Advertising, ad campaigns, ad agencies, and the people that make it happen

Second Life never wanted these corporations and their strange expectations. We never welcomed their ugly sims or their kaput ideas about marketing in SL. We are more than glad to see them leave. Our current concurrency is 40,000 users signed on simultaneously most of the day every day. And yes, SL will exist in one shape or form in the future. You mark my words.

Thanks for presenting a well researched, well balanced, objective article on the progress of things in SL. Clearly just like the mainstream advertisers have misunderstood SL altogether, you seem to just quote the opinions of a few with perhaps no personal experience of your own on the matter.

So here's your bitter medicine back for you:
I declare that journalism is dead. Sure it was fun when major media outlets opened their own news channels and started bombarding us with images of the Gulf War followed by any other military altercation, terrorist attack, or whatever else they can find between bomb scares and kitties who can predict dying patients in elderly care homes. This shock-news era lasted for a good decade before the sleepless public sitting in front of their TVs realized that these so called news organizations were presenting the same brain numbing non-news day after day depending more on people's tendency to pay attention to fear inducing stories rather than reports by legitimate reporters and news sources.

What's worse is the questionable alliances between the news outlets and other corporations with certain interests further warp these non-news stories every which way depending on the long list of maggot like partners each one of these dead horse news outlets carry around on them.

Clearly, when we take into account the dwindling numbers of cable subscribers watching this news-nonsense, the age of journalism is over. Clearly, when the people of this country have no trust left in the news media's ability to ask the right questions, at the right time and report what matters, the discipline of journalism is dead.

Owning a blog does not mean you are a journalist. My dog has a blog but he is no journalist believe me. Owning a site does not mean you're a news outlet. What makes news, what makes journalism is research, research, research and objectivity, balance and integrity. Without these you're just another monkey with a keyboard and at this current age of technology we are all stocked up with those. So Thanks but no thanks.

Clearly, you need to do your job better.

Clearly.

Well said, Troy :)
Also, I've heard Everquest is on its last legs... due to the place being full of trolls or something.

Just because advertisers don't seem to have any idea whatsoever how to go about appealing to the in-world population doesn't signal the virtual world's imminent demise. Rather than doing any market studies or research, they seem to build stuff, then hope someone notices.

So corporations have been and gone.

meh.

There are a few who get it. The Sector 7 sim for the transformers movie being one such example.

But the majority f corporations just came and set up a big 3d at, and they're SUPRISED that noone cares?

SL is very different. And requires very different methods. For a virtual world "on it's last legs", there sure are a lot of people making a living there, and a hell of a lot of ongoing growth and development.

Corporations never brought much of anything to SL. LL is not dependant on their money, and their presence, or lack of it, makes 0 difference to us. Just a meaningless blip in history.

Just like in any other business, some corporations understand Second Life and how to leverage it and others don't. Declaring SL dead because some don't is like declaring small business dead because 60% fail in the first five years.

As someone with a breadth of experience in Second Life, my sense is that you wrote your article by googling a bunch of sites instead of doing any actual research or gaining personal insight. That's too bad. We need more journalists and fewer hypesters.

Oh, cause some irrelevant blog says "it is official", we're supposed to take notice?

SLCC 1, October, 2005: 150 attendees (sold out)
SLCC 2, August, 2006: 500 attendees (sold out)
SLCC 3, August 24-26, 2007: 700 registrants already (sell out at 1000)

Those numbers would indicate that you're a moron.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out and all.

Nearly all of the people who've responded to this commentary are "Second Life illiterati" who are hanging on to the dream for dear (second) life. They're Rosedale's longtime dupes, and they can't quite believe that the world has heard, come to see, judged for themselves, and moved on to things that work better.

In the beginning, SL was a noble, well-meaning, and exciting idea. But Rosedale was too much of a huckster to spin out a serious product; turned out he knew nothing about the real issues of creating online worlds.
And the mere thousands of dupes he enlisted to create his free-content-universe proved to have neither the talent nor the understanding to sustain the community and economy Rosedale imagined.

Turning to the corporate world for salvation may be Rosedale's final undoing - some of these people are sharp, objective, and unafraid of swimming against the tide - until the tide turns in their direction....

Yes, I actually do know what the hell I'm talking about; I've been in SL since January 2004 and have had a ringside view of all the nonsense.