does monitor them. Maybe your new PR person will be able to help with that.

* Please don’t limit yourselves to just pitching the business press! Diversify and share the cool and positive stories more!

Why isn’t this dress by Eshi Otawara being written up in W magazine or Vogue or Elle? It is certainly oozing in style and it is definitely newsworthy enough.



Or how about this hairstyle by Sinnocent Mirabeau?



Look at how AM Radio is using Second Life to restore Real Life photography… and while we are on the topic of AM, his wheat fields have raised enough money for a herd of Real Life cows to benefit third world communities.

I think many publications would be fascinated to learn that they have not one but two choices if they wish to visit and experience Escher’s Relativity House in-world.

In fact, why not aggressively look for ways to encourage crossover and show them how Second Life is beginning to have a genuine impact on the way people live their Real Lives? Other virtual worlds and digerati are often sailing past Second Life in this regard nowadays.

* What is Second Life? I was shocked to read the boilerplate (descriptor) in your press release dated September 3, 2008. So this is what Second Life is to you now? I wonder, fellow residents (corporate, educational or otherwise)… does this description mirror your experience in Second Life and express the advantages and opportunities you see in it?:

About The Second Life Grid and Linden Lab
Consisting of a series of sophisticated content creation, land management and transactional tools, the Second Life Grid is the technology platform used to power the Second Life virtual world. Provided by Linden Lab, the Second Life Grid platform enables businesses of all sizes to develop their own virtual world environments. Whether connected to the Second Life mainland or secured and blocked off from public access, custom virtual environments increase internal collaboration, enhance customer engagement and reduce overall business costs.

Linden Lab is the company that created The Second Life Grid platform and hosts the Second Life virtual world. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, Linden Lab was created by former CEO and current Chairman of the Board Philip Rosedale. The company is led by CEO Mark Kingdon, former CEO of Organic, Inc. and counts noted software pioneer Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, among its board members.

* It’s clear that you already think of your Residents as stakeholders, and Torley does, indeed, amplify our awesome, but so much of the intense goodness in Second Life never sees the Real light of day because Residents don’t know how or when to promote themselves to Real Life media. Linden Lab might be the greatest beneficiary of all if it empowered Resident groups with the tools and basic know-how to do their own pitching. Your PR agency might conduct regular seminars with and for in-world groups to help them implement their own media outreach to the Real World rather than keeping all this positive news inside the garden walls.

* Hype is overrated and trust and credibility are paramount. How can the media – and the Residents! - trust you if you make this claim?

“Second Life® is …inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.”

Not only is this published in numerous places on your website, but your press office has been quoted as saying as much. Your Residents know the truth. Daniel Tierdeman over at CNET knows the truth. Tateru Nino at Massively has published the truth. Anyone who spends a little time in-world can easily see that the vast majority of the registered members never made it in-world (probably held back by technical difficulties as I was initially), and several millions more simply never came back. So why oh why do you persist with this fallacy? How or why should we ever believe another word from Linden Lab again?

* I don’t see enough messaging about the fact that it is a fantastic platform to unite and help educate people all over the globe in an economically sustainable and an environmentally friendly space with distance learning, cross-cultural programs, collaborative experimenting and communicating prototypes for nearly every field including agriculture, space and medicine research. Please stimulate research and showcase your own and third-party stories about the cost differences of having a brick and mortar storefront or school, or the savings in time and money (and to the environment!) when it comes to using Second Life as a meeting ground. This press release by IBM about its Virtual Green Data Center tells a timely and positive story.

* Not long ago and on Metanomics, I mentioned that I’d reached out to your press office on behalf of Burning Life 2007, seeking assistance with Real Life media outreach and in-world promotion. That help never came. I’m glad to see that this year you’ve promised to make an effort to secure Real Life media coverage for the juried artists. Still, one week is not enough time for all that other quality content (twenty two sims brimming with creative goodness! Thank you for that) to be celebrated and reported on. Let bloggers in early and encourage their writing this up to maximize exposure.


Philip, all my thanks to you for shepherding this brave new world into existence, and thanks, too, to the many incredibly talented people at Linden Lab. Together, you've dramatically changed my life and made it infinitely better and more interesting. I look forward to the coming years and to looking for ways to spread the word about its transformative powers.

I love Pocky

I do! I really really love Pocky.



Pocky are long thin Japanese biscuits that are coated with chocolate or some yummy flavor. They are today's "amuse bouche" for people on-the-go. They aren't high in calories, they aren't expensive, and they keep you busy... and entertained.



I especially love Pocky in Second Life. Here's a corporation that gets it.



They set out a sim to celebrate Valentine's Day, promoting different flavors, and with some lovely interactive features, and then added some events, too.



I have no idea how much longer this sim is going to be there, but be warned. If you love Pocky, like I love Pocky, you will want to run out and get some immediately after visiting this sim (teleport directly from here).

Dear Colgate-Palmolive...

Oh, the ruckus that ensued over your promotion in Second Life! I for one would like to congratulate you for taking the leap and having a presence here. The typists behind all these pixelated people need to brush, too. However, I would like to suggest that you consider taking a more... erm... "virtual worlds" approach. Let's not forget that Second Life is about entertaining its Residents, too.

I happened upon Madcow Cosmos today while he was working away in a sandbox and was delighted with his new-to-me avatar. He calls it the "Brush your teeth Fairy." I immediately thought of you! I suspect that people would respond more... um... enthusiastically to this fairy than any corporate booth.



However, when I took the liberty of dropping a snapshot of it to your marketing company representative, the only responses I got were two "lols." Oh well. Catch ya next time. :P

Second Life infomercials you actually *want* to see, by Ordinal Malaprop - Yea!

"Technologist, natural philosopher, mathematrix and occasional purchaser of shoes,"
Ordinal Malaprop, has taken marketing in the metaverse several steps up the "professional production" scale." In fact, she has created infomercials for her "Ordinal Galvanic Swordstick," and her "The Ordinal Automatic "Flick"-Knife" that just need to be seen by one and all. Never thought I'd see the day I'd love infomercials, but yea!

Here's one:


The Ordinal Galvanic Swordstick from Ordinal Malaprop on Vimeo.

Fire-side chat with Gary Hazlitt, or interactive marketing 101

Within something like two minutes of meeting NPIRL'er Gary Hazlitt, I realized that I am going to want to warm my toes by the heat of his knowledge and - importantly - his marketing prowess... often and a lot.

It is so very rare to find someone who is, at once, technically expert and savvy/hyper-innovative in the area of user-friendly branding. It isn't for nothing that Australia's 11-island The Pond (or BigPond) - which he masterminded and lead-created for Australia's communications group Telstra - is experiencing 12K+ visits a week (see Tateru Nino's analysis), and is the highest rated brand in Second Life.

Even more endearing is the fact that Gary is a ginormous supporter and believer in the power of the Not Possible in Real Life (NPIRL) concept, and integrates it into his builds in fun, approachable and unexpected ways.

The spice on Gary (aka Gary Hayes IRL):
* Sydney-based, born a Brit, lived in the U.S.
* Director of the Australian Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP)
* Heads up Virtual Worlds for the UK-based The Project Factory
* ...is a busy blogger on SL and its culture, as well as role-playing which he says is a "big fascination of mine atm"
* Is an advocate and has a passion for creating rich organic
story environments
* Makes cool vids
* Is a musician and composer, having created music for film, radio, tv and self-expressed albums

Here are some highlights of what Gary had to say when, for a change, I actually kept my fingers quiet and listened and, dear readers, for you folks who want to learn something about marketing in the metaverse, this is the smartest - albeit basic - 101 you are going to find on how to get it right from the get-go:

"I have been talking about over-representation for a long time ;-) - hence my interest in NPIRL. In other words too many malls, real world architecture, etc, etc.

I have just posted a simple thesis on wikipedia about how the environment can help nurture inhabitants in SL to really dream and create their own fantasies, but most importantly share stories and experiences through places with total immersion.

There are 5 levels and most of the great places in SL, especially the
NPIRL ones, exhibit levels 3 and 4 where the environment itself has character and leads you into your story mode.

Greenies is a great example, albeit a frozen moment. I am always trying to create fantastical and dynamic (things) so (they are) slowly morphing and exhibiting a different character and sensation at any given moment. Every time you go back you have a slightly different experience (and are) always able to uncover something new.

(I) suppose that is the organic side to it... layers of depth to get under the surface; very few places like that but it should be, as creators, our goal to create things that feel like they have been here for years and centuries, even if they feel contemporary.

I am a good friend of DanCoyote's (Antonelli) and his works have that sense of organic... of being created from the virtual earth... and are timeless vs - spits on the floor - copies of RL!"

* PAUSE while this blog poster and yours truly thinks to herself: OMG, this guy sooo gets it!

"(RL) has its place as I have to do lots of corporate builds, too, and although I would love them all to be floating, moving, spacious, ethereal - you have to create the equivalent of the vanity boardroom and such... that being a metaphor for things noobs from companies can recognise at the start."

* PAUSE while this blog poster lowers head, genuflects and utters "amen"

"(We are) happy for people to drop in and - here is a main point with NPIRL type builds - is that they should be responsive to comment. (Important) that the builder and creators agree with the inhabitants who visit that any piece can be changed (to some extent) so it becomes a work of the SL community, too.

We are very keen for folk to suggest changes, because we love to hear from those who have experienced it and say 'oh that would be great' or 'do this.' To me that is what the social network that is SL is all about... co-creation... so we really listen to comments and suggestions and mix that in with our intentions."

***
Over the next two weeks NPIRL members will have the pleasure of previewing two of Gary Hazlitt's new build environments and learning his thoughts on them.

P.S. After posting this, a couple of friends mentioned that my commentary sounded a bit suggestive. OH MY! Is it my fault that smart marketing makes me sizzle? Not hitting on Gary, no no no. :P