Second Life featured in BusinessWeek!

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938601.htm

From an article entitled "The Power of Us"

The online masses aren't just offering up ideas: Sometimes they all but become the entire production staff. In game designer Linden Lab's Second Life, a virtual online world, participants themselves create just about everything, from characters to buildings to games that are played inside the world. The 45-person company, which grossed less than $5 million last year, makes money by charging players for virtual land on which they build their creations. Second Life's 25,000 players collectively spend 6,000 hours a day actively creating things. Even if you assume only 10% of their work is any good, that's still equal to a 100-person team at a traditional game company. "We've built a market-based, far more efficient system for creating digital content," says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.

Woot the lindens spring up again in the media

This is a very interesting article on how the open environment of Internet has enabled a collective force of millions of people that have unprecedented power anything from disrupting whole industries (Telecom - disruptor Skype) to creating largest knowledge base of human kind (Wikipedia - 580,000 articles and counting) to creating a massive online world (SL of course).

This peer production and creation is so exponentially empowering that clearly it is a major paradigm shift in human history. The article lists some of the best known examples and companies who are tapping into this power. It really is wonderful that Second Life is part of this major human revolution.

What is even more exciting is that SL is still in it's infancy in terms of peer participation. Imagine in a few years instead of 30K there are 300K or 3 million people. Suddenly content creation ability of this incredible mass increases 100 fold, which would be more formidable than a company that have 10,000s of people dedicated to content development. What you will then see is than, in a given day more content will be created in SL then it is now in a year. It will be very exciting to see how SL and rest of peer production evolves.

This kind of breathless stuff *always* needs a much more weathered eye on it. There's no collective braindpower at work really because it's very much stratified, cliquified, gated, sequestered, classed, feted, etc. etc.

You can only say that a collective world exists by accident, the byproduct of people happening to be on the same servers -- not by design.

We've just heard how "not very many" people join in groups to get the 10 percent discount and only about 2 came up to protest the threat of having the 10 percent removed. One REAL VOCAL group isn't even business-oriented but is anti-business.

Hundreds of thousands of people pass through Times Square every day, too, buying millions of newspapers and chocolate bars and subway tokens. Nobody gets breathless about this massive economic interchange and exchange, it's just a marketplace.

Nothing so different happened because it was put on the Internet, if anything, significant problems were introduced.

What boggles me is to see these articles claiiming this is an economic engine space. It's an entertainment dollar sinkhole space for many -- but that's OK. Nobody complains if you spend lots of money on videos, CDS, movies, books, etc. -- it's just what it is, spending on a passtime. Here, we're supposed to get breatheless about all this RL cashout from content creation, yet we can never get a really good journalistic investigation into what the REAL story is here because privacy rights which we all respect mean we can't really test out people's claims for sale and income. We near REALLY hear what their costs are.

The other day the marketing guy David Linden's town hall meeting was essentially this message: make more stuff. Make lots more stuff. We need more stuff to be made so more people will come...and buy the stuff.

But what about the poor people with no talent? Where are their jobs?

A very special congrats goes out to the brilliant (and sexy) Green Fate featured in the Slide Show

I am not sure you actually understand the meaning of this collective power. These are rather disruptive mass cooperation powers that are changing how we generate and share knowledge and content, as well as goods. I would advise you to look at Wikipedia.org as the best example. Companies such as Ebay and Google (combined market cap $130 billion) are some of the best beneficiaries of this collective disruptive power.

I think you are looking at this the wrong way. Even if millions of people never ever contribute and just consume wikipedia articles, it is enough that 300,000 of those contribute in writing those articles, which then creates a human knowledge base that is 5 times greater than largest encyclopedia in the world.

Well, I wish we can go back in time, lets say just 15 years ago, how obvious it would be then to see the power networked-collective.

heh, indeed. We did talk about it - the pros and cons of mentioning avatar genitals in a business week article. It tends to be the single point of focus once mentioned and my view is that it is best left to be discovered. So I am glad that it was left out. I also know they did get in-world and check out my wares.

We talked for almost an hour and a half, what an odd cobbled together quote they printed.

That interview was about 8 months ago I think, long time.

Uh, I'm not sure *you* realize why something called "collective

It's not "FUD" or "conservative" to point out that these "changes" are not revoluiontary and beneficial, but sometimes plunge us back to the barely literate Dark Ages.

Wikipedia is filled with dreck. Any serious scholar or investigate journalist knows that. It has its moments, but it also has incredible biases introduced by the Internety tekkie culture that spawned it. Sorry, but I'm sure others will agree that Wikipedia is just not going to be the persuasive example. Collective, sure, and therefore open to distortion and bias and idiocy LOL.

There's a reason why they call the job "editor-in-chief" -- somebody takes RESPONSIBILITY for the ultimate text generated.

Ebay is also hardly the example, as we've often discussed how the ratings system there just feeds itself, someone sees 99 "luv ya kisses wonderful" and they add the same.

As for google, well I ask you...there are so many notorious examples, like what you get when you type in anti-semitism or even *cough* some people's RL names which then churn up other RL people of the same name.

Unimpressed. Definitely not out of breath here.