Implicit Value

Eata, there will always be big names and little names -- that's the way humans work. You will never be able to create a completely level playing field. Besides, all a level playing field gives you is noise. It's like blogs, there are a few famous instapundit-like blogs that get huge traffic and then zillions of little blogs that very few read.

Sometimes a name gets because because of hard work, sometimes quality, sometimes luck, or a combination of all of them. Building a brand gives you an advantage, but by no means allows you to rest on your laurels. If quality goes down, customers leave. If a brand gets tainted by scandal or other, then customers often shy away. If you don't innovate, then an upstart steals your thunder.

Why does it work this way? Part of it is human group/herd instinct, and part of it is the desire to save time. You can go to 300,000 stores/websites or you can ask a few people who the best or most famous are, and go there. Humans rely on referrals for a reason.

In many ways, it is easier to start a new venture in a space where there are established "gorillas" than to go out into a completely new area. The big guys have helped create demand, they have educated customers, they provide a target to tilt for. On the other hand, the innovator creating an entirely new space not only has to tell people (who will bother to stop and listen) who they are, but what the product is and why it is important and how to use it, etc etc...and deal with the inevitable missteps and confusion along the way. You're starting from ground ZERO.

Both are a challenge, both take hard work, both can be fun... both are what entrepreneurship is all about.


I have always liked Thomas Edison's quote: "Most people miss opportunity because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work."

That's a matter of opinion. I have fallen asleep flying a few times around those Sims. For the record I have never fallen asleep elsewhere in game. LOL

Have you tried sleeping at night?

Then as an Alternate, we can build Robots that make whatever we request and while the robots are hard at work, we can go to the beach and soak up some rays. This Robot could also be a concept called a Replicator. To take any matter and make an entirely new thing from it.

There are alts to the Conservative Work Ethic

I saw some machines in Azure Islands a month or so ago. They were on the new Sim, and they had some kind of name like "Land Terraformers" or something, and they looked like they were working on the land!

coco

Jeffrey's a mite wordy, sure. But, holy sox, not even Bulwer-Lytton deserved this kind of trout-slap. How 'bout *you* attempt *half* as many words as he did, Heather, and on a topic as equally worthy of consideration, and see if you conjugate everything according to Hoyle. (Excuse me: Webster.)

And that's only to pick a nit with your own grammarian nit-picking. That's not even to mention your assumption of J.G. "looking down his nose." I've seen Jeffrey's nose, okay? And he'd be more likely to look down that well-sculpted proboscis at *this* unwashed avatar than at any generic audience he's addressing or discussing.

And, as of yet, he ain't did it.

"He ain't did it," yes, that's what I said. You having trouble parsing that?

What Euterpe said:

Nope that's what daytime is for.

Nice.
When you manage to get the technology together, please let me know. I'll pour whatever capital I have into it so we can change the world economy into a Star-Trekian utopia. I know you'd get that kind of backing from hundreds of sources.

Of course, it would take a lot of hard work, and capital investment... you know, the old Conservative Work Ethic.

Government funding will do. Keep your capital investment

Where's the government getting that capital?

Oh yeah, from those making money!

Guess I don't get to keep all of my capital, huh?

Then the work will be done for free, since the Replicator will be the last thing made by human hands,,,

Im getting confused.
Gor = robots = alts to conserative work ethics.

Think my brain is going to overload on this one folks.

Cool. How many physicists, chemists, nanotechnologists, engineers and programmers are working on this?
(And how are they feeding themselves?)
'cause, really, I'm desperate to have a taste of that life.

For the record, I didn't say SL is shallow.

"if SL lacks substance or value..."

"If the values in SL are askew..."

"If people are making purchases in spite of..."

I might believe SL exhibits some of these traits, but the declaration you attribute to me is not something I would make.

Yeow. I just now have time to think again. I've been running around campus for the past five hours working on getting some last credits for my degree checked out, so I have the edges of what was a very big headache. Bear with me here.

This... might get a little long.


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Starting from the top:

First, I apologize for it being long. You were warned that this was somewhat self-indulgent from the get-go.

Really, if these ideas were easily compressed into "See spot run," I'd give you that version. But seeing as how these forums have pages upon pages of threads on all of these issues, I took the more complete approach.



On the nature of needs: really, our avatars don't have needs out of Second Life, but I feel we as people do. I'll consider addressing that one in a future posting. It has several caveats that I like.



On branding: For those that came off my post thinking this was somehow a long-winded discussion on the state of business in Second Life, allow me to elaborate.


I feel that branding does work, yet in some ways misses the point. Nor is my measure of success monetary value alone, as blaze tried to insinuate.



Here's why I chose those six names. I'd also love for those cited to comment:

Aimee Weber:
PREEN. Though someone else brought up the fact they know Aimee as Aimee, which is quite relevant to my argument. More on that in a moment.

Anshe Chung:
Dreamland and related land sales. Anshe is a celebrity, and justifiably so - she's worked quite hard on the ground to maintain so much land, outcries of "land baron" aside.

Cubey Terra:
Masterful vehiclemaker that's achieved "brand" status in his own right, as well as his exposure in Abbott's Aerodrome (is that one or two "t"s?).

Francis Chung:
Another easy choice, for Seburo, ROAM, and other success stories regarding branding.

Foxy Xevious:
Team Bedazzle. We all love Jimmy's work to boot.

Kermitt Quirk:
Tringo. Even though event hosts use Tringo for some "shady" events in my opinion, Kermitt is the epitome of the capitalist success story in Second Life.


I use them as success stories precisely for their image, not necessarily for their money status or personal clout. And, in doing so, to serve that image is indeed not everything (despite what is taught) further down the post. What's left beyond that is a group of fairly competant human beings doing what they do best.

Intermission:
http://www.samandfuzzy.com/archive.php?id=35
http://www.samandfuzzy.com/archive.php?id=36


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I expected this one would strike a nerve with some people (if not quite so many), so I've already prepared where this all comes from and what it's about in the back of my mind. Here goes:

A while back, I ran with a crowd that predominantly played MMOs. One of the things they absolutely loved to do was post articles that get you to think about the issues involved, including virtual economies, why treadmills and the games work in the first place... et cetera.

As luck would have it, this group stumbled upon a little "game" called Second Life. Here they happily dismissed it as the next gen Active Worlds and professed its shallow existance.

Clip to the present. While most of their arguments were without merit, some of them do stick. In looking at Second Life versus the generalized "MMO," one of the most interesting contrasts is consistency and stories we can attribute to the experience. "Hey, that was some great raid we had the other night!"

In thinking of my time in Second Life, I can think of very little that is predominantly Second Life beyond Tringo and discussions of the early metaverse (which, arguably, is more drawn from the work of Neal Stephenson). As a collective whole, we've drawn in thousands upon thousands of wonderful and amazing things, yet they feel drawn in.

In their stead, collective thought largely centers around concepts of money and politics, much like the real world. Yet, it would be so much more interesting to me if we had more advanced concepts than Tringo, brands, and celebrities to point to and say, "See? That is Second Life in its own way."

Now, I would like to attribute this to the fact our technology is limited and that inspiration is hard to come by, yet I can't. Instead, the writing analogy serves message to what I'm really getting at here.

We really fail to attribute meaning to our work in Second Life as a collective whole. Contrast this to the traditional MMO environment, where everything fits happily in its niche and goes to painstaking detail for consistency, Second Life often comes off disjointed.

And this, I think, is why we're slowly moving away from one another into our own "worlds" of island sims. While several concepts of physical distance, and communication, and prims, et al work in Second Life, the concept of a physical grid where box houses transition into works of Picasso just somehow feels... wrong.

I highly respect the concept, but I think, watching more and more, that it's not for everybody. By "writing our own stories," I think that as the island sims develop, we will begin to see grids that maintain that missing sense of consistency and breath meaning into their actions. Darklife, Dreamland, Fairchang, Gorean, Simcast et al, Faded Reality, and even the main grid pale in comparison to what we've begun here, which is why I don't believe we need to do much more than we already are out of gut instinct.

Pendari might worry that she missed the point, yet I think she drives it home in two tiny sentences:


And bringing that out, to me, makes this whole thread worthwhile.

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So what's left? As a Senior with a business major in computing, historically my personal views are against the grain of business as we know it. Living off an income or social status in Second Life is just fine and dandy, but every so often we should catch up with ourselves and remember why it is we do what we do.

Too often these forums, the press, Western thinking, and Second Life itself all get caught up in how money is somehow the ultimate panacea. I see Philip parroting this view, and it makes me more than a little sad.

What is all the money good for if it isn't used wisely? If coping with concepts of greed and altruism is to be human, then using the power invested in you wisely is to be humane.

That's why I start off with views of business, and transition into concepts of meaning. We just cannot idly stand by and talk only about cash flows and investing behaviors when there's far more to it than that. The media especially has been bad on this topic, as have many talks in these forums.

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And I left out Heather's comments. Purposefully. It sounds like the two of us should have tea at Ravenglass sometime.