CopyBot Named Herald Avatar of the Year
Over at the Second Life Herald we have a long tradition (well, a tradition as old as the paper itself: three years and change) of giving out three “avatar of the year” awards every January for the virtual personae who had the greatest impact on the news over the preceding 12 months. This year’s first-place winner is CopyBot, the Second Life avatar- and object-copying program, whom we’ve immortalized with Uri’s Ballad of CopyBot over at the Herald. Two of the three awards this year went to abstractions (Time stole the idea from us, naming “You” as its Person of the Year). Second Place was taken by the unverified masses of Second Life, i.e., free accounts with no payment information on file, which caused quite a stir earlier this year, as well as helping to swell SL’s ranks. Third Place went to Mark Barrett, creator of SLStats, which had many residents up in arms because of perceived privacy infringement.
Other avatars were in the running, including Anshe Chung, who announced she’d amassed over $1 million worth of virtual assets, and Adam Reuters, who runs the Reuters bureau in Second Life, but in terms of virtual news and life within Second Life itself, it was probably the three scandales above that had greater impact.
It’s interesting to note that the public outcry in each case led to a partial rollback of the project in question. CopyBot, which might have been a useful tool, was made a criminal for its potential for abuse. Concern over griefing by Unverified accounts led Linden Lab to add new social management tools to Second Life. And SLStats, which harvested publicly available data, was also curtailed out of its potential for abuse, and users’ uncomfortability with having too much information on the Web (though the information only amounted to where they’d been and who they’d seen). Does that make the SL population slightly reactionary?
While I think we’ve done a good job pegging the biggest stories of 2006 in the Herald, I’d wager that it’s the slightly smaller stories that will have a more lasting impact on Second Life. A few off the top of my head include Reuters, the work that IBM is doing in SL, and perhaps the early moves by NBC to take advantage of Second Life as part of its media platform. Those choices straddle the real and virtual, of course, which is slightly different from our remit in the Herald Av-of-the-Year awards. But it’s interesting to compare the two streams of news and ideas as they develop, and it will be more interesting still to see whether they move closer together or farther apart as time goes on. My money’s on the former. While it will always be possible to maintain a sealed-odd portion of the virtual world, it looks like Second Life’s hooks to the “real” will only expand as time goes on. In fact, I’d say they would have to for the thing to survive.
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A good reply to the Herald’s choices; CopyBot, after all, was a program, not an avatar. I’ve been disappointed in how lame Time has gotten with it’s yearly picks, with “The American Soldier” and “You”, and hopefully, the Herald will return to naming actual avatars next year. It is nice to know, however, than I was more important this year according to Time than Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il because I figured out new and interesting ways to waste time at work with MySpace and YouTube! :)
Well, it’s not so much a reply to the Herald’s choices as an addendum. I was one of the three votes on the Herald’s choices, after all, and in fact nominated the Unverified. I’m all for the abstractions. The only thing I’m sorry about with the Time magazine thing is that I never found a copy while it was still on newsstands.
I guess I just like calling a spade a spade. Rename it to “Avatars & Events That Had Impact” if that’s what you mean. It is just a pet peeve of mine; I hate it when sports writers, for example, choose “Co-MVPs” or do the age old trick of, “Player of the Week” and then list three people in a tie. Starting in 1927, Time actually used to name one person a year until recently; it sounds like they should change it to “people of the year” as well… but like I said, just a pet peeve. :)
yeah I actually find the whole end-of-year look back/ahead thing kind of tiresome, myself
This is an interesting response. When I heard that the 3rd place was Mark Barrett, my next response was, “well, Copybot is 1st, the ony question is who is 2nd” So clearly I am a jaded individual, and I didn’t even realize it.
In that light, I assumed Gene Replacement and the V5 crew seemed to be the logical choice. But maybe there is a rule that you can’t be in the top 3 more than once.
Thanks for the list, good times.
One of the dumbest comments I’ve seen come out of the whole Copybot fandango is this literalist tekkie bleating that “CopyBot is a program, not an avatar”. But — duh — you need an avatar to run that program. The avatar is the manifestation of the program. The unmanned avatar you log on using the account IS the CopyBot for many people — it’s a bot. Duh. A bot? Get it? An unmanned robot that you control from another place. So to keep yammering on and on that it “isn’t an avatar but a program” is just plain ridiculous. Of course, the unmanned avatar, the robotic like bot, could then become a “person” of the year following the Herald’s logic that they were picking these types of mass representational type of objects. It’s perfect, just as “Unverified” is.
Now, as to Walker’s claim, “CopyBot, which might have been a useful tool, was made a criminal for its potential for abuse.”
Huh? It wasn’t “made a criminal” (oh…using “a criminal” about something that’s not an avatar or a bot or a thing, but a program, are we Walker hehe?). The TOS language put in as a halfway house is “unauthorized use of”. That means using it is not criminal. Only making copies to sell is criminal, evidently, but that’s up to the Lindens’ discretion to determine what “unauthorized use” is.
Furthermore, there are ample accounts of the Copybot still being used in other forms. The mob of them rezzed on Sheep island. The Rockbots to multiple instances of a concert. We’re told (very likely falsely, given the track record) that the Copybot is “broken” on the latest version downloads of SL anyway. Oh? But they keep on materializing as “Campbots” sucking up camp chair money. So, honestly, there’s no “crime” that the Lindens are recognizing and all that um creativity you’re worried about squelching, Walker, is alive and well in the form of draining CampBots run by libsecondlifers.