Telling: Like it Is

(a review of the literature)
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Readers of this blog (thank you!) should also be reading most, if not all, of the blogs listed down the right margin out of habit, just like I do.  Regardless... Once in a while I feel compelled to single out their words about an important issue.

The issue of the moment (get ready to be unsurprised) is yet another battle in The Fake War: the argument precipitated by the statements of Facebook's CEO, followed by the actions of FB, regarding the identity of their account holders and the disposition of information.  It has particular impact on the Residents of Second Life for a number of reasons; chief among them being the occasional vague references from the likes of M Linden (CEO of SL) and Hamlet Au about some form of "integration" between SL and FB... as if a mere population increase will solve SL's problems, rather than exacerbate them.  (That began before Facebook dropped the nuke on privacy -- see the list of articles at the end of "Vaporworld" for background).

Along comes Wallace Linden, fresh out of the test-tube, with his inaugural piece on the the official Second Life blog: "Will the Real You Please Stand Up".

A lot of us have -- here are some of the best minds in the SLogosphere, doing just that:

Dusan Writer: "Linking Second Life to Real Life Names"

Snickers Snook: "Real Life, Second Life. Blurring the Lines."

Honour McMillan: "Connecting Real Life and Second Life - a Personal Opinion"

Dale Innes: "The real me is having a nap, tyvm"

Dio Kuhr: "I am Spartacus -- linking real life identities to SL personas"

Emily Orr: "oh, I'm scared of the middle place, between light and nowhere"

and Botgirl Questi, with appropriate humor: "The REAL STORY Behind the Wallace Linden Controversy"

Department of Redundancy Department:  In my "Vaporworld" post below, and in comments scattered around the Web, I have used the phrase the identity in your wallet.  It's a deliberate reference, not just to your driver's license but to the other contents of your wallet: cash and credit cards.  The drive to link "real" identity to pseudonyms is what the latest jargon calls "monetization".  It's quite simple: data-mining hits a brick firewall if the account name can't be matched to purchase activity.  Therefore, the data being mined has less resale value, and neither the miners (EquiFax and their ilk) nor their clients (Facebook, ad nauseum) like that very much.  You need look no farther for the motive of the anti-"fake" side of The Fake War.

Speaking of monetization...  Remember this?  Second Life Affiliate Program, which you can use to place an ad for SL on your blog or other website, and receive a whopping U$D 5 kick-back for any Premium memberships initiated by a click-through from your site.  I love the irony that not one of the blogs about SL that I've read since that program began displays one of those ads.

Heh heh

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At the very bottom of each of the pages on this blog is a Sitemeter logo (you'll find it on a lot of other blogs, too). It's a widget that aggregates information about visits to each page, and I have a link to Sitemeter where I can read my "metrics". I check it at least once a day, out of a combination of curiosity and -- yes, I'll admit it -- vanity. What author doesn't care about how widely he or she is read?

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Or: "Make sure that bandwagon you're jumping on isn't actually a hearse."

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There's a lot of buzz buzzing around about the growth of virtual economies -- that is, the amount of real-world cash converted into them -- in spite of the global economic fiasco.  [Here's an example]  To me, it seems exactly parallel to the near-cliché about the film industry during the Great Depression: people spend what they can on a chance to get their mind off their problems for an hour or three.  But, to paraphrase a different cliché, that particular honey is attracting a lot of flies.

The latest of these announced its presence last week (13 January), through a press release that was quoted more or less verbatim in various places all over the web.  This newcomer has the audacity to call itself "United Nations Citizen" (UNC, hereafter; not to be confused with the excellent institute of higher learning in Chapel Hill), and -- in spite of the 5-part joint venture touted -- appears to be the brainchild of one Anthony Loiacono, founder and CEO of "Heads & Tails TV", an independent advertising agency.

I belong to a group called "Transworlders" (there's a link in the sidebar here, please join if you're inspired to). We're intensely interested in -- and generally encouraging of -- any new entrants into the Metaverse.  That, coupled with the potential of meaningful in-world employment, caused me to take a hard look at what information was available on the site.

There isn't much. 

Dio Kuhr, cantankerous author of The Ephemeral Frontier (sometimes I think she channels Sam Clemens), did what I agree is an accurate review of the textual content of UNC's site in her post "Hell is Watching Other People Shop."  I haven't a thing to add, except congratulations -- you should click away from here and read it, and don't forget the comments!  Come back, of course -- there's lots more.

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(or should that be "Orifice Hour"?)

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I've been trying to resist joining the communal navel-gazing that attends the end of a calendar year. "After all," to paraphrase Scarlet O'Hara, "Tomorrow is just another day." The First of January is a legacy of the Roman Empire. There's no more compelling reason to make its arrival special than there is for, say, Rosh Hashana, or Samhain, or the vernal equinox... or one's own biological birthday or Second Life rezday.

Predictably (pun intended), the SLogosphere has been full of look-backs and looks ahead, and I would be remiss if I didn't add my still small voice... wouldn't I? I've only been publicly blogging since September '09, and have no previous year's predictions to review for their (lack of) prescience, so... here's my prediction for Second Life in 2010:

Same Shit, Different Decade

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