The Metaverse: LiveJournal or TypePad Blog?
Second Life resident Khamon Fate has an interesting post musing on the difference between owning property on Second Life’s main Grid, which is a contiguous land mass, and owning it on one of SL’s private island estates, which, while accessible to all, take marginally more work to locate, and provide the user with more tools. (One often stumbles across new locations on the Grid, while you rarely stumble across new locations on private islands because they’re not on any conceivable travel paths.)
Khamon compares the Grid to a LiveJournal community, and an island to a TypePad blog.
. . . migrating Fate Gardens from the mainland to an estate is similar to migrating a focused blog from randomish friends-based LiveJournal to a more independent location such as Typepad. Rather than relying on traffic from friends and their friends et al, a Typepader seriously blogs a subject and relies on links and shortcuts to garner traffic from people interested more in the subject than the blogger’s personal life. It’s similar to migrating away from a free hosting site to a paid facility where I have to do all the work, but can program the pages and scripts to organize and present material anyway I please without relying solely on provided tools and layouts.
Definitely read the rest of the post as well. Khamon characterizes the main Grid as more or less training wheels for a private island. Where SL itself is concerned, I’m not sure I agree. I like the sense of community that comes from owning land on the main Grid. But I’ve written before about the fact that (in my opinion, at least) the metaverse will eventually fragment into something more like private islands, in large part. Khamon’s take on it sheds an interesting light.
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Somewhat ironic - “Journal has been deleted. If you are khamon, you have a period of 30 days to decide to undelete your journal.”
Wow, that was fast.
It’s true that some people’s sense of community is based on living in contiguous land. That seems very limiting to me; but it’s a legitimate feeling, something else that Philip and Prokofy have in common. I have a hard time distinguishing their rhetoric.
The blog is being reformatted as a 3D graphics discussion to feed into the fategardens.net portal I’m building to support texture creation and application in virtual world environments. My apologies for killing the party, I’ll repost the entry here for open debate:
The wora’uld has clarified overnight. To me, though Prokofy would take great exception to my statement and ramble for days about my need to manipulate the entire population of Second Life into a narrow-minded, technologically prestine view of everything including Tom Jones’ grandmother, OMG I’m doing it now…
The wora’uld has clarified overnight. To me, migrating Fate Gardens from the mainland to an estate is similar to migrating a focused blog from randomish friends-based LiveJournal to a more independent location such as Typepad. Rather than relying on traffic from friends and their friends et al, a Typepader seriously blogs a subject and relies on links and shortcuts to garner traffic from people interested more in the subject than the blogger’s personal life.
It’s similar to migrating away from a free hosting site to a paid facility where I have to do all the work, but can program the pages and scripts to organize and present material anyway I please without relying solely on provided tools and layouts.
The Second Life mainland serves the purpose of dipping our feet, learning the interface, meeting people, learning to build, script, socialize and conduct business in this new virtual world environment full of anonymously represented people. But we reach a point where we want the ability to focus what we’re doing. We need space, venue, the ability to manage the resources of a sim, the facility to create whole environments to share.
The mainland grants us traffic from flyover, map abuse (setting very overpriced land for sale, large prim signs), and people’s fascination with virtual vehicles. Estate traffic demands a viable product, well advertised, and wholly supported. Seriously focused work is required; but the facilitation of cutomization and individualized resource management are quite worth the effort.
The happiest conclusion is that it doesn’t cost any more per month to own an estate sim than it does to own a mainland sim. In fact, it costs less. Linden Lab provides estates for $1250US which converts, under current Lindex prices, to about 6L/sm. Try to accumulate a mainland sim for that little money. If you do, you’ll be stuck with given ground textures, practically no terraformability, no choice of neighboring views, no ability to manage such things as scripting resources, and Linden tracks running through.
The mainland has served it’s purpose for me. I appreciate Linden Lab for hosting it and I very much appreciate the people who’ve allowed me to participate in their groups and work within their projects. But it’s time for me to move to a place where my skills and reputation can be put to full use, tested, and honed for the coming virtual metaversal 3Dwebal whatever hatches out of this egg we call Second Life.
I’ve been rightfully called a traitor for reaching the conclusion, based on my experiences and feelings, that Fate Gardens will is best served by moving to an estate. Rightfully because it the way I’ve described my predecessors that’ve defected to estates.
I’ve been wrongfully told that I shouldn’t phrase the terminology in certain ways because people might misunderstand and be offended. That’s a debatable point.
I’ve also been told that it’s irresposible of me, as a public figure, to say anything that might lead mainlanders to consider migrating their own environments to estates. The jury’s still out on this one. How public a figure am I anyway?
“Khamon characterizes the main Grid as more or less training wheels for a private island.”
My intention is simply to state that there are divergent reasons for living on the Mainland and working on estate land in Second Life. The journal hosts analogously serve differing purposes; so a person must choose which to use for varying types of posts aimed at specific audiences.
There’s no inherent reason for a person to choose exclusively; in my case, it’s a financial consideration. So the entry is as much angst about having to choose one over the other as it is about making the comparison in the first place. I envy people who can either afford both or have a clear choice of one or the other.