Your2ndPlace

Tonight at 6pm SL time I have the honor of being a guest on "Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe".  It is a half hour show with three guests a night.  Or as there notecards say "Tonight Live is second Life's highest rated TV Show. It is a Second Life TV Talk Show filmed live in Second Life every Sunday at 6pm slt in front of a live audience of about 60 people in the Second Life studio and broadcast through the web on SLCN.TV and in world on screens and on itunes as a vodcast." It's set up pretty much like any late night show you would see on network television. I'll just be talking about land basics for about 10 mins.  And since I'm not very good with voice, you'll probably catch me mumbling or freezing a bit.     The fact that the shows have 200 live viewers and averages 6000 downloads a week does make me a bit nervous, but I'll do my best.  If anyone is interested in watching live you can be part of the live studio audience located at  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Northpoint/206/103/32 The show starts at 6pm sl time and doors open at 5:30.

You can also catch the show afterwards on the SLCN website that can be found at  http://www.slcn.tv/tonight-live-paisley-beebe

I hope to see some of you guys there!

I'd mentioned it before - a false start - but upgrades are coming to Your2ndPlace.com this Friday. I won't promise much (so I won't be a liar), but I hope to add a lot of much needed functionality while working on the look and feel of the site.

The look and feel requires your input.

Feel free to comment between now and Friday about things you would like to see on Your2ndPlace.com. A few things:

• No forums are really expected, though they can be added at any time. If there is enough interest, we'll try them out.
• The colors will change - should we go outlandish or should we go more 'corporate'? I'm looking for a mix of both, so your input is welcome. We know Sarah will want at least some purple...
• The site will be down at least for an hour, at most for a day, while I get the core functionality reinstated.
• Coffee beans will be killed to assure the sanity of the guy-who-does-stuff. If you are a member of the 'Save the Coffee Beans Foundation', or any associated NGO, please rest assured that the guy-who-does-stuff could care less. :-)

I need your QUALITY freebies! I've just done a massive expansion of
freebie paradise and I'm looking for lots of new items to fill it up
with.

What does offering a $0L (I don't do the $1L thing) do for you??
Quality well made items that are given out as freebies can provide
amazing advertisement when packed well with a landmark and note card.
Freebie Paradise gets a traffic rating of 14,000 to 20000 daily. It
helps establish your name and get landmarks out and about. Trust me I
know this well. If you take care of a new player, they will remember
you later in there SL.
Offering a freebie also helps out the community, and helps give a new
player a good start. Players who have a satisfied start are more likely
to stick around.

My freebie guidelines..

Yes I have rules for offering freebies. I have a theory that freebies
at my place should be quality items, and not the typical "Well it's not
good enough to sell so I'll just throw it at some newbs" type freebies.
Look at the item. If it's not something that you would wear or use
yourself, don't expect a newb to want to either. Plus what ever you
hand out is often a persons first impression of your quality of work
and items.

*Items given to me must have copy and transfer rights. Both the box
they are in, and the items within the box. I redistribute them as no
transfer unless otherwise specified. If you don't not feel comfortable
giving me full rights, I can offer you a group invite and have you
place the item yourself.

*No strictly advertisement items such as basic t-shirts with a club name on them.

*Items need boxed in boxes sized 2.5x2.5x0.2 with no floating text
unless it's a mixed item box. Boxes filled with lots of random items
should be anywhere around 1x1x1 and I just add them to the mixed boxes
area.

Robin's office hour was a washout as she's on holiday. Jack's office hour was calmer than normal and Jack is definitely considering options on what to do about parcels set for sale for what many call extortionate amounts, although no change in policy at this moment in time. Thanks to my underworld sources I have a full transcript to read.

However I spent half an hour trying to get out of Jack's office hour to go to the Terry Pratchett live Q&A, alas the sim was full until ten minutes before the event started.

Just as I was celebrating, I crashed. However fate wasn't going to prevent my mission, oh no, I got right back in there. I did however notice that a couple of Linden's (rumours that they were playing hooky are unfounded!) managed to sneak in at the back, hmmm!

There now follows a transcript, edited, abridged and hopefully with the right answers to the right questions!

We all waited calmly and then he appeared:

TerryPratchett Morpork: Hello everybody! Sorry, I’m new at all of this kind of stuff and so can anyone tell me how to get the rocket launcher?

TerryPratchett Morpork: …and I’m not really into all of this YourTube into MyFace kind of stuff!

Michaelx Beerbaum: Question is if Second life will appear in one of the books?

TerryPratchett Morpork: As far as I am concerned, my books are Second Life.

Matty567 Dallagio: Why was "Nation" not set on Discworld?

TerryPratchett Morpork: Good question; for one thing, the fact of it being on Discworld would change all kind of things that I could do. After all, Nation is hardly full of laughs. Setting Nation on a thinly disguised “alternate” world does, I think, give it more power and urgency.

I've often wondered why I don't see more sponsorship within Second Life. I'm talking RL companies here as well as inwolrd business. Sponsorship has a very big place in RL, sport being one area that is awash with sponsorship from company logos on team shirts to having a stadium named after them.

I've touched on this before but what are big business afraid of with reputable inworld business? Instead of having an island of their own, why not sponsor a popular island ran by an avatar?

The SL Shakespeare Company are seeking sponsorhip, why wouldn't a big inworld or RL company want to be associated with that? What's holding them back?

This just seems a much easier form of placing your company's name within the Second Life world than having your own boring island that nobody even knows exists.

There are of course issues with mature content, but then there's PG land and plenty of it. They could even pay to have the sim contain their name, have a little bit of presence and then leave the rest of it to the sim owner on the proviso that every now and then they're allowed to make inworld presentations and product launches.

Alternatively, hey, sponsor a mall. This way business is intergrating with Second Life instead of being stand offish. Even with mature content companies could intergrate inworld, Stroker and Xcite are bigger inworld names of adult products than Playboy, instead of operating their own sim Playboy could have asked to sponsor their areas or some rebranding of existing products to get their name out that way. Stroker and Xcite might not be interested but it's the sort of link that would highlight a brand better than current tactics do.

How long is it going to be before people accept that SLExchange has changed its name? I just can't bring myself to call it XStreet SL despite the logo, it's SLExchange. These things take time, the bus stop in town in Tesco was still the bus stop in town by Tesco years after Argos had moved into the store. Nowdays however it's the bus stop by Argos so eventually a change makes its mark.

I've been perusing showcase lately. The evil heinous showcase that has fashion as a section when it simply shouldn't be there. Take fashion out of it and it merely becomes questionable, fashion shouldn't be there, it's just plain wrong.

However I do find showcase to be useful. Who knew that Journey had a sim? More to the point, who wanted to know? You see search only finds what you want to find, if you're lucky. We do need more than search, despite what the perfectly prim lobby would have you believe. There's none so blind as those who can't see.

It's not just the showcase though, I was out checking a former ad farm area today and not only did I find a train track, minutes later a plane flew past me. I had been told about the SL railroad before but I hadn't checked it out, it's a really nice feature, but who would pay to ride it?

So I've been to a giant maze, discovered en garde, been ice skating (although I knew about that one already) and I'm planning on going skiing. I wonder at times how entertainment venues make money. Greenies have been charging, to much negative vibes, but this is a culture issue. I don't like the fact that they charge and I won't go there whilst they do, but why shouldn't they charge? They have to pay their tier fees like everyone else. My mind can't quite understand why I find this concept wrong.

So it came to pass that a giant monster was unleashed on the mainland, not in the shape of a 16M parcel as first feared, but in the shape of those whom now want to shape the mainland in their image.

Jack Linden's office hour tonight was arguably the ugliest office hour since Jack's last office hour. Those who sense victory on the ad farm issue, whom have largely achieved their goal now have a bigger goal and it's one I'm extremely uncomfortable with.

Instead of thanking Linden Lab for cleaning up the mainland, they now want more, this isn't an Oliver Twist type more, this is the screaming tantrum style more of a child who can't get his own way. The meeting at times descended into schoolboy farce with name calling and threats of abuse reports being submitted by one member of the audience if someone used the word "Extortion", whilst another person was threatened with being sent outside the classroom by Jack himself. All we needed was a threat of detention and the picture would have been complete.

The aim now of some is to have all 16M parcels wiped from the landscape, or, if they must persist, to be sold only for a fair market value. The question of to whom was never quite answered but I suspect there's plenty of self interest going on here.

I'm not a fan of 16M parcels, I've purchased some recently near my land and joined them, they're currently designated as empty spaces with their prim allotment used elsewhere on the sim. I won't pay over the odds for a 16M parcel and now with the elmination of the use of "adverts" and banlines, nor should anyone else. There's no longer a need to buy back the view. That was always the argument, these parcels spoiled the view. Now that that argument has been won the new argument is that 16M parcels spoil full stop.