The Beeb tours N-burg

No fooling. Check this report on the BBC on SL and virtual worlds in general. We even get a mention and they have focus-in on Eugene and the SDF blimps.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4583924.stm

Wow! We made the BBC. I watched the video in its entirety. Thank you for posting it.

~Ulrika~

yes --apparently The SDF is a nostalgic political party

You can't possible imagine the impact of that BBC programme... I estimate that about 2000-3000 new Brit users joined SL in about 24 hours or so (!). I wonder if they're now all eager to visit N'burg

I noticed that population is way up. SL only broke 100K in the last week of December, and we're already up to almost 110K. 10% growth in two weeks is scary.

Well, that was an anomaly due to the BBC programme... but watch the numbers as MTV rolls out their use of Second Life in their shows I'm not exactly sure if they're using them as "separators", to give birth to more virtual bands like the GorillaZ (but using SL avatars for that), or if they're just doing a limited-time series that will feature SL content (avatars and scenarios).

In any case, the impact of new users due to MTV will be awesome (for good and for bad, of course, but now that we're on the race for a million users, this is critical).

Philip now believes that he'll be able to get a million users by the end of 2006 (and not 2007, like he foresaw two years ago). This means that SL has to grow every month as fast as it took *three years* to reach 100,000. This is a scary thought. For his sake, I hope he can pull it off, although I'm not sure how. MTV will surely help, as well as some large-scale projects that are being deployed by now but not revealed yet publicly. We'll see. 2006 will be a very interesting year. We may find out that we'll have ten sims by the end of the year

Also, as a side note (this should get its own thread), in a few months, Linden Lab will introduce covenant-based zoned land in the mainland. For us Neualtenburgers this means that we might be able to go back to the mainland. Advantage: people being able to buy/sell land and not only deeds. There are still some months left for this to happen (people have lots of questions on how this is going to be implemented technically, and so far, no satisfying answers) but I expect that we will have to seriously give some thoughts on this as well.

Yes, Gwyn... start a new thread and explain to us what this means... or, is there a discussion going on in the forum already about this? Thanks .

Sudane

I have an idea, since we have no RA meeting scheduled for today, I set up an improptu event at 1 PM for us to discuss this a bit

Information, sadly, is seriously lacking, but so far, Sudane, what I found out is that this will be sort of a Linden version of Neualtenburg's deeds system, with a way to enforce the convenant, but no need for a "legal system" like ours (ie. no one "watches the watchers" under the Linden system ).

I notice Anzere is still utterly empty

I'll be there.

I too miss Anzere. I remember looking down the hill and seeing multiple sims of wide open space. It was beautiful. Yet an island does have many benefits, such as the ability to purchase it in a large block and grow it outwards without restriction.

In regards to the growth of SL, one of the things that I think N'burg has failed to capitalize on is the growth of SL. We should aggressively seek to expand the size of our land holdings, while growth is strong and we are still one of a kind. Additional sims should have varied yet related themes with overlapping zones (spilling the city walls across into an adjacent sim). All new sims should be united under the same constitution.

It's my hope that the next RA pushes for two new sims by the end of its term.

~Ulrika~

I agree we should expand, but, as I often say... make sure we can pay the bills.

I'm also not sure how "varied yet related themes" works... so far as I'm concerned, being united under the Neualtenburg law is the uniting theme.

Paying bills is important.

To do so we can take our past sim growth rate and time to profitability and break even as a model and extrapolate the total revenue required to support one or even two new sims. We then issue bonds for that amount with a maturation date that matches our time to break even (plus a buffer). The goal is then is to simply meet (or exceed) the population goals required by the model.

We are only limited by the total pool of people who would be interested in our project and by the total capital we can raise during a bond offering.

Uniting the new sims under the N'burg constitution is paramount. It is the new citizens that will help bring diversity and life to the project.

As for the theme, we need consistency between the original sim and the new sim, while moving beyond the market-limiting Bavarian theme. Thus a part of the "old city" would spill across sim boundaries into the new sim(s), yet the new sims would have a different (but hopefully complementary) theme (covenant). Claude has some excellent ideas here.

~Ulrika~