RE: Where to Find Updates from Linden Lab

Regarding the subject blog notice, it was not that long ago when we had a blog that was a 'one-stop shop' to get direct or linked information on grid status, server and viewer updates, events, education, company announcements, and feedback was always solicited on the blog. Today the process is thoroughly broken and it's apparent that executive management is not involved.

To find the grid status, one has to goto status.secondlifegrid.net and of course no feedback is solicited, much less an ability to flag a potential problem.

For server updates, it appears status.secondlifegrid.net has the info or maybe it will be on the blog.

For viewer updates (inc. release candidates and beta), goto www.secondlife.com/downloads and maybe one will get an announcement on the blog or maybe it will be noted on status.secondlifegrid.net.

To see Torley's fine video tutorials (great for newbies and old timers alike), they're now in www.secondlife.com/showcase/tutorials/ and there's a blog for the tutorials at www.secondlife.com/showcase/blog.php?blog_category=6. As the showcase is to highlight the 'best' inworld locations and Resident creations, why are tutorials buried in the location? At least put a link to them in the knowedge base from the support site.

As for the blog itself, communication from the company is a hit or miss affair and solicitation for feedback depends on your expectation of receiving complaints.

Sometimes you allow comments on the blog, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you allow comments and than halt allowing comments mid-stream when you don't like the comments. Sometimes you solicit comments in the forum instead of the blog, sometimes you don't. It's obvious that you're managing the feedback to ensure negativity is either squelched or moved into the bowels of the forums.

To add to all this confusing mess, you want us to use RSS and Twitter. Please stop the insanity and re-simplify the process, always solicit feedback, and thicken your skin a little to handle the complaints. Even if you ran a smooth and efficient operation, you'd get complaints along with the kudos, but since it's a massive *CF*, you'll get more complaints and less happy smiles.

The RSS feeds just might be their saving grace. It's possible to make all this look almost intentional with a bit of CSS to create a "sidebar" populated by all those RSS feeds, so that while viewing any of those scattered blogs&cetera., one could at least glimpse the recent headlines from all the other scattered blogs&cetera.

This would not be rocket science. This would require, however, a tiny bit of effort--unless the new all-singing all-dancing blog-cum-forums package does all that out of the box. You know: the "October surprise" package. Check your calendars: they should be starting on that any day now.

Oh, and not that long before the Blog became a "one-stop-shop," the Forums were the "one-stop-shop." If they tinker with it long enough, they'll have enough CSS framing the new Blog that they'll recreate vBulletin.

It's another core competency: reinventing the wheel out of surplus missile parts.

The main irony is that LL, in an attempt to create a new way for people to communicate with each other via the ... o what is it this week? web 2.0? 3.0? metaverse? whatever it is they are trying to do, I'm pretty sure when I got here it was about new ways to pull communication into a virtual interactive environment...

Anyway, the irony that always strikes me is that LL has such an incredibly hard time COMMUNICATING, most especially with the very people who use their platform.

Forums don't seem to work for them, or blogs apparently now, and we all know how effective they are at communicating in-world.

If LL can't figure out how to use SL effectively as a communication tool, how is anyone else supposed to?

Thing is, it never was truly a "one stop shop." It was closer to that, but there's been Lindens on twitter for some time, and you can often glean some information from their feeds, there was the old status page, there's been office hours, which can be invaluable for seeing where things are going, there has been the sign in information they mention, etc.



This is someting I was thinking a lot about some time back, right around SLCC. That's a convention that LL touts a lot of their stuff at, holds keynotes, people meet up at, an so on, but it has a "secondary" inworld presence. There seems to be little attention paid to effective inworld communication, leaving a lot of important information to filter through as a grid-wide game of telephone.

There are still dead spots, though. How many know that the Busy Ben/Luna Oaks lottery is coming up, and that the Yacht Club in Bay City is also going to be involved? If you had gotten the trick or treat stuff in Luna yesterday, you might have seen the billboards. But the information is not otherwise visible, as far as I can tell.

LL, really, could - should - lead the way with effective inworld communication.

Because they haven't figured out how to completely botch the tools that WE use to communicate with each other

Everyone knows my opinion of the blog, when it became the "communications of LL." It's well documented that I thought the blog was useless for anything other than announcements. It wasn't communication with the residents. Well, congratulations to LL because they have rendered it completely useless.

I honestly don't care WHAT M Linden is doing once a month, because in a few more months, he's going to forget to post anything on the blog and leave it to the lesser executives to handle. And while things like policy changes should be announced, they rarely are.. they're just quietly changed and people get busted without warning. The rest is usually bad news to the users, as the open space price hike shows.

Having things like Torley's tutorials announced there made us at least feel that LL cared about the community they claim to want. It also reminded us that there are PEOPLE behind the Linden name. People who want to help us and give us the tools we need to create and maintain LL's dream for a Second Life community.

I don't recall seeing any mention of Twitter being a Linden Lab tool for communicating with users. Torley uses Twitter, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that is part of official Linden communication.

Have I missed another announcement?

They really do need to have essential communications and information in one place. Not everyone spends their days scouring the internet. I don't read blogs, and wouldn't know an RSS from a Twitter if it fell on me. And there should be some sort of SL Central InWorld Information Propaganda Bureau to disseminate the LL Party Line as well.

As a matter of fact, yes. As referenced in the OP, http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/31/where-to-find-updates-from-linden-lab/ contains this little gem:My theory is that LL communicates just fine with exactly the audience with whom they intend to communicate. For example, why should anyone know about Busy Ben / Luna Oaks unless they regularly hang out at Luna? Okay, that's stupid, but who's to say the intent isn't stupid?

I've seen this phenomenon before, in a huge company told by consultants that it had "communication problems" following a botched merger. Naturally, they went to IT for a solution, and naturally IT "addressed" the problem with every imaginable communications technology available at the time. It was a tremendous success in the sense that everybody got bonuses without the nagging inconvenience of having to actually communicate with employees.

For another example closer to home, consider the bewildering array of communication media used--totally ineffectively--to inform Mentors about needing to renew.

It's a truism that a business can never communicate too much with its customers. But when it comes to communication channels, less is usually more.