SecondCast to Host SL “Town Hall” Meetings
Second Life resident Johnny Ming’s SecondCast has just been hired by Linden Lab to produce a one-hour audio “Town Hall” meeting about once every two weeks, Johnny reports. LL’s Town Hall meetings put a single LL representative on a stage in Second Life to field questions from residents for an hour or two. The crowd pushes SL’s servers to the limit, and the chat window is filled with so many questions and comments from residents that the Linden’s responses are often difficult to make out. Moving to an audio format should solve many of the problems that have plagued Town Halls in the past.
(Note: I appear on SecondCast each week as the avatar Walker Spaight, editor of the Second Life Herald. It’s definitely worth a listen, if you’re SL-minded. And see below for some traffic stats.)
After our recent SecondCast show with LL founder Philip Rosedale (download or listen here), Rosedale was so taken with the format that he floated the idea of having us host the Town Hall meetings in audio. Looks like Johnny and Philip have found a way to make that happen.
Town Hall meetings in the past have been burdensome affairs. Harried Linden handlers have to page through the queries and hand the ones deemed worthy off to whoever is speaking. Answering in chat has also been difficult for the Lindens who’ve hosted the meetings, only because of the natural limitations of chat as a medium for communicating complex ideas. Moving to an audio format ought to sort out many of those problems, and since it can be streamed back into the world live via a URL, residents ought to be able to listen from wherever they are, rather than having to gather in one lag-fraught location. What Philip was most excited about was having resident questions filtered through the SecondCast panel, rather than being relayed in chat by one of his employees. What’s still unclear, though, is whether the Town Halls will be as “live” as they’ve been in the past, or whether pre-approved questions will be collected before-hand.
In part, moving things like LL’s Town Hall meetings to a looser audio format represents the triumph of long audio sentences over short snippets of text. It’s almost as if the evolving technology has brought things full circle. Microchunking may be the current big thing in content distribution, but it does have its limitations. SecondCast, for instance, doesn’t seem to be hampered by its episodes being 45 minutes to an hour long each week. The 10 SecondCast episodes that have been posted since the show started on February 19 have seen a cumulative total of 4,100 downloads, with another 3,400 partials on top of that, Johnny reports. And traffic is only rising. Not bad for a rambling, long-format show that addresses issues in a virtual world with average concurrencies below 5,000 residents.
Johnny’s idea, and it seems to be a sound one, is that people want a way to take their virtual world experience away from their desktops. Being able to download a one-hour podcast to their iPods and listen to it on the train or in the car turns out to be an ideal way to give them that. And a nice step forward into the 3pointD world.
Feeds
This is a horrifying, horrifying development. I can’t believe the giddy Philip Linden handed away the town-hall function of our world, run poorly, but more or less fairly by the federal government, to the private FIC-cast concern of Second Cast. This is just awful. *OF COURSE* it will be vetted, pre-cleared and sanitized! Jesus, Walker, how on *earth* can you not see that??? Like Lenin, these people merely took over the telegraph station — and flattered you as part of their plan to take over a whoppingly huge information/commercial advertising channel in Second Life *just like that*. It’s absolutely stunning. And horrifyingly awful.
What Philip was most excited about was having resident questions filtered through the SecondCast panel, rather than being relayed in chat by one of his employees.
We saw how badly Philip performed in the last town hall. He ducked all the pre-cleared vetted questions carefully put on the forums by Robin, and Jeska never presented them, anyway. This left the floor open to various idiots screaming about special issues like the umlaut, but worse, it meant that he never answered anything of substance. If it weren’t for Margot Abbatoir blurting out the question many of us had as to whether his long disappearance was related to him boxing up SL to sell to another company, we’d have never heard even the fig-leaf assurance he gave on that score.
Many people don’t want to have their RL voices in this virtual world be heard by others. They want privacy.
Typing questions is not so hard. Lindens can pay attention and moderate. The medium has its difficulties, but there’s no substitute for the human will and Roberts Rules, which they simply couldn’t find the skill or determination to apply.
All that happens now is that the very notional concept of the “town hall” in Second Life is completely obliterated, taken over by smarmy talk-show hosts with a pre-filtered “panel” that is “delighting” Philip Linden apparently because he wants to flee from the world he created and the people in it, and not take responsibility for it.
This is one of many examples of the Lindens “handing over the reins” of the world to unelected, unaccountable, untransparent little power groupgins like this, which has rightly been dubbed the FIC Power Hour.
I’m in despair for this world.