The MM - SL's biggest joke

These nominations could have been discussed without sledging MM or dismissing anyone's work.

Thank you, Fade.

P2

I agree ... all of the channls for communication are too fragmented; there is /NO/ way to reach any significant group of the population.

Maybe LL should sell ads in the MOD and for that blue notice box they use for global notices.

Reading this thread i begun to wonder about something else.
"the results are odd".
Ok, and?
I mean, it's not like this is a complete injustice that would damage the truly best whatever of SL by oh so unjustly placing someone on a throne (and as such deserves a forum post whose belonging to this particular section of the forum is shaky to say the least, by the way).
Sure, someone is gonna get a mild amount of free advertisement, someone else is not. Where's the problem?
I really doubt that not being voted as best whatever of SL in whatever newspaper's poll will damage my business or will lower the quality of my products.
So where exactly is the problem? It's just a poll of one magazine. No one is gonna loose ANYTHING from it (besides receiving, maybe, a little hit to their egos), so i wonder where all those complaints come from. Are you really that worried anbout your favourite designer's ego?
I repeat. No one is gonna loose ANYTHING from the MM's poll, so where exactly is the problem?

While I like the MoD idea, there's also a big problem here. While I also like to complain about the lack of a decent communcations network, I also don't want to start getting spammed. While I love the new group tools, I've already left a few groups that were abusing them. The new, shiny toy is leading to a few guaranteed GROUP NOTICE boxes I have to kill upon every log in. Now, try to imagine that on a grid wide, full population scale.

It's a tough problem, and I haven't heard any really good, robust solutions to it yet. (Although the MotD rental would be a nice start, heh).

As to the original poster's intent: look at the join date, the number of posts, and how many times he's returned to the thread to reply and engage in debate. Some pathetic person who didn't get nominated is having an alt-based pity party. Too bad they got pwned by logic instead of having their little drama really erupt.

Regards,

-Flip

Some sort of totally opt-in, subscribable channels would be neat.

hm. No login. No verification.

Vote early, vote often!

I noticed it myself, now the question is: what's worse between a scorned egotic creator that tries to stir trouble with an alt (in the wrong forum), and the ones that actually fall for it grabbing the torches and pitchforks to join the joy of the slanting?

As Fashion Editor, I can assure you there wasn't favoritism involved in the process, or in general in the paper. I haven't done any articles on several very good designers who are friends of mine, and I have no problem pointing out flaws with events run by my friends.On the poll, I was as surprised by some of these nominations as all of you.

Moreover, there is never any direct relation between advertising and articles. I find that accusation either incredibly ignorant or purposefuly insulting. In my section, Iris and I work hard to bring interesting articles from the fashion world every week, and we rarely consider what someone does apart from the story. Whether they're advertising with us or even work for the M2 is irrelevant; we're covering that individual story, and we always do it as completely and fairly as we can.

The best way to get in the M2 Fashion section isn't to be a friend of mine; it's to contact me directly, and be agressive about getting my attention. While I love to go looking for articles, I also love it when people let me know about stories out there.

Whatever your personal opinions of Katt and Phoenix, they put a hell of a lot of work into producing a professional product every week - a product that is better-edited than many, many RL newspapers, BTW. No matter what process they used to make this poll, there would be people who would whine about it being unfair.

Bullshit. Most of us didn't even know we had a chance to nominate anyone. I don't really care, but just looking at the survey, it's obviously incomplete. I like Katt Kongo, I just thought the survey wasn't up to snuff.

Although I'm not a fan of "top" lists, what the Metaverse Messenger was trying to do was something that is seen a lot in RL publications. It's considered a fun way to learn about things others like, which the reader may not be familiar with.

The problem is that, in SL, there's no way to get the input of others, especially in a short time frame. I've been running photo contests for more than a year and if I work very hard I get a lot of entries but if I don't, I get few. I've thought about it a lot and reached no solutions. It's really hard to get people to participate - or even to know they CAN participate.

That being the way it is, perhaps the format just isn't the right one for SL at this time. Maybe a different approach that gets groups involved (different clubs' top tens, top ten list in a region or role-play genre - I don't know) might work. Maybe, if the community gets involved, a write-in ballot heavily advertised on many different sites would work.

There's little community involvement in things as there's little community, period. The grid is huge - there's things I'll probably never see and other things I have nothing in common with. However - maybe it's time for the grid to be broken down into areas or such for the purposes of creating communities.

I'm just writing down a few thoughts that may be right or wrong - but in any case, I think the Metaverse Messenger staff's intentions were good, but the idea that works fine in RL communities doesn't work at all in SL now. That's the real crux, I think. What can we do about it? Should we do anything? Is there anything we can do?

I Like the MM (I've taken a full page ad with them every week since their first issue.) And I would like to point out that they are at liberty to conduct this survey any way they please, including asking for nominations, and running with however many nominations they receive (even if they only get a few.)

But MM needs to remember that they are attaching their reputation to the phrase "Best Of" for this piece, and therefore should be very careful about what those words mean to their audience. Normally if a poll does not obtain enough participation to be a representative sample of the population, then the results are discarded and the poll is done over. MM is not morally obligated to do this, but if they do not obtain a statistically significant sample then questions of credibility regarding their use of the phrase "best of" could cause long term Public Relations damage. Blaming the readers may have also been a bad way to respond to this.

I would suggest starting over, and working on a better campaign to solicit nominations. You could post in all of the forums, ask bloggers to help out, get on SecondCast, get in-world DJs to help, and maybe take some banner ads on Snapzilla and some of the fashion blogs. This is expensive and difficult, but featuring a journalistic "Best Of" story is a great boon for your newspaper! You have to expect expenses for such an attraction.

If you don't want to go through the hassle, then the alternative is to fess up about the significance of the results in the story itself. Rather than "best of" perhaps you can call it "Unofficial favorites." If the number of people who did nominations is small enough, perhaps you could just interview those individuals and ask for them to talk about their favorites things in SL.

The bottom line is to tell your readers exactly what they're looking at. Don't call it "best of" unless the survey was conducted in such a way that you would be willing to put yout newspaper's reputation on the line for that claim.

That's my 2 cents.

On the one hand, this thread was clearly started by someone trying to spread shit under the cover of an alt, and there have been some unjustified personal accusations and insults. On the other hand there has also been a fair bit of constructive criticism - more so on the SC thread, actually - and frankly, come on, you can't say this is going to result in a believable "Best Of SL" list. As Aimee says it could actually do the MM much more damage than anyone else.

If Katt and Phoenix want to cancel it, it's no skin off my nose, but I'd certainly suggest that instead of that they extend the nomination deadline. As I said on SC, the purpose of nominations is to try to get an unbiased and comprehensive list of candidates that people can vote for, it's not an end in itself.

Tks Christiano - I wish more had noted your bright about that horrible days.. week history - post...

I was myself close to leave SL that weekend (Phoenix knows more knows about that and of course my GF know..) - and the days after was a complete disaster.. for us all in SL.

And this was not only hitting me it hitted all in SL..

I myself read that issue long time after.. al disaster.

PLEASE al - RE-read Cristiano´s post once more including you Katt.. and reconsider what you have posted and do a marvelous restart.. I have seen some using the diploma in the bottom of the posts here.... and of course at walls in the stores in SL..

Time to rethink..

/Tina

Very true. But that's not really the point.



Wich brings us back to my point Lo. The survey is obviously incomplete, and? Every survey will be, incomplete and faulty. This kind of "popularity contests" normally never get true-to-reality results. Last year i won "best car maker" category. Am i the best car maker of SL? Not even in my sweetest dreams.

Is the incomplete survey gonna damage anyone to the point of warranting an entire thread of protest and slanting (in the wrong forum)?
I'm not in the nominations, and i don't really feel damaged.
As i said, someone is gonna get a little free advertisement and visibility, someone else is not. The ones that are getting it will gain something, but this doesn't mean the ones that aren't will loose anything.
It's not that not being between the nominees of a "best of" of a single magazine will reduce the quality of their work or their fanbase (even because the true "Best of SL" for sure don't NEED any addtional visibility, so i definately think they're not gonna be bothered much).
Someone will feel an hit in their ego, but honestly if their ego is so easily slammed, IMHO they need to get back a little of perspective.

It doesn't actually make much difference to the world if the MM is seen as publishing a daft "Best Of" list. It makes quite a difference to the MM though.

BTW M2 poll are about the ”Are you considering leaving SL due to all the recent problems?”.. so Katt please. We al had a terrible time.. cross my fingers it are for ever behind us..

No one can have missed it..



http://www.metaversemessenger.com/webpoll.htm

/Tina

Sure, but that definately doesn't warrant a good portion of the posts seen here (and actually doesn't warrant this thread itself, looking at the post that started it).
What i personally did was looking at the names, when i saw a name that was worthy of actually being elected (in my eyes) as one of the best, i voted for him/her, where i didn't see anyone that really tickled my fancy, i simply didn't voteand moved on with my day.
The results of that poll won't affect anyone else than a few (i HOPE) egomaniac designers like the owner of the alt that started this thread and MM's credibility itself (wich sure doesn't depend in a large part on such kind of "en passant" surveys anyway). I doubt that's really a big problem.

No, a lot of the posts here on the first few pages are the sort of stirring personal-attack nonsense that seems, unfortunately, to be part and parcel of the SL fashion scene.

However, personally speaking, if I knew the limited nature of the nominations involved I would treat any resulting vote as pretty pointless, and I'm sure the MM doesn't want to be seen as pointless. And I have no personal issue here with anyone involved or with nominations, I'm not interested in that sort of thing.