Your2ndPlace

I recently celebrated my fourth month at the Lab and it has been a terrific adventure so far. As the leader of this amazing company, what have I been focused on? Leading the company’s efforts to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

How are we doing?

We wrapped up a very busy and productive Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere with great results to report. First off, each week since August 31st has brought a concurrency high. Yesterday, the peak hit 71,232 – that’s an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak concurrency has grown more than 38%. An even more impressive figure is the number of Residents who logged-in during the prior seven days. For the week ending September 19th, we had 505,839 unique log-ins – another Second Life record. Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue their steady climb.

What can we attribute this to? We simplified the registration process to make it easier for Residents to join, registrations are continuing at a healthy clip, existing Residents are spending more time inworld, viewer crash rates have declined, teleport failures have declined and database/network/simulator outages are down substantially (for the past three months, simulator outages were 24% of what they were the prior three months).

All are indications that Second Life is becoming more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

What’s next?

First Hour Experience: Shortly after I started, we kicked off a project to reinvent what we call the “first hour experience” (our web experience, the viewer, and the way we acclimate and acculturate users inworld) for new users. We’ve made great progress and will be working with an award-winning interactive design firm to help us complete the reinvention and bring it to life. Yes, we are creating a viewer that is new user friendly! Stay tuned for updates.

Mainland Improvement: Jack Linden has written several blog posts about what we are doing to make the mainland a better experience for Residents so I won’t go into much detail other than to say that we recently banned ad farming which was a blight on the landscape. Our Department of Public Works (DPW) is continuing to make the mainland more attractive by adding roads, parks, buildings and gardens and other great features. The mainland is a crucial part of the Second Life experience and we are taking a more active role than we have historically in ensuring the inworld experience is a great one.

Experience Localization: When I joined in May, I attended new hire orientation at Linden Lab. One of my classmates was the new Linden hired to lead the localization of our product (websites, viewer, support tools). She has made great progress. By the end of the year, the viewer will be fully localized for all our major markets.

Product Focus: Linden Lab, like many startups was born out of a fascination with complex technology. This focus brought innovation and allowed for the breakthrough thinking behind Second Life. We are now at a stage in our development where we need to add addition product strategy, product development and product management experience to help us better tailor our product offering for each of our key markets. We’ve found just the right person to lead this important transition in the company. His name is Tom Hale (he will be called T Linden) and he is a technology industry veteran, having spent the last 14 years at Macromedia and Adobe where he held a variety of product strategy, development and management roles. Tom joins Linden Lab as Senior Vice President, Chief of Product. Read more about T Linden here.

Linden Lab is buzzing with activity. We’ve just completed a major strategy project to define the areas of focus for the next 18 months and we are in the process of translating those strategies into tactical action plans. To support the strategic initiatives we’ve identified, we’ll be hiring 60-70 more people over the next several quarters. This is all part of our commitment ensure Second Life remains the largest and most successful virtual world.

Thank you for your attention. I will meet you in the forums later this afternoon (sorry, I have meetings all day!) if you have pressing questions or concerns.

Cheers,

M Linden

      

For years, Philip Linden has talked about the annual Burning Man Festival and the ways its open-ended nature, participant-created content and art contributed to his vision of what Second Life could be.

For those who aren’t familiar with the event, Burning Man is an annual week-long art, fire and community celebration in the Black Rock Desert – a 400 square mile expanse of barren landscape in Northern Nevada – focused on community values like immediacy and participation. Attendees are invited to be whoever they are, express themselves however they want without fear of judgment or social criticism. It’s a place controlled only by the limits of the imagination – a place where 50,000 individuals come together to form a peaceful, respectful community where all ideas have merit and everyone is invited to create, share, explore, learn and grow.

Sound vaguely familiar? It should. Many of the same principles that guide Burning Man form the core foundations of the Second Life community.

With the histories of Second Life and Burning Man so closely intertwined, it should come as no surprise that a virtual rendition of the event exists – and will be celebrating its 6th anniversary starting today. Burning Life, as it’s called inworld, has now grown into one of the larger, annual Second Life events. This year’s Burning Life – which runs until October 5 – will feature art and live performances, interactive theme camps, a fashion show and of course, the burning of the Man amid a fireworks display.

To help commemorate Burning Life’s anniversary, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey and Philip will be participating in a panel discussion on Tuesday, Sept. 30. They’ll be chatting about their experiences, inspirations, reflection, future goals and the roles that both Burning Man and Second Life play in enhancing the human condition.

For more information on the discussion or on the event in general, including schedules and to find out how you can contribute and participate visit the official Burning Life Web site.

When: Burning Life opens Saturday at 9 a.m. pacific time and runs to October 5th.

Center Camp stage kicks off at 11 a.m. pacific. See the performance schedule here.

Where: Burning Life

What: Art installations, live events, music, discussions and more.

      

As we’ve discussed several times in this space, improving the “first hour” experience of new Residents is one of our primary goals. As our use cases and base continue to diversify, it’s important to begin tailoring the Second Life experience to the specific needs of our audience and reduce the time it takes to access and begin exploring the virtual world. One of the ways we can address this is to look at how first-time visitors are finding and accessing Second Life.

It’s with that mission in mind that we are launching Direct SLurl, an improved web address vehicle that enables first-time visitors to arrive directly at a location within Second Life, as their first location, by clicking on a Second Life URL from the Web, email, etc. Previously, all new Residents were directed to Help Island upon registration, where they went through orientation before they began exploring Second Life. In this new model, a first time visitor will be directed to www.slurl.com where, on that page, they click “sign up” and quickly register, download and login to the viewer, and arrive at their originally intended destination. A quick tutorial will open upon their initial arrival.

All existing SLurls will be enabled with the Direct SLurl extension effective Thursday, September 17th, 2008.

While Direct SLurl will mostly affect first-time visitors, the tool has significant existing benefits for current Residents as well. For example, if you are hosting an event inworld it will be much easier to recruit and attract non-Residents, as you can post your SLurl to your blog, email to friends, etc., and then attendees will be sent directly to your location.

Furthermore, Residents have the ability to create and brand their own page within slurl.com. When a new visitor clicks on your SLurl, they’ll be directed to a page with your content, further extending your inworld brand(s) to the real world.

While all SLurls will be Direct SLurl-enabled, the same security measures and land ownership protections will still apply. If your island is private and not accessible to the general population, it will continue to be so unless you indicate otherwise. If a first-time user is trying to access private content they will be advised of its status and be directed elsewhere.

It’s our belief that taking the steps to make it easier for new visitors to sign up and begin exploring Second Life will improve the usability of the platform for everyone. Further tailoring of the “first hour” experience can be expected in the near future with Direct SLurl being the initial, and very important, first step.

Further Information:

*  How do I invite someone who isn’t currently inworld to a specific location?

* I don’t want people to use a SLURL to access my land

* I followed a SLURL and it took me to the wrong place!

View Torley’s informative Video on Direct SLurl

      

Just a short announcement that the Land Store will be taken down on Wednesday 17th September for an upgrade to version 2.01. It will be switched off at 9am PST, and all being well will be back up by 11am PST.

This update is specifically to add one new feature that we’re calling ‘Allow Neighbours’. This new functionality allows you to grant permission to other residents so that they can order islands alongside your own, something previously disallowed unless granted through support tickets. For more explanation we have posted a Knowledge Base article over here.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Thank you to everyone who provided constructive comments and feedback in the forums to my initial post. I encourage you to continue to add to the conversation.

I’d like to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing with respect to advertising on the Linden Mainland.

A number of you have raised concerns over going the formal license route, and we too have come to the conclusion that this isn’t the best option. So instead we are going to cover ad farming activities (and the operating of network advertising businesses) under our Terms of Service, specifically as Harassment under clause 4.1. By Networked Advertising, we are specifically talking about the use of multiple parcels, on multiple regions, for the primary purpose of advertising, usually on behalf of other inworld or real world businesses.

What does this mean? if you operate any such networked advertising business on the Linden Mainland, that breaks any one of the following rules or restrictions, we will consider it to be a Terms of Service violation leading to disciplinary action that can include account suspension and loss of land.

• We will allow no more than 50 advertising locations owned by a single individual, whether personally owned or via groups in which you are a member, unless you have written permission from Linden Lab to exceed this limit.Use of Alt accounts/groups to circumvent this restriction will be considered a violation.

• In addition to the cap, we will allow no more than 1 advertising placement by an individual in any single region.

The advertisements themselves..

• Adverts should be grounded to the terrain, not floating.
• Adverts should extend no higher than 8m from the ground.
• No rotating, no flashing content and no particles.
• No unsolicited dispensing of IMs, notecards, landmarks or content.
• No light sources or glow (full bright is acceptable however).
• Advertising hoardings should be Phantom.
• Adverts must be clearly PG in nature.
• No sound and no temp-on-rez content.
• Ban lines should be switched off.

We will expect that all advertisers make a reasonable attempt to fit in with the local area and to respect the wishes of Residents living nearby wherever possible. Linden Lab can and will, at its sole discretion, ask you to remove or modify any advertising related content that it feels is unacceptable. If you, using alternate accounts, groups or other methods, attempt to create a networked advertising business that extends over 50 placements without our express permission, we will consider that to be a violation and you will be asked to remove them.

Finally, if we review your land transactions and deduce that your primary purpose in placing the advertising content is to force the sale of land rather than genuinely advertise, this will be deemed to be a violation and dealt with accordingly.

Now to answer some questions that came up in the forum posts..

Q. I have several Mainland store locations, with signs above them, am I affected?
A. No, this policy change is not aimed at personal advertising of this kind.

Q. I run a business that places adverts inside clubs and malls, am I violating this policy?
A. We call this ‘affiliate advertising’, and it’s unlikely to be affected, especially when it’s inside venues and therefore not adversely affecting the local area.

Q. Does this policy include signs advertising Parcels for sale?
A. Yes it does.

Q. Why don’t you just disallow small parcels?
A. Whilst we might restrict parcel join/divide on new zoned areas in the future, for existing Mainland this isn’t practical. There are legitimate uses for small parcels and with such a limit in place, complex parcel shapes would be impossible to ever divide.

The issue here is not advertising, or parcel sizes, it is the way both are used together to the detriment of the Mainland as a whole.

Q. What about land cutting?
A. There is no doubt that this is also a problem. If the removal of ad farms doesn’t substantially reduce land cutting, we will look at other options.

Q. How do I appeal this decision or your enforcement of it?
A. We will be providing a new ticket route in the support portal specifically to handle questions related to this policy change.

Q. What are you doing about other forms of land extortion and harassment?
A. This concerns us very much, and we’ll be doing all we can to remove this behaviour. Deliberately misleading other residents, for example with doughnut shaped parcels, is unacceptable. You can expect that any practices that negatively impact the Mainland will be looked at, and where possible stopped.

If you are engaged in something that clearly has a negative and widespread impact on the Mainland experience, we will request that you stop.

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable (insert wiki to the Linden Network), so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Best Documentation
In this category, we wanted to find someone who contributed lots of great documentation and helped build a community of fellow writers in a helpful and friendly way. This is an area where a lot of people do a lot of great work — people like Gellen Glenelg, Strife Onizuka, SignpostMarv Martin and Catherine Pffefer — and, in fact, we had to declare a tie.

One of the winners tirelessly translated hundreds of pages into Japanese on the wiki, expanding the universe of Second Life residents, builders, and contributors in the process. The other was equally impressive with French translations. The work that these two residents have done has greatly expanded the reach of the ecosystem. The 2008 Hippo Award winners for Best Documentation are Asuka Neely and Gally Young.

Best Organizer
We split Best Organizer into two categories.

A. Best Issue Tracker Organizer
Organizing our issue tracker, aka “PJIRA” is a category in its own right. We had several really worthy contributors in this area: Ellla McMahon, Lex Neva and WarKirby Magojiro. However, we found that our winner could not be beat in raw, productive, obsessive compulsive organizing. The 2008 Hippo Award winner for Best Issue Tracker Organization is Harleen Gretzky.

B. Best Working Group Organization
Working group organization is also a very important asset to the community, and we have an embarrassment of riches here, too, including Zha Ewry and Saijanai Kuhn. Our winner in the category has been not only a good organizer, but a blog author and an implementor. After the first meeting of the Architecture Working Group, despite not being there in person like many people, he wrote what was probably the best summary of the meeting and what was discussed, which educated a lot of people about what AWG is about. He also has been instrumental in the creation of the PyOGP reference implementation for the open grid protocol. The 2008 Hippo Award winner for Best Working Group Organization is Tao Takashi.

Best Code Contribution
For this category, we were looking for the best feature or other code contribution. At first, we looked more closely at utility, but we also looked at how it was contributed. Runners-up included McCabe Maxstead’s “classic” viewer skin and Seg Baphomet’s OpenAL contribution. Choosing a winner was tough, but in the end we recognized that contributor who’s work was not only of great utility to the passionate and significant machinima community in Second Life, but who also did the work in a tidy and thoughtful way. The 2008 Hippo Award for Best Code Contribution goes to the contributor of the voice lipsync feature, Mm Alder.

The Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence
This award is named in memorial to Jesse Malthus, an early contributor to the Second Life open source initiative who was always a cheerful and positive influence in-world and helped make things interesting and fun.

This year, the winner is a formidable presence on PJIRA. This resident often comments on very contentious issues in a constructive and thoughtful way. PJIRA would be a lot less organized and friendly place to be without the winner in this category, so it’s with great pleasure that I announce this year’s winner of the20008 Hipppo’s Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence: Lex Neva.

Contributor of the Year
We had so many good choices to pick from here, including Whoops Babii’s 64-bit platform work, Carjay McGinnis viewer patches, Alissa Sabre’s translation work, and Gigs Taggart’s patches and PJIRA work. Our winner this year has contributed her fair share of patches, working with us to make sure that our transition to CMake is a smooth one. Many patches have helped get the Linux version of the viewer much closer to parity with the other platform versions. All of this is done with a cheerful and constructive attitude that attracts others to the project. It’s with great pleasure that I announce the 2008 Hippo Award Contributor of the Year is Michelle2 Zenovka.

Please join Linden Lab in thanking these contributors and the open source community for their work to improve the Second Life experience for everyone.

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

In recent months we have had a large amount of feedback about the need to improve the Mainland experience. We have listened and we agree. There will be a number of phases to this work that will include policy changes, land recycling, zoning and urban regeneration programs. The DPW was the first step, and the next step is to tackle ad farming. After my previous post you gave us a lot of input about advertising. You made it clear that this is the most urgent issue right now.

Back when the Mainland began there were very few restrictions, driving creativity and adding a little chaos to the mix, but as in the real world, a lack of controls can lead to misuse. Unsightly advertising rapidly spread across the Mainland causing the situation we see today, with some kinds of advertising driving down land values and adversely affecting the majority of residents. We need to remove the bad forms of advertising whilst encouraging and controlling responsible forms of advertising, just as city planners do in the real world.

The good news therefore, is that Network advertising (Ad Farming) will no longer be permitted on the Linden Mainland unless you have a written agreement with Linden Lab (essentially meaning a license to advertise). Anyone currently operating such a business inworld will need to remove their adverts by the 1st October 2008.

By Network advertising we are specifically referring to the practice of using many parcels over multiple regions, especially small micro parcels where the predominant purpose of the land is to hold advertising. In the vast majority of cases we believe it will be very clear whether a particular use is a violation or not but we will provide a way for people to appeal and discuss their own case with us before any action is taken. We will assess any edge cases as we encounter them.

You’ll note that I’ve mentioned Licensing. I’d hope that most of you will agree that advertising itself is not the bad guy here, the issue has been with the way in which advertising has been done and the excessive number of adverts. There are lots of positive forms of advertising already inworld that are no problem at all, from the signs you place above your own stores to the club owner that will place your ad on the wall behind the bar for a fee. Besides, much of what we call Ad Farming is not genuine advertising at all, but geared more towards selling the parcel.

So, whilst we are no longer going to allow Ad Farming, we accept that there may be genuine advertisers who wish to operate on the Mainland and are prepared to sign a license with us to do so. The idea here, is that where we do allow a small amount of network advertising to take place, it is highly controlled, low impact and managed responsibly. Licensee’s will be limited in number, capped to a specific number of advert locations and with strict rules about how their adverts look. No more spinning, floating cubes, no more unsolicited notecard givers, no more improper use of ban lines.

We will provide more information on the license process and terms very soon, we hope to finalise them as soon as possible. Here is where you come in..

Please let us know what you think, we’d like your opinions on what licensed advertisers should and should not be allowed to do on the Mainland. Adverts as light sources? How high is too high and when is an advert too large? We would really appreciate your feedback as an aid to us finalising the terms themselves. As with my previous post comments are not enabled, so please head over to this forum thread to let us know what you think. We may not reply to all the posts, but we will read every one of them.

Your feedback was clear, and we’re pleased to make this change to improve the Mainland for everyone. ‘Ad Farming’ will no longer be allowed on the Linden Mainland.

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

·       Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presence” status updates

·       The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call

·       The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving  forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home.  Will comment on the blog then.  Thanks.  

 

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking FOR. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

I’m delighted to announce that Mono is ready to launch as part of the 1.24 Server deploy starting today.

Mono is an open source technology that improves the stability and speed of scripts – particularly calculation-intensive ones. In some of the internal benchmarking we’ve done, scripts running on Mono ran up to 220 times faster. This extra speed both increases the gamut of scripted applications that can be developed in Second Life and also makes Second Life more responsive when running existing scripted applications that have been converted to run on the Mono scripting engine.

Because Mono has been integrated in to Second Life alongside the original scripting engine, scripters are able to opt in to Mono. Unless scripts are explicitly converted to run on Mono they will continue to run on the existing scripting engine. There is no automated conversion to Mono and all existing scripted content will continue to run on the original scripting engine as before.

As well as providing immediate benefits, the integration of the Mono virtual machine makes many future improvements possible: the use of mainstream languages to script Second Life alongside the existing LSL language; the removal of arbitrary per-script limits on script resource usage and the use of mainstream libraries and tools for scripting to name a few.

Mono scripts run on the Second Life server and so can be used with any compatible viewer, however to create new Mono scripts requires a client that can select the Mono engine as the target when the new script is saved. Once the 1.24 server deploy is complete we will release the 1.21 Release Candidate Viewer, which contains these interface elements and will allow the creation of scripts targeting the Mono runtime.

Please note that the 1.24 server deploy will take a number of days and during this period Mono scripted objects will not function on all regions. Once the deploy is complete and the 1.21 Release Candidate Viewer is available it will be safe to use, buy, sell and distribute Mono scripted objects across the entire grid.

More information on Mono can be found in the wiki, FAQ, release notes for 1.24 server and forum.

The integration of Mono is the first step in the evolution of Second Life into a true software development platform. Thank you to all the residents who have helped us take this first step.

BURNING LIFE 2008
September 27 - October 5

In 1999, an innovative man made the long trek from San Francisco to the sun-baked playa of an enormous, flat, dry lakebed in the Nevada high desert.  He went to attend the renowned Burning Man festival where, for one week each year, tens of thousands of people from around the world build art, camps and communities, and celebrate life. This man came back with new ideas for the virtual world he was planning; ideas about the nature of reality, creativity, identity and community.

He worked some of these ideas into the very fabric of “Linden World” which eventually became what you and I know as Second Life. That man was Philip Linden.

To celebrate the inspiration that enriched Second Life, over the past six years, Residents in Second Life have gotten together to build one of the largest, most unusual and most creative events found in the Metaverse— the annual Art, Fire and Community festival known as Burning Life.

To read more about the project and find out how to participate, visit Burning Life Volunteer Central !

To discuss the event and preparations please visit the SL Forums.

Performers: there will be a separate place for you to indicate your desire to participate, coming up soon.

Getting griefed isn’t fun, but this enlightening video tutorial sure is. I collaborated with our peacekeeping Governance Team to teach you how to file effective abuse reports so you can have a happier Second Life.

Action-packed griefing and conflict resolution tips are shown, and so are effective ways to use tools we provide — like how to mute annoying noises. Press play and be on your way!

DOWNLOAD HIGH-QUALITY VERSION

In less than 10 minutes, you’ll learn:

01:07 - How is discipline determined?
01:52 - Top 5 tips for Self-governance
04:37 - How to file an abuse report
07:32 - Want to meet the Governance Team in Second Life?
07:43 - What do I do if my items are being illegally copied?
08:07 - What if someone’s name doesn’t appear when I file an abuse report?
08:38 - Share this video with your friends!

If you’ve ever had buddies ask you for help filing an abuse report, share this video with them! They’ll appreciate the knowledge, and you and your friends will be prepared to do the right thing when you come across trouble. Empower yourself and keep enjoying your Second Life.

Related resources:

• Abuse & Griefing – Knowledge Base articles
• Policies: Community Standards, Terms of Service, DMCA
• G-Team Office Hours - Meet ‘em inworld!

-Torley Linden   
     Video Tutorials & Creativity inworld @ Here island

A short post to let you know that after reviewing the current market, we are remaining unchanged on Mainland supply. There will be no new whole regions offered at auction. We will review the situation again at the end of the month.

The mainland price is remaining consistent, the Mean average being L$7.10 per meter over the last 7 days for individual buyers compared with a little over L$6 for Group buys. This is the number we usually talk about in these posts, and is an average of completed Mainland sales only (not parcels set for sale) and excludes estate sales, zero value sales and auction parcels.

For extra context, the Median figure is L$5 for individual buyers compared with L$4.4 per meter for sales to Groups. This has also remained quite consistent over the last few weeks. We’ll talk more about the numbers and how we view them in an upcoming blog post.

I’ve got a double treat for you today — 2 (two) tips of the week! They’re both followups re: questions I got about Here island o’ Enlightenment, which you should, like, totally visit if you haven’t already.

Have you ever wanted to use a custom texture when clicking the Default button in the texture picker (instead of ol’ plywood?) Save time, builder! Here’s how:

DOWNLOAD HIGH-QUALITY VERSION

And now, I show you how to make a glowing neon sign which will surely stand out. This features some principles I’ve covered in past vidtuts, but can be watched standalone if you’re new to my video tutorials, so enjoy:

DOWNLOAD HIGH-QUALITY VERSION

If you’re on the free ArtRage version, you can download the transparent canvases to use. And remember, this is just one example of infinite possibilities you can do — I get you started and greatness is yours to claim.

Send your creations to me, Torley Linden, and I look forward to them soon!

-Torley Linden  
     Did you know you can download all 600+ Torley Textures in a single zip pack? CLICK HERE to learn more & get ‘em!

This is a post about the Mainland, and more specifically, about an exciting and necessary change of direction we’re taking. I’m also going to talk about why we think the Mainland is important, what we feel the issues are and some of the ways that we intend to transform it for those of you that live or spend time there. This won’t be a short read, so grab a drink, make yourself comfortable and join me after the cut..

We have come a long way since those first 16 or so regions appeared back in 2003. These days we have inworld parties that are larger than the original mainland. At nearly 5000 regions the Mainland represents around 327 square kilometers of virtual land. If those regions were placed end to end, that is almost 800 miles to drive through and in terms of area the Mainland is now bigger than Malta. The Mainland is important, it has a history, it has roots. Many of you had your first experience of Second Life on the Mainland, you may have bought your first parcel, accidentally attached that first prim to your head, or added that first name to your Friends list there. These are the largest contiguous land masses we have, each of them incredibly creative and dynamic in their own ways and home to some wonderful communities. All of the Mainland Residents deserve as good an experience as we can provide.

It has always been a diverse and exciting place to have your inworld home, but in recent times it has also become a challenging and frustrating one. We have long had a policy of noninterference, instead applying the Terms of Service and Community Standards via abuse reporting. This made sense during the pioneer period of early adopters and rapid growth, but to echo Mitch Kapor’s recent speech at the Second Life birthday event, as our audience widens we have to take a more active part in guiding their experience. Unfortunately with the wonderful freedoms and creativity the Mainland offers have also come substantial problems that are unique to this area of the grid and so the time for change is now.

As Estate Manager for the Mainland continents, Linden Lab needs to become more involved. Much more. We have to actively work to provide the best experience for our customers just as the many wonderful private estate owners do for theirs. You can expect to see Linden Lab proactively resourcing, planning and taking action to better support the many mainlanders on our estate; we have a responsibility to our tenants and we take this role very seriously. We feel that this change is critically important and feedback from you tells us that you agree.

This change has actually been coming for a while. You can see the early signs of this new commitment, with projects such as the Dept of Public Works and the more rapid recycling of abandoned land. Both initiatives will continue to grow.

The problems on the Mainland are many and sometimes complex. We have Mainland land values that are less stable than we would like so we need to be more open, earlier, about how we intend to manage supply and what metrics we care about when making those decisions. We need to help you to understand why we make the decisions that we do. I’ll be blogging much more about that topic soon. We need to address issues regarding highly fragmented regions and areas of problem terrain, especially coastline. And then there is advertising..

It is hard to talk about the Mainland without talking about the issue of advertising inworld; it is, without question, one of the biggest issues we face. Through office hours, emails and notecards we have been gathering feedback from all sides of this issue ever since the initial change of policy earlier this year. That change helped but it didn’t go nearly far enough. Current policy allows adverts which ruin the view and depress land values for nearby Residents which is just not acceptable.

We need to professionalize all aspects of advertising inworld. This includes our relationship with the advertisers, the conditions under which advertising (especially by large networks) is controlled and the guidelines that we wish advertisers to adhere to. In many ways this is no different to how real life cities approach this problem, and our principal drive here will be on improving the quality of experience for our Residents. You can expect a much more thorough explanation of how we intend to handle advertising very soon but rest assured that this will change, because it has to.

Whilst many Residents love the ever changing aspect of the Mainland, for some Residents living there is just too dynamic and too unpredictable. We intend to provide more choice in the kinds of new Mainland continents that we make available because just as our customer base is very diverse, so are their land needs. To meet those diverse needs we plan to create different areas with different covenants in place that are actively enforced by Linden Lab; basically this means Zoning. This may include commercial areas, or residential only, or areas with no advertising. We hope to be talking more about how this will happen towards the end of the quarter.

Governor Linden owns a very substantial amount of land, and there is a lot we can do to make these parcels more attractive for the Residents living alongside. Obviously that will be a fairly long term project due to the high numbers of parcels involved.

I should probably wrap up at this point, before this post becomes a novel. But I’d like to get much more feedback on this post than the blog comments would allow, and also be sure that Residents in all timezones get a chance to give their views. So we have created a specific Forum area which should be available a few minutes after this posting goes out; so please take a look and let us know your thoughts there. To reiterate, comments are disabled for this post because we’d like your feedback on the forums please.

Welcome to another KBAotW!

My selection this week is our handy article How to select everything you own on a parcel of land. There are many uses for this quick and easy click-n-drag selection method.

• Select an entire unlinked build
• Make copies of your copyable objects into one coalesce file
• Moving to a new parcel? Select your objects, take them with you and rez the file at your new location.  Voila, moving is easy.

If you missed a Knowledge Base Article of the Week, you can find our collection here.

Please also join us each Friday for our Documentation Team office hour held on Friday’s at 2 p.m. PDT at our pier-shaped office in Beaumont: Knowledge Bear 1.0!

Kate Linden

You are Here
You are standing in a field filled with watermelons, next to a giant Torley head which bids you “Friendly greetings!” Attached to one of the melons is a leaflet which practically begs you to, well, leaf through it.

> read leaflet

I’ve an island named Here which you’re most welcome to visit! (Yes, you read that right.) Here is my inspiration brought to life in Second Life: you can watch video tutorials inworld, try some of the lovely stuff I rave about in-context, and get excited about creative possibilities. After all, the best way to understand Second Life is to experience it.

Ever wonder what motivates me on the job to amplify your awesome? Check out this video tour, learn more about what I do for you, and listen to stories of my experiences:

DOWNLOAD HIGH-QUALITY VERSION

Whether it’s giving terraforming a go in my "landbox", knowing why click actions are so useful for interacting with objects, and picking up a copy of my FREE Torley Textures (there’s almost 600 of ‘em!), I’m sure you’ll find something and more to enjoy, Here in Second Life.

Related resources:

• More info about Here
• Linden Office Hours
• How to take snapshots guide (referred to in the vid)

-Torley Linden  
     I amplify your awesome!

We would like to invite you to join us in the Forums as we experiment with how we communicate with you, our Residents. 

Try out a “live discussion” with us, in the Forums, where we’ll read along and answer questions, for the next 3 days. 

We’ll keep the thread open for comments for 72 hours, so Residents from all time zones will have an opportunity to participate.  We’ll read all comments, and we’ll participate as well, but please be patient and remember this is a conversation that will last 3 days.  

First Forum Discussion Topic: VAT
Recently Zee Linden noticed a number of questions about Linden Lab’s charging European Residents VAT, from comments on M’s blog post about his first 60 days at Linden Lab.  Zee wanted to answer some of those questions, and so VAT will be our first Forum Discussion topic.

Zee will be reading along, and periodically responding to comments there, so please join the conversation here if you’re interested in talking with us about VAT. 

Thanks!  We look forward to hearing what you think about this format.

Last month IBM and Linden Lab demonstrated inter grid teleports between the Second Life preview grid and an Opensim instance run by IBM. Torley Linden made a video of the event. Now we are making the intergrid teleport code available for all developers interested in making virtual worlds interoperate. Today we begin a public beta program for all prospective “gridnauts” (a gridnaut is anyone who has successfully teleported between virtual worlds).

This beta is intended for virtual world developers. The purpose is to establish a base level of interoperability — no inventory, textures, or attachments will transfer upon intergrid teleport. You will appear on the target grid’s simulator as that grid’s default avatar (Ruth). Second Life resident Tara5 Oh has a walkthrough of the Open Grid Beta Program.

A gridnaut from the preview grid, who just teleported to an OpenSim region.

In the first phase of the Beta, we are working with OpenSim developers to allow teleport between the preview grid and a patched version of OpenSim. Zha Ewry of IBM has contributed code to the OpenSim project that implements the Open Grid Protocol.

If you are a virtual worlds developer and want to participate in the beta, see the Open Grid Public Beta page on the Second Life wiki.

Along with the OGPB work, we’re also sponsoring Pyogp, an open source client library and test harness code base being developed jointly by AWG members and Linden Lab. The client library fully supports authenticating on the agent domain hosted on the Preview Grid.

This is a historic moment in the development of virtual worlds, and we look forward to your participation.

– Whump Linden, OGP Beta Manager