Getting a little tired

Blue = Kewl ty

Viva De Revolution!

All I can say to this is "Microsoft", "Sears" etc...(insert name of a corporate giant that seems to have a hand in the evolution of any small buisness/enterprise/media)

EDIT to add this: Also the Big corps who have their hand in the pockets of "YOUR" politicians who "donate" to funds for their own interest and not the interest of the common person.




I agree with Cat in this way, Selling goods IRL and useing SL as a medium to advertise it is no good.

If you sell goods that Advertise SL on or with RL products to help promote SL I'm all for it. Just don't bombard the SL world with it, we are already here we don't need to be sold to SL.

I don't think we have anything to fear from big corporations advertising their wares in SL, at least not in the near term. The playerbase isn't nearly big enough to make it worth their while. I think what we *are* likely to see is artists and designers in our community perhaps finding buyers for their RL artwork and services. Since SL is a kind of refuge for artists I don't have a problem with that at all. Even if corporate influence does find its way into SL I'm not sure I'd care much about that either so long as I'm not being hassled by sim to sim salespeople. If there's a store that opens in SL that I don't like I can simply not go there. Anyway, my point is that no big corporation in their right mind would spend money to advertise inside SL right now. There couldn't possibly be sufficient return on investment.

I think you see Nike and Levis in There because There Inc. solicited their involvement and most likely is doing it for them for free for the sake of having those big names associated with their game. I'm pretty sure LL is hip to the fact that trying to do the same thing in SL would go over like a lead baloon. As always, I could be wrong

Indeed. i always love to use myself as an example here.

Everyone worries about "big bad corporation inc." storming in and raping Our Fair Program for profits. It's not like they can strip mine Tan, anyway.

In any case, people against "corporate" interests in SL usually hush up when I bring up the fact that i could sell my music in here, and if they would have an issue with that.

interesting double standard..

LF

Nope. Not shutting up so much as saying, well, I don't mind if the individual artist sells their RL stuff. I do mind, however, if it becomes megacorp inc. playground and actually *does* start looking more like There as a result. There is a soul-less wasteland of shallow, greedy people. SL still maintains some semblence of a refuge for creative types, who (if they are anything like me) would drown in the overbearing corporateness of There. Thank god we aren't There, actually.

I'm not against making money via SL. I'm against only a few people being able to make money because the system is skewed toward the big guy, not the little guy. Make sense, LF? .

Zana

So far as I know, SL has never been intended as a game or a seperate world, cut off from RL. I always thought of the end goal as being more like the web -- a vast network of sites being used for everything from entertainment to business to education.

I don't understand how businesses or individuals using SL as an advertising medium or -- god forbid! -- a tool for commerce is a bad idea at all. To me, it sounds like a very good one. How does a company, even a very large one, owning a sim or two and using it for commercial gain... well, how does that even affect anyone at all?

Linden Lab isn't There. They're not going to impose some system of rewarding corporations while excluding the users. That's completely contrary to the whole point of SL.

That said, I definitely don't think advertising in SL is terribly profitable at this point... unless you're an advertiser, in which case, you should go give the Lindens money now.

I suppose as long as LL allows it and there's a market, they're well within their rights to do so.

However for many people SL is an escape from RL, and as soon as it's no longer and escape I'll go elsewhere...

Especially if it *does* become like the web - starting off as a useful tool but being destroyed through greed, scams, spam, littered with nothing but ads shouting in your face when you're trying to look for meaningful information.

Del, can you seriously say that the web is less useful and beneficial now than it was back around 1992 or so? There are things on the web now that I wouldn't want to be without... books and music sales, google news, access to newspapers around the world, portals and commerce for 3d artists and animators, tutorial sites, the ability to program my ReplayTV from anywhere in the world, easy access to technical support and manuals for every piece of equipment I've ever purchased, user reviews for books, music, and electronics, price watch, free games, mmogs... I could go on for hours. The benefits to me personally that came from commercial interests getting involved on the web so vastly outweigh the annoying aspects that you couldn't pay me to go back to the way it was ten years ago. Sorry, don't mean to hijack the thread but I find your sentiments truly bewildering and have a hard time believing that you actually mean it. Really the ONLY things online these days that I hate are pop-ups, pop-overs, pop-unders, and ads with audio. Aside from that it's all good.

. . . and, to further Chip's point. If you put any effort into it whatsoever, you can block any Pop-Starts.

hehe Pop-Start. Gonna start using that as my collective term for all those annoying pop-whatevers.

Thanks Chip

Yes okay I was exaggerating (or perhaps predicting?), with a sprinkle of nostalgia for the peaceful world it used to be.

It's *based* on truth though, which is the difficulty in actually searching for things. It's hard to think of examples when you need them, but countless times I've tried to Google for some information on a product and received nothing but places desperate to sell it. Particularly the likes of Kelkoo, who seem to keep a huge database of product names and dynamically generate results to match your search.

Maybe I'm just in need of a better search engine... Google had its day producing amazing results and then got abused, the same life cycle that Altavista went through...

Yes I know about popup blocking, I use Mozilla

It seems that people have more of a problem with sellers seeking them out than they do with sellers existing (to be seeked out) in SL.

That's like one of those F annoying popup ads that appears over a webpage, as opposed to a non-obtusive ad that's off to the side and doesn't have to be clicked. Big difference...

As a side note, I really, really hope that the programmers/company that made the recent "in-your-face" popup ads die painfully, while choking on excrement.

Not all websites are useless. Chip's right, if you think the web's usefulness has decreased over the last decade, you're insane. Or on drugs. Or both. No, the web's more useful than it's ever been.

Don't compare SL to a single website, compare it to the web. If you want an escape, a private hangout, you can HAVE that.

I have to agree with Del on this one too. This isnt the game I signed up for. Its changing daily, into something that I disagree with on a "player/elfin's" point of view. I came to SL to have fun. Sales, marketing, ect. take a whole lot of that VR away from me. It's becoming more of a reality than a fantasy. So instead of just finding a new game I kinda like the idea of saying "hey this stinks, I am not wanting to pay for these types of changes LL" I hope everyone understands that much.

Cat

*edit*

Charilie; Thank you for your support on this I could not of said it better myself! I have nothing to add to your post, it was excellent.

Cat

Lets say for example there was 1 store in ever sim where ppl wanted me to buy their RL products off their RL web site. Where would I escape to? I have it now but what about a year from now.

Will we all be sitting back and saying "I should of said something a year ago, now its too late." I understand your point of view. I just dont see a need for it all around me.

If someones things are that good I will come to them asking for tshirts or music.

LL already gave the green light on ppl selling their stuff (why on earth I have no idea, IMO)

So now what? Ah but what about a year from now?

I see that Del has already responded to this but I took the comparison of today's web with that of the early 90's a different way. The first phrase that came to mind for me was "Signal to Noise Ratio". Clearly there is MORE on the web now that there was then, but finding the good stuff, no matter what search engine you use becomes harder and harder. The "free" search engines more and more send people to sites that pay for the privilege of being at the top of the list, but even without that it's easy to "game" the system. There are whole books written on how to trick search engines into sending people to your site.

Back in the early days, if you posted a question about science in a newsgroup, there is a good chance that an actual scientist, expert in the subject matter of your question would respond. These days, at best, you are directed to a web site that may SEEM authoritative, may CLAIM to have the inside scoop on some issue, but then you find out it's just some old retired guy with basic web skills, sitting around in his underwear with nothing better to do. But let's leave me out of this.

In addition to all the new GOOD things you mentioned that are one the web, there seems often to be just as much that is bad. Identity theft, stalking, con artists, rip offs, viruses and worms, and of course SPAM. In the early 90's you would think nothing of identifying yourself, even giving out your full name and address on the Internet. Now almost nobody does that, and with good reason.

There are a surprising number of people out there who take delight in ruining whatever online activity people take part in. We have to devise complex rating schemes to try and filter these people out somehow without having to resort to an online police force. But the griefers figure out these schemes pretty quickly. Build up their ratings in Slashdot by cut-and-pasting other peoples posts, so that they can later nuke another discussion. We have griefers like that in SL too, and I often think its more luck than anything else when they slip up and get caught.

I'll grant that the good outweighs the bad, but ever so slightly. I don't subscribe to magazines or newspapers any more, but I probably read far more than I ever have in my life, without killing trees. On the other hand, I used to get out more, ride my bike, play racketball, or just hang out with people. The inertia of sitting at the PC most of the day is addictive, and it's harder and harder to focus on making it a usefull experience rather than just a way to kill time. For those willing to make that effort, the possibilities are enormous though.

As to the original topic... to expect SL to be any purer than the Internet as a whole I think is unrealistic. We may have been spoiled by the selection process that went into the Beta. Even for the first few months after production everyone seemed so nice and to get along so well, but for me, it was always inevitable that "undesirable elements" would arrive, and of course, also inevitable that there would be disagreements about what exactly is desirable and what is not.

On the other hand, "getting a little tired" of all of this implies that there is some way to wave a magic wand and make us all live happily ever after. What's wrong with the Internet isn't some evil property of TCP/IP or the HTTP protocol, it's the darned users. In the early 90's the users were university and research types. I was on the internet to work, not to play. It's the rif-raf that screwed up the internet, and the same rif-raf will screw up SL if there are not both procedures, and clear thinking people in place to stop them. Unfortunately, that does not mean that SL can become a "walled community" requiring an IQ and political correctness test to get in. If you want that, then you should start your own company (and make sure you have a lot of money in the bank to fund it).

In SL we CAN associate with like-minded people though. We CAN to some extent isolate ourselves "geographically" from those we don't get along with. In a VERY big version of SL I can imagine large communities that don't allow any advertising, or any commercial entities, or any __fill in the blank__. The best thing that Linden Labs can do to make this happen is to get big. Lots of geography will mean that each person has lots of choices about where to "call home". Like other experiments in connectedness (Orkut, Slashdot, and others) SL may actually make the rest of the Internet easier to work with at some point. We are a long way from that point in time, but I think there is hope of it happening.

Points to ponder

1) it was inevitable that the fence I build would not hold the cows in; or keep the wolfs out.

2) I should of taken the time and built a better fence to begin with.

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Mac put it perfectly... exactly the point I was trying (not very effectively) to put across The phrase 'signal to noise ratio' definitely sums it up.

the signal-to-noise ratio may be less now, but there's still tons of information out there, just waiting to be learned.

I've been on the internet since I was 14 (8 years ago, thanks very much , and yeah, there was a lot less "crap" floating about, but there was a lot less stuff in general floating about. A couple games sites... what, two search engines? Altavista and Yahoo (oh and Lycos too, sorry). A few news organizations, and a ton of AOL-hosted personal home pages.

After 1995 everyone got on the dot.com bandwagon, and you suddenly had an influx of stupid pages, but you also had a ton of websites go up that are SUPREMELY USEFUL. Everything2.com, wikipedia, google, and so on and so forth.

In any case, if you REALLY want to dig into "experts" and whatnot, don't even bother on the web. Get a Usenet client and go fishing in there. Tons of scientists still use it.

LF