Need Input From SL Content Developers --- L$10,000 reward

As a creator I'd be interested in participating. However calling, even calling in, is too invasive in my opinion. Some of us don't block our phone numbers so simply having caller ID would show our home numbers to whomever we were calling, and frankly going to a payphone for this is ridiculous.

Dunno, why the interviews couldn't take place in SL... seems that would be the most appropriate... Just a thought for future researchers! Best of luck!

Harvard college girls with my phone number?? OMG..that would be great..errr..umm..a nightmare!

I created a giant jar of peanut butter the other day. I think that means I'm in...right?

Um, because they are only talking to content providers? And because students, however lowly, if they are in the HARVARD business school, are the very people who will control our markets in the coming years, and therefore worth bothering with?

So...they talk to content providers only (scripters/designers/animators) and are steered and blessed in doing so...But they do not talk to the businesses of real estate, land sales, land rentals, and related services? Those are businesses, too. How about housing construction and custom architecture, for that matter?

Of did you think that the business of selling land and services on the server isn't a business because it takes part in-world in the immersive world of the metaverse? But the other businesses tie into RL-more in terms of design and marketing and web sales, and therefore are "more real"? Or because...there is something you think "sleazy" about real estate whereas somebody who designs a groovy avatar outfit or a kewl spaceship is just inherently more cool than somebody dirtying their hands with land parceling?

The land barons are left out of a Harvard Business School study of business in SL?

Huh????

Yes, it is a wine-and-cheese college party (whine and cheesiness?) of designers/artists/animators and not a steak-and-brew party where the land barons could have their say about real money-making businesses in this game.




Um...now stay with me here on this Enabran, I know it's tricky! maybe they have been helped and steered toward only those "most active users who post on the forums" (because they don't go to jobs but sit at home all day in between their costume designing for SL???) who do not include those in the land business?

Honestly, Enabran, can't you get it? It's not about talking to clubbers, although I think any cross section of an economy that has as much hidden and made deliberately secret as this one needs to look at consumers, too! Duh.

BUT LAND SALES AND RENTALS ARE ALSO BUSINESS.

In fact, they are the most hated business in the game, and yet conversely, the most loved because everyone uses them, practically, at one time or another.

In fact, they are the targets of the vicious, anti-commerce climate in this game, the victims of signage all over their properties inciting hate, and inciting people to boycott their land. Geez. That's the incitement going on, nothing in my posts about any classes.

In fact, Harvard Business School, instead of sitting with their white-wine drinking avatar skin designers and their Gucci bags, if they care about the study of business, ought to study that nasty BOYCOTT ANSHE sign put all over the new world, a sign that will not stop people in the land business from engaging in the kind of legitimate, high-volume, commerce that the Harvard Business School should recognize, study, and encourage.

Maybe you, LL, and HBS all think of land sales as somehow, I dunno, a bubble? An aberration? A phase? Of course, LL itself sells that land on the auction lol. But what...they think that it is only bought by little old ladies who drive their 4096 plots with Victorian homes and waterfalls on Sundays? By...people with high-end boutique stores 1000 miles from telehubs? By...uber architects with huge classicial old-world civilizational builds striking awe (and terror?) into the hearts of all passersby?

Please.

Land sales are also a kind of content. And they are certainly a kind of business. And to leave them out of this study, and to slam me for pointing out that they have been left out of this studyis to be part of the problem of the socialist whining content barons who want to keep the society a medieval guild instead of a modern, liberal market democracy.

And...don't even get me started on the club and sex business. Those are businesses too, with real money changing hands. How could any study of any economy, especially a Third World transitional economy like SL, leave out that???

Oh no, contempt! I wilt!

*wilt*

I buy this. It just wasn't clear from the first post in the thread.

Also (not speaking to you, Enabran, but just in general), the post doesn't say anything about excluding real estate developers, really. It seems like anyone can call themselves a "content creator" and get a call from the HBS guys/gals, who will then weed in/out who they want. Which isn't always the perfect way to go about it but is probably good enough for their purposes. RL polls do this all the time. I often get excluded from a poll when the second question is, "Do you now work or have you ever worked as a poll-taker, publicist, advertising guy or journalist?" I answer, "Yes, your honor, I have," and promptly get hung up on.

I *still* want to know whether HBS is going to share the results of their study, though. I really think the (virtual) world deserves to know. RL polls work because people have a stake in them when they become public, not because the subjects get paid $40 to participate. I actually think that's going to skew the results more than anything else.

Which reminds me. When *IS* the next cocktail party?

They are indeed, Prokofy. And when you make your little rental properties, I'm sure you create a little building or something else that's cute to house your tenants. So, I'm sure they'd like to talk to you too.

Or, here's a thought. Instead of crapping your pants in front of the whole forum, you could E-Mail and say,

"Howdy. I happen to be a land baron in Second Life. You wouldn't happen to be interested in that sort of thing, too, would you?"

But that would require basic social skills. Maybe I ask too much of you.

edit: btw, what's more impressive: The company that makes the Playstation or the little leasing company that owns the land on which sits the Best Buy in which the Playstation is sold?

Could not resist the parting shot.