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Linden Lab invited people to join them at GDC if they were able. Not having anything better to do I decided to go. If you look at my flickr stream (see ‘flickr’ link, top right) you can see all my pictures from the events. I will produce a fuller write-up shortly.

In any case, it was a lot of fun and a great laugh and I met some crazy and lovely people. Hope I can attend again! And I swear, we were only passing through that mature sim to get to a pub!

For a while now there has been discussion about government in SL, mostly from the Neualtenburg group, who have a town formed high on the sides of a mountain in Second Life. This was recently reprized in the excellent Second Life Herald, and got me thinking.

While discussions have wandered back and forth about the purpose and role of a government in Second Life, there’s one point I’ve never seen adequately answered, and that is, why bother?

In the real world the government is essentially a force for compelling us to do things, whether that be follow rules, pay taxes, drive on the left (or right!) and whathaveyou. Government also handles our relations with other states, nominally, to further our own interests (thus, if you drive a big car and are against war for oil, then in my books, you’re a hypocrite).

But in Second Life a player government will have no power of compulsion and its citizens live such transient lives that rulings would be nigh-impossible to enforce. How would a government be able to govern without power or a populace?

In the real world government, essentially, solves problems for us that we are unable to solve ourselves. When government is working well, this is what it is doing, in my book. Government ensures we don’t crash into each other too much through enforcing certain rules. It makes sure we have a variety of services and that the weakest are never left to rot. It tries to ensure that other people can’t come and take our stuff, and that other nations can’t come and take our land.

And none of these or related useful functions government in Second Life will ever be able to do under any conceivable scenario.

So why bother? Well, I think there are useful roles for central leadership in Second Life, but it’s not through some circle-jerk of player government where wannabe politicos and revolutionaries can practice for the day they work in the lofty heights of local government, or dream of their utopias. Instead, those forming an SL government should focus on what they can do to make SL resident’s lives better. And I think there are a couple of options.

Having a bonded sellers program would be a start. What if a central body or government signed up retailers to a program where the retailers agreed to stick to a code of practice and dispute resolution process in return for being able to display the ‘bonded retailer’ logo on their stalls? The retailer would pay L$500 or-so as a bond, in case they failed to uphold a dispute resolution against them. This would be one really useful way SL government could solve problems related to trusting retailers and consumers getting value for money.

Another way might be to lend government ‘district planning officials’ to groups wanting to agree on rules for residential areas or suburbs. The officials could have a stock of standard agreements between players and again, perhaps hold a bond centrally in case of dispute. The official would also impartially hear disputes in a tribunal of some kind, thus helping players who are part of a controlled residence feel confident it won’t just fall apart.

However, there’s one problem with this kind of thinking. The problem is it’s just not sexy enough for many people interested in SL government. It is however, eminently useful, modest and practical. What’s more, it’s also doable and an inclusive way to involve more people in the bigger idea.

In the end, if SL government focuses on how it can solve problems it will be successful. If it spends its time talking about charters, organization, a constitution and bill of rights then really, it’s just a waste of time as it’s only purpose will be to inflate the egos of those involved. None of these sorts of discussions actually help players and they’re just not necessary for government to work, despite what certain educational backgrounds might imply.

Fix problems. And over time the government will grow, maybe even into something meaningful. Flying in government, fully formed, as if from outer space, will never interest or be of use to anyone.

Saw an interesting article the other day on the global consciousness humanity seems to share. It was worthy of linking I think. It will be interesting so see what ongoing study is done and what it concludes.

I did a little research last night and discovered that a search through ‘all’ will pull results from event titles as well as property and other descriptions. This leads to the conclusion that you should make your event titles as descriptive as possible. Of course, being a title, the event will be descriptive anyway, but thinking about the keywords will really help.

So, if you’re running a bingo event, don’t just call it “Gaming at Joe Bobbs”, instead, make sure to put ‘bingo’ in the title, heck, throw in a bit of ‘win money’, or the location name, theme, or whathaveyou. “Goth Bingo – Win Prizes and Money” might be a much more attractive and findable title for your event!

Today I’m bringing Second Life business owners another little optimization tip to increase visitors. If you’re running a shop in Second Life, you might want to look at creatively adding some of the frequent misspellings of popular keywords to your site descriptions. You would probably want to hide these at the bottom of a profile, but they might just do the trick for you.

Clothes shops could consider dreses along with dresses, lingere along with lingerie, and so on. Think about your products and shop and think about the most common kinds of misspellings. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it and have a profile stuffed with random words, but if you have a particularly badly misspelled name or product type you should definitely think about it.

I hope this little series of optimizatin ideas proves useful to you. Let me know if you notice any results!

Linden Lab recently introduced a Sponsored Links program in Second Life. This interesting idea sees people bid on eBay for a chance to have one of 20 slots on the Sponsored Links section on the in-game ‘find’ menu and, for some, on the web site as well.

While an interesting idea, I’m somewhat concerned at its implementation. For starters, by listing individual slots the final sale prices are varying between around $13 and $40. On average slots are going for $20-30. The wide variance in cost for a slot means ROI for the businesses involved (can they be considered hobbies any more at this point?) must be considered quite unpredictable. Its also a time-consuming task as you micro-manage your budget and try and maintain leadership in at least one bid race. All this on the back of no data from Linden Lab on views for the ads, click-throughs from the web site or any case studies of success the ads can generate whatsoever. It’s a risky investment for no proven return, yet it seems popular enough.

Also of concern is that the price you pay for your ad in no way influences your position on the sponsored link list. You would expect that the slot that sold for most would give the buyer a first position on the list, with the lowest winning bid being last. But no, instead, the list is sorted alphabetically. At the top, “* Animations and poses”, and at the bottom, “Timeless Trinkets”. It would seem only fair that those who pay the most go to the top, not those who know the priority sorting of asci characters. The last thing we need is a bunch of “### AAA Great Place” type listings.

For a toe-in-the-water experiment the sponsored links are an interesting move by Linden Lab, representing an official acknowledgement of the economic closeness between real and Second Life. However, I think they should try and refine the scheme as quickly as possible. I, for one, would be interested in numbers for the views and clickthroughs before I considered an investment. For a cost of $30 (around $7,500Lindens), I would need to be fairly sure it was going to be profitable and right now it’s not clear at all how beneficial the purchase will be.

Hamlet nominates Game SLave as link of the week!

Yesterday I was searching for Metadverse, the ad network being built in Second Life by Rather Underthorn. But I couldn’t find it. An average searcher might have given up there, but instead I persevered and a did a search, discovering I had actually spelt the name wrong. The correct spelling was Metaadverse, and so I was able to find the location and organizer. What does this teach us? Yes, Rathe needs to put somewhere in his Metaadverse description a miss-spelling of his company’s name. I imagine many others are capable of making a similar mistake, and putting the common misspelling in his land description will ensure interested people still find his shop.

If you own a property with an unusual name or a hard-to-spell name you might want to think about adding in the odd misspelling to your property or personal profiles. The DarkLife project suffers from a misspelling problem, in that people often refer to it as Dark Life. Thus I have tried to make sure both types of spellings are used in various places.

Hope you enjoy today’s tip. I’ll bring you one more at the end of the week!

Lo Jacobs had some excellent optimization tips on the forum, pointing out a couple of things I overlooked. I will quote her post in full, as it’s full of good idea.

They are good tips, but I must make one correction here; if you write “dresses” in your store description it WILL show up in Find if someone types “dress”. I’ve done it myself.

Also, not to nitpick but there IS limited space. They’re great tips and I try to make my store descriptions as accessible as possible (utilizing much the same logic as yours) but when you’ve got makeup AND shoes AND pants AND dresses AND skins AND shirts, not to mention formal wear, lingerie, and men’s clothes, and possibly hats and animations and hair (not that I have all that stuff) — you have to decide what you want to put in.

Another thing is, you still want to make the description appealing, throw in a little advertising, which also takes up space.

So it’s a little tough to do sometimes especially when you’ve got a huge variety of things to sell.