I do understand that the core audience reading this article is from the States. But please, pretty please, can ‘journalist’ at least make a minimal effort to look at the bigger picture? How to achieve this on a global scale?

Do those writers actually have knowledge about that this internet thingy is something spread internationally? You know, connecting the world? This is Cnet we are talking about and not Little town in the prairy news.

Of course if you report on such an discussion you should report mostly about what was said etc. But would it kill you to add even a paragraph about the problem?

If those kind of discussions are started and focussed on US law alone, then we can start all over again once they discover that there is more to those virtual worlds done than just in the US!

How do tax payers in the US feel that their representatives spend time with doing things more than once instead of doing it right from the start? “Ups! Surprisingly our plan did not work, now we have to deal with those funny people from outside our world view. There seems to be money too …”

This is fricking 2006. It should have come also to the attention of some tax people that there is more than just their own country.

Especially when you want to collect their money too. Start thinking globally with local in mind and then make it local usable.

Tag(s): closed minds, international tax, second life, virtual worlds

I saw on Techcrunch an article about a new social software site called Rupture will have a plugin for Wow and that they want World of Warcraft Users as their beta testers. Which is a clever move: Instead of getting us beta junkies they use testers with an actual need to use the service.

But it got me wondering about something: How many people really use the net as a tool to enhance how they live / work / have fun in their first live and for how many people is this really different?

My contact page only lists some of the services I am using and it is already a mess, but if you would have a deeper look at it, you would see that they are all tied in together, you usually find my nick on forums to be nixande etc. You can research what I say and do pretty good job. (Still you will be missing out on the parts of my personality and life I intentionally do not share with anyone online but with close friends.)

So for a person like me a new social software site which has the intention to allow me to integrate rather than force me to reenter data is compelling. I want technology to help me and make my life easier. There are several inventions I am really waiting for to finally make the step from Science Fiction to reality.

I might choose from time to time to ‘make’ such a second identity for different purposes, but generally I am ‘myself’. But that is me. What about you?

Do you prefer to keep those lives seperate and do not wish them to mix? To which length do you go to keep them separated or the oposite, get them ‘together’? Would a service which let’s you integrate your data more easily be more attractive or do you find this to be creepy because it feels like with google when “all your data are belong to us”?

Do you want your Second Life to be just that – a second one, with no or few interactions to your first one? Do you want your chat identity to stay hidden, or do you want the benefit of not needing to care about which irc networt you are just entering because your friends will recognize you right away?

Technorati Tags: social software tools, sl, second life, wow, world of warcraft

As I read on techcrunch, Dell wants to make a move in Second Life but as a closed off, invite only event:

This new trend of announcing news in Second Life is generally pissing off journalists, who don’t have a lot of time to waste. But Dell is apparently going ahead with plans to host an invite-only press event inside of Second Life on Tuesday morning at 10:15 AM PST to announce that they’ll have an ongoing presence within the virtual world.

The virtual event is under heavy embargo with a select few journalists (we weren’t invited), but one journalist, annoyed that he is being forced to create a Second Life account and log in to see what the announcement is, decided to just pass it on to us to break the news.

First of all – I am getting tired of companies just hopping into SL as a mee too!!! and expect me to be excited about it. This is just as lame as all those companies and media organisations popping out telling the world “we are the first!!”

(A tip: As most of the people dealing in this space seem to be male, remember sex? This is even lamer than “being first” at sex.)

Some disagree, like Paul Short writes in the comments:

Lame? I think not.

Imagine 2 years from now when Second Life is one of the largest internet commerce enablers on the planet.

Imagine the SL client preloaded on Dell and Alienware computers in the near future.

They will already be packed with Windows Vista which leaves not enough space at these margins they have to include even more RAM and speed for a ressource sucking system as Second Life. But more to the point: What sense does having an invite only, SL only event make now, today?

None at all – except reducing the possible coverage. In two years this may be a viable option, but today?

How many journalists – mind you those are the text base crowd – actually have computers at their hands which can even start Second Life?

How many global IT departments have already cleared SL as an allowed installation?

How are journalists supposed to get the information there out of the system easily?

In two years when the setups are much better – yes absolutly. But today? That is just screaming “how to reduce exposure”. Especially with text loving journalists. Is that what somebody really wants? A reduced exposure of their own event?

I use the word office as I do not see any real news at the moment out there – guess what, you reading this could have been informed about what Dell is planning to do but you will have to wait for some journalists to attend and report back on it. You know in the paper magazines you do not read anyway.

[What would be interesting and actually would make it newsworthy is if they would have a setup like a store where I can order a in game Dell and watch how it gets assembled or something like it. But then again it is a PR/marketing move so probably nothing new there ...]

Technorati Tags: second life, sl, dell, event organisation

Most american articles rarely mention that there is something in Second Life which has to do with Sex whereas the German articles most correctly state that there is also a lot of sex involved. Cheap sex to be precise.

If you look for most articles, SL is great because of the people, the land rentals and sales, some selling of goods and of course now the big companies coming into the game.

When in reality it is all about sex. gaming and clothes / enhancements for sex. The land rentals are only there to provide space and place for this and I would consider the sales for items non sex related to be rather small. *g*

Of course, that is not everthing, but seriously – I have never met so many cheap “escorts” as in there. Did I say cheap? When talking about prices for sex in Second life there are things you have to seperate.

There is the equipment necessary to ‘perform’ – I once wanted to buy a bed which was supposed to cost an outragous amount of money which I could not understand until I saw the poseballs … Then, you have to dress up for your occassions but those prices are very cheap given the work involved for the artist. All of this has pricing which is in game levels – cheap but okay, these are items which are sold and resold.

If you want to go shopping a bit – use SLExchange to explore a bit of the real world out there in Second Life in the uncensored part of the boutique. ;)

[If you wanna buy something there, refer me with Nixande Teazle. And no, afaik they do not show what you buy they just will give me a commision] ;)

But there is one ressource which is sold ridicoulusly cheap. Second Life Escorts! If you want to buy sex as in ‘see’ someting and get some action as text? You can call a telephone sex hotline and get poor, or you swing over to one of the SL escort services – where the ‘expensive’ ones will cost you about 7 dollars an hour – 10 if you include tipping.

Remember that 1000 L$ is roughly 3-4 dollars and take a look around here. You get more working at McDonalds!

If you dig a bit deeper into the profiles of some of the Escorts you will notice that they also expand their services towards telephone – sorry skype sex. (You will also notice that the available few male escorts have even lower prices).

Nothing against a healthy industry but girls (and the boys in disguise) – at least take a fee which is worth your time! :o)

Technorati Tags: second life sex, second life escorts

It does make more sense in German – as this is going to be the first German thing in SL afaik. (make that in English – which makes a lot more sense). And just for the record: If I hear anybody using “look at me! look at me! I am first! I am first!” again I think I am going to loose it.

The *real* news in this is not that it is the first tabloid but the background behind it. Bild is comparable I think to the british Sun and I do not know what the US equivilent is to it – a HUGE media house in Europe. Them getting into SL and using their basic knowledge of everyday work to build a professional tabloid – not in content probably but in production.

Don’t get me wrong – the Second Life Herald surely is nice but we are talking different leagues here and different interest groups.

Let me put the German hat on again for a minute, because that is the real thing: Second Life is getting hyped in Germany quite a lot. Dozens of articles, reportage in the news – much more than blogging and even more than podcasting.

As I was considering blogging more about Second Life, the first reaction of mine actually was to do that completely in German. :)

Technorati Tags: second life, bild, axel springer

Technorati Tags: second life, exploit

The following text of mine answers a question on the SL Forums (I thought they were supposed to be killed?) called “A rant about poor English” by Fmeh Tagore in which he (?) starts off with saying that he does in fact accept poor english (probably does not like it, but hei) but goes on:

What bugs me is when people use gangster-speak to cover up for having poor English. I find it completely unnaceptable, and I will rank on someone every time for using it. There are a few posts on these forums where someone from a place in which English is not the native language has been trying to act as if he’s in a gang, as if it will somehow get him more respect than if he just posted his natural poor English. I just don’t get it.

I’ve added some hopefully working explanations to the thread and also (the twist) added a link to another thread in the forums where they are talking about a perhaps obscene profile and have a full page of descriptions I cannot make anything of (that parts starts at “Not even knowing what we get ourself into).

Now for my answer:

Assuming that the original poster really was serious about the topic, I would like to add some thoughts.

There is more to gangster speak – never assume intention when it can be explained by pure stupidity.

First some words on the poor english itself.

Word order
English is a very restricted language. German for example has the possibility to set part of the sentence nearly everywhere due to the word endings – they ensure ‘the position’. Single language native speaker of English *really* do have a problem with understanding such sentences.

It is very hard for a German speaker to get this and therefore they do sound “yoda” from time to time (or more often). It is my observation that people who are in contact with spanish speaking people often are ‘softer’ on this topic because they already seem to be used to “strange” stile.

If you encounter this kind of problem, try to adapt yourself a bit to it or at least recognize that it is this kind of problem. This has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, this is just your training since childhood, it is absolutely natural to you, and you usually find it irritating how somebody could not get this.

Just as it is irritating, strange and time consuming for me to try to put the words in the correct order. Or for example – because this is how it is handled in German – say ‘the computer who just crashed’. You are probably looking for the missing person (it would be “the computer which”), but in German the computer is referred to in male form, so “who” is in my mind with the female / male gender and “which” would describe a neutral gender. As things have no gender in English, my brain takes over and uses the German gender.

You do have some of those, though. The ship, cat = she.

if you encounter something like this, and you are at least interested, give the other person an idea why you have a problem, tell them you don’t understand them.

“I am sorry, but your sentence makes no sense to me with this order of words. Could you try and rephrase it?” should remind a non native speaker of his or her training lessons in school where the teacher put emphasis on that.

idioms / range of word knowledge
As native speaker you are fluent in your idioms and which words to use. Non native speakers do learn a special vocabulary they feel comfortable with and use it all the time. My favorite words are “stuff” and “things”. I made a quick count and can come up at least 10 different words like that “stuff” in German. Language seems limited when you talk to a person.

Note that you are bothered with the limited amount of words of a person which is a second language to him. (They will be happy to speak in their natural language to you and give you a chance to see how sophisticated they can be. Well, are those few lines of english starting to make sense to you?)

The basic vocabulary afaik is around 2000 words – and with that you are already in good business for speaking english. Writing is even more restricted – one has the natural tendency to avoid words which you are not able to spell.

It is normal to use your natural idioms – only to learn that most of them are not valid in English. So you not only have to loose your favorite idioms and the way you translate what you want to say, you also have to learn new strange ones. Talking about cats and dogs here – something which is so funny if taken literally …

‘Misplaced’ word, false friends, common words.
As with favorite words, you also have favorite mistakes. ‘Misplaced’ is one I encountered several times now. What I wanted to say is mistake / confuse and especially with word order in sentences.

It makes perfect sense to me as a German to say ‘misplaced the words (in order of the sentence)’. It usually makes no sense at all for native speakers to the degree of being highly puzzling.

Tenses / Grammar also is a point: You will never be as good with tenses and grammar than you are by default in your natural language. Don’t ask me why I use tense xyz in German, I know it is right. To do it correct in English I need to *know* which time I want to use and also need to know if there is a difference in how tenses are used in English (there is – it is much stricter).

So again, it is not only translating but transferring knowledge which makes it harder for pure natural speaker to understand.

False Friends as in common mistakes like for example describing somebody as brave when in fact I was searching the translation for well behaved (brav in German).

This link gives you a list, just look at the english words on both sides and you will note the huge difference in meaning.

Coming from German, these are mistakes Germans are highly likely to make – other languages have the same problem.

Not even knowing what we get ourself into
This thread about an obscene profil (or not) brings up a whole new dimension in talking to each other: culture and values. Shit is more just a word for me with no other meaning and while I do not say it that often in German (scheisse), shit is softer / not as hard to me because of the different language. I do prefer shoot but mainly because I like the sound of it.

The thread in question is here and let me tell you: Obviously there are some differences in word usage I do not see. NOTHING on that page has any meaning to me in obscene meaning even if I would try to put on the more restrict american view on it. It just does not tell me anything.

I heard of a guy who went to the UK and had to learn the hard way to change his nickname in real life. Running around introducing yourself as ‘Hi I am Randy’ seems to mean “Hi I am horny”.

If you take all of this together, it may be more understandable why some non native speaker tend to speak fewer words (additionally shortened by chat language which makes it easier), make unusual spelling mistakes nobody does (our words train our fingers differently than with english words which is why one makes those unusual mistakes) and why they speak funny.

Which still is no reason to have patience with idiots who are incapable of expressing themselves and are just morons. In any language possible. :)

Which brings me to the point of the original poster:
Additionally to the challenges described above most people still are not 10-finger typers, so typing takes time. And they are in an interactive game where others manage to talk fast and fine english – well kind of. Most conversations I observe accidentally are full of abbriviations and alike – just by native speaker meaning there is a little more meat to it.

I am not saying you should pity them. But you should give them a chance to learn.
Why not make a notecard and hand it to such people? If you take the effort of ranking them, you can instead make the more useful effort of handing them a message url for example to this thread.

Back to the morons: It that is a teenage boy giddying with fun over the cool sex babes running around and offering ‘making love’ all the time, is it a wonder that they feel this is natural? And all the bling and shiny shiny? Male predominantly in Arnold Schwarzenegger mode (back when he was Mr. Universe) *That* for me more gangster style than anything else.

And you wonder why such people get the impression it would be okay to talk this way? :)

728 prims, 2896 sq, 1000L$ a week tier directly to protected land AND in the very nice settings of an Azure Island property meaning nice roads and trees and such as well as a nice square form.

Best of all: You don’t need to be with a premium user to have this land!

Bigger picture on flickr:

Tip: If you visit the url, right-click for about land and you will see the form of it. And building is easy as cake: The plot starts in the 0,0 corner of this sim. If you stand in front of it: Everything on the left is protected land and will never be built on. :)) This is a residential zone meaning no commercial stuff but you are able to build a house on it and rent it out or do commercial work in it.

Price: Parting with this beauty for 12K Linden Dollars or I would be willing to rent it out for 5000 a month (advance payment).
Mail me or inworld Nixande Teazle.

Technorati Tags: second life, second life land, second life for sale

As I was attacked over the last days several times a day, this thread in the SL forums just kicked it over for me to finally write something about it.

I had my nick registered around last year when initially trying out SL, and got back using it this year. As I now own a piece of land I wanted to go shopping.

In the last three days, I have encountered several people using weapons of me of several kind. Sandboxes are already unusable.

In order to do abuse reports, I started making screenshots of them and looking them up afterwards. Oh and of couse, both abuse reports I send in, I have not had an answer at all. So as it seems we need to talk where the money is. (and it would really help if the message I send it is copied in my acknowledement of the abuse report …)

All of them where new residents, all of them where not willing to understand that this is not a shooting game, all of them where like “yeah fuck off i do what I want”. To think that you can talk reason into them when they are clearly into exactly this . shooting people for the fun – is like expecting script kiddies to be in irc for talking and social exchange.

From what I see it those kids are the skript kiddies of SL. And they will become more andlook out for more “fun” if nothing is done against it. Yesterday I saw three whole pages on SL Echxhange about “great weapons” and alike.

I do not want to start having to look out for shields.

I do not want to be teleported away from a shopping spree or anywhere in a sandbox because some kiddies play wild west.

I have no interest in setting up my avatar again or ever try to build up my buildings or anything like it due to a shooting.

From a view of a skript kiddie, this must be heaven.

A new cool Egoshooter game where there are a lot of people as easy targets and more realistic guns than ever before. Just the bullets need some more work on. end of ironie.

Of course they do not stay in special zones – they never do. This is uncool.

People being attacked don’t shop, don’t explore. don’t buy land. They don’t play and especially don’t tell their friends about using Second Life.

I already say about SL “this *was* a nice game, but now there are skript kiddie equivilents in there”. This is out of hand and I am sorry: The real rush in of those has not even started.

Linden has to decide if they want to keep SL and evolve it or get it crashed by kids like that.

Of course there are solutions – make your own island, make your own home, only allow groups to enter and alike, but this is again against everything one would like back then in Second Life. In real life, we do have laws against that (at least in most countries) and there is a reason for it – people die.

As in SL you don’t die, but still it costs you a lot of time. My recommendation: Every time you geht attacked, do a an abuse report (help – abuse). In the moment of attack use ctrl-shift-S to do a snapshot (it will be faster than the abuse snapshot) and report. Make a copy of the text as you will not get one by the mail system.

Do I want to ban weapons at all? No. If that is what you want – great. If you find people who want that too – great. Consensual and everything around it. But if you are running around and attack people like those ones above, you are on the same level like any stupid skript kiddie.

Technorati Tags: skript kiddie, second life, sl, weapons in second life

But, buying land is contagious with the “I want more’ bug and while I am still not sure if and how I would like to use SL in commercial way, I have set up my house in SL in Antilia.

As usual I notice that I have more fun with building things than really playing in it. Just like Lego back in childhood or blogs today. ;))

So I was considering rebuilding my house and renting out flats – while this is a pure residential sim, renting out houses is allowed. And I would love to make it more blogger / podcast centric. Which is probably the reason why I got Thomas to buy the land next to me ;) ;) Antilia really is a nice place, especially because of the vegetation and how the streets are build, much better than normal sims. Take a look at my home -( btw I do have another connecting piece of land right next to it, 2000sqm I would consider selling ;))

As I know that at least two readers of mine are homeless ;) I was wondering if we all could share some thoughts on what would make you buy / want / rent a home in Second Life.

Some thoughts from my side:

* For me, SL started to be fun once I had a place where I could set my home mark to (=teleport home) see some of the neighbours and start decorating my house. Something like that. But I also would like to have a place where people gather, like a meeting place – so in inviting Thomas to live nearby, this made sure I have from time to time some people I know.

* If I would not have had a land to buy (impulse buy, btw), then I would have liked to have a place nearby people I know so we can meet from time to time – be it on purpose or by accident.

* Having a house and land is nice – but it is much nicer to have a casual place to meet other like minded people. I would much prefer an apartment complex than houses which very often need a lot of space to look nice and therefor make it much more expensive.

* I would like to see only so much of others = have glas everywhere in my flat but not have others look into my rooms.

* I don’t really see the point in having a separate bathroom or bedroom (unless you want to have cyber sex in SL in your bed – two rooms and for example a rooftop are already great. One more open to show off, one more private to use it in a more private way and some place ‘outside’.

* how much space do you want to have and how much would you be willing to pay for it? btw, the amount of what you are willing to pay for it also influences the flat you get – just like in real life. ;)

* Renting out should be easy and without hassle

While I really like the concept of pure residential sims and commercial sims, I do see in the future that I might want to be part of a commercial island to do some business.

Oh and trying out – Do you really want a place to try out a lot of things, because this is what the sandboxes are for. Due to the recent increase of guys building weapons and trying to destroy avatars, I do see a future in having payed access only sandboxes with personal invitation or something like it. :(

If you like to meet me in SL, name is Nixande Teazle. And did you notice? Once you start building in SL, everything around you brings up the question in your mind “hm. Wondering how I can copy that into SL!”? :)

Technorati Tags: Second Life, renting second life