The Metaverse

Missing in action: Avatar puppeteering

Tateru Nino has been doing some fantastic posts on Massively lately, and has dug up a real gem in "Peering Inside: Whither avatar puppeteering?". Digging into the avatar puppeteering project which has been more or less missing in action since 2006, she finds that Jeffrey Ventrella, the main man behind the project, left the Lab in August last year - and the project has been "on hold" (which usually means "dead") since then.

Good digging from Tateru, who's posts on the whole trademark debacle have also been essential reading.

The deeper issue behind the Second Life trademark mess - community engagement

I don't think that Linden Lab meant to create quite such a blogstorm with its announcement of the inSL logo programme, but there's no doubt that this is exactly what it's done. With some bloggers talking about three day strikes, and many others echoing the message that Linden Lab has overstepped the mark, it's pretty clear that this is a mess - and one which the Lab will have to deal with.

As I've pointed out, the reality of the situation is actually pretty uncontroversial. The licensing programme itself is just about ensuring that companies can advertise their presence in SL without having to use Linden Lab's trademarks, which is the kind of thing that gives the average business lawyer hives.

However, the way it's been expressed has lead many people to believe that they will have to adopt onerous conditions whenever they even mention Second Life. Again, as I've pointed out, this is largely not true: unless your business name or web site name uses one of the Linden trademarks in it, you'll probably have to do precisely nothing different. Publications with "Second Life" in the title will probably need to adopt appropriate disclaimers. No one will be able to attempt to use Linden trademarks to suggest they're associated with the Lab. As Ciaran Laval has pointed out, this is exactly the same rules as any other trademark.

Clearly, Linden Lab communicated this badly. But that's not enough to explain how bad this is looking for them. Why are so many people willing to believe that Linden Lab actually wants to kick the hundreds of bloggers, writers, and content creators who contribute to Second Life's success in the teeth?

The answer lies in the complete dearth of proper community relations management and an utter failure to have any kind of real blogger engagement programme. This is something that's been building for months - and to anyone who's been following the progress of the Lab, it's no surprise.

For a company based on building communities, Linden Lab is surprisingly opaque. Partly, this is down to a failure to develop its sense of what its community is since the days when Philip Rosedale could hold "town halls" with the reasonable expectation that everyone in-world could attend without the servers falling over. The original way that Linden Lab communicated with its customers was in-world - but that only works for a few people at a time, and utterly fails with an active community in the hundreds of thousands.

(As an aside, I suspect that this is why Linden Lab spends such a lot of its time working with small groups in-world, such as the Second Life Architecture Working Group. Small groups work in-world. The problem is, of course, that it's all too easy to see such groups as "feted inner cores" and assume the Lab doesn't care about anyone else.)

Nothing has replaced in-world meetings as the core part of Linden Lab's communications programme. While the company has a blog, it is mostly formulaic corporate comms with a dash of hints and tips. It has grown well beyond the point where a single blog is enough - every senior executive should have a blog, and communicate things which impact their area directly. With the Linden blog, you never feel like you're talking to a person - which is the point of blogging.

Worse still is the apparent lack of a real community/blogger engagement programme. For a company like Linden Lab, blogger engagement is probably the most important kind of PR. And while individual Lindens often appear happy to talk about their specific area, no one appears to be doing this job for Linden Lab as a whole. This is shown by the fact that, 48 hours after this issue started brewing, there is no clarification or response from Linden Lab over the issue.

Good blogger relations - heck, just good old fashioned PR work - could have nipped this one in bud. That hasn't happened, and it's now getting to the point when a minor clarification may no longer be enough to stop the damage.

So where does Linden Lab go next? The first thing it needs to sort out is this mess, which it can do by officially clarifying things. If its lawyers can't agree on a form of words which express the simple fact that you don't need to follow every instance of "Second Life" on your blog with "TM" then it should fire its lawyers. Other companies' legal teams manage this daily.

Second, it needs to start a serious blogger outreach programme, to ensure that it gets feedback from some of the most vocal members of its community - people who's work influences thousands of opinions. And blogger engagement means listening as much as talking - something that should never be forgotten.

Finally, it needs to start being a more marketing-focussed company. So far in its short life, it has mostly been a technology development team: marketing was really a "pig in lipstick" role. The techies delivered the product: the marketers worked out how to market it. Now, it needs to learn the real lesson of marketing - put customers first, including in your development process. And that means learning a lot more about the community, who are, after all, its customers.

The huge kerfuffle over Second Life trademarks

When the world of fandom and amateur publishing collides with the world of intellectual property law, there are usually sparks. The decision by Linden Lab to start being professional about its trademarks is a classic example of this, as can be seen by this (typical) post on MindBlizzard. To summarise: Linden Lab has created a special logo aimed at companies wanting to advertise their presence in Second Life. It can't simply let them use its Second Life logo or the Second Life trademark, because of the potential for consumer confusion - the prime reason that trademarks exist. However, as is standard with legalese, lots of people are reading this as an attach on the vast community which surrounds Second Life and talks about it incessantly. Before we go any further, I'd suggest people go read the excellent PubLaw article on trademarks, and specifically this bit:

"It is important to remember that the only type of use by an author that may suffice as a "fair use" of another's trademark is the use of the mark in a non-trademark sense. It is also possible that the "overuse" of another's trademark, even in a descriptive sense, may not be considered fair use. This is because the repeated usage by the author could lead to a likelihood of consumer confusion based upon a presumed connection or sponsorship with the trademark owner.

The fair use defense if it is to be successful must meet the following requirements: (1) the author's use of the mark must accurately describe the trademark owner's product or service; (2) the author must use the mark in a non-trademark manner and not as a source identifier of the author's work; and (3) the author's use must be in good faith."

In other words, if you are using a trademark in a way which makes it clear that you have no association with Linden Lab, that you're not part of them or sponsored by them or that your work is approved by them, you're fine. Specifically, you can always use a trademark nominatively - that is, to refer to the product, service or company that it's a mark of. You don't need the permission of the trademark holder, and you don't have to follow the terms of any licence they want to impose As long as you do this, you're OK. There is no legal requirement to include a trademark symbol, or a written acknowledgment of trademark, as long as there is no potential for confusion and it is clear that you are referring to the specific thing. Yes, this means you don't have to follow Linden Lab's guidelines over use of "Second Life" to the letter, although if you're a corporation I'd suggest you do anyway to cover your ass. As long as you're not using their trademarks in a generic way or suggesting that Linden Lab approves of what you're doing you should be fine. What if your blog is called "The Second Life Foo"? Here, the clear thing you need to do is ensure that there's no suggestion that it's created, sponsored, or related to Linden Lab.  Just stick the disclaimer that Linden Lab has provided somewhere on your blog. What if you've called your business "Second Life Building Inc"? Here, you're likely to be on much stickier ground. Consider this: Would you call your company "Coca Cola Building" and expect that to be OK? Best option is to just change your name. You can, however, use the trademark descriptively in your material - ie "We create buildings in Linden Lab's Second Life virtual world". So is all this a storm in a teacup? Yes and no. Linden Lab isn't doing anything that it ultimately doesn't need to do, legally. It has to protect its trademarks, not just for itself but also to ensure that there's no potential for consumers to be confused about its involvement in third parties. In creating the "inSL" logo programme, it's made it a LOT easier for businesses to advertise their presence in Second Life without infringing trademarks, something that's always a major concern to business lawyers. But, as is often the case with Linden, it's not communicated this well. There's been no explanation of WHY it's doing it, or how it affects existing businesses.  For a company that's founded on community, it does community outreach extraordinarily badly. And given that the community is what makes Second Life so compelling, both on a personal and business level, that's a worry.

Death of Second Life? Nope

Accenture Scientist Predicts Death of Second Life. Actually, you read the report and he doesn't:

"'The virtual worlds hold out the promise of everything from lower infrastructure costs to new revenue streams,' said Swaminathan. 'But Accenture Labs foresees an imminent drop in interest as businesses hit the limits of closed virtual worlds. Much as circumscribed networks such as CompuServe gave way to the open IP world of the Internet, 'SL' and others will evolve toward much more capable open virtual worlds.'"

Yes, that's right: Swaminathan is, in fact, predicting that Second Life will evolve into an open platform, rather like Linden Lab's own roadmap. Doesn't make as good a headline, though!

In which Prokofy fails to understand dual licensing.

Second Thoughts: Sheep 'Dance on Eggshells':

"Now Satchmo delivered the real story: that in his/ESC's interpretation, if Linden Lab had a dual license under GPL with their OS code for the viewer, which they released both as an OP code and, as he claimed, still claimed the right to sell it as a proprietary item (and they must have gotten some payoff, too, when they licensed the Sheep to have a 'commercial use viewer), then by analogy or by precedent, the Sheep, too, could turn the open into the closed."

Hard as this paragraph is to parse ("word salad", indeed), it's pretty clear that Prokofy doesn't understand the concept of dual licensing.

Troubling community standards... or non-standards

Guess what will get you banned... - Second Life Insider:

"Today, an abuse department Linden contacted a resident on a matter of sexually suggestive images involving minors. I've been passed a transcript, but I'd rather not quote the piece to avoid the resident suffering from any additional woes. The abuse Linden insisted that 'certain' items of content had to be removed, but refused to indicate which ones.

The resident was certain that they had no such content fitting the description of the infraction. The abuse Linden insisted that they did, but refused to indicate which items, only that the offending items be removed or face suspension/banning.

In order to support his case, the abuse Linden quoted the Community Standards. Only they're not the ones on the website, or in the library folder of your inventory. Apparently there's another set that has never been published."

Either this is a very good example of something who really needs to stop doing customer liaison, or someone is playing a very bad joke on SLI.

How should you be running your office hours?

One of the traditions of Lindenhood is the office hour, a set time when residents can come along to a time which a specific Linden will set aside, to ask questions or otherwise interact with the makers of the world.

Although they're not widely advertised, they're easy enough to find out about - there's even a public iCal listing them if you want to nip along.

The obvious point of them is to keep open a channel for people in-world to ask questions of Lindens, discuss various topics, and so on. What they're evidently NOT is customer service sessions: although open forums like this are part of the whole customer service experience, they can't be about answering specific problems for customers. If they are, then something is going wrong as their should be better methods of doing that (in Linden Lab's case, bug reports and JIRA).

Office hours are a great idea, and can work really well for companies beyond Linden Lab. However, there's a few things which can go wrong with them and limit their effectiveness – or even provide a very poor experience for the customer. So here's my five rules for running a successful "office hour" type of interaction session.

1. Set an agenda, don't go freeform.

Although office hours exist in a virtual world, they obey fundamentally the same principles as meetings in the real world. Indeed, they borrow their name from a form of real-world meeting - the academic "office hour" where a teacher promises to be in their office so individual or small groups of students can go along to discuss an issue.

However, office hours in virtual worlds tend to be more like seminars in size, with 10-12 people crammed into the same virtual space. This means that you get 10 people all of whom have different requirements and expectations of what they want from the office hour. Inevitably, this will mean that some people's expectations conflict - giving them a very unsatisfactory experience.

That's why, unless you have very small groups, the best office hour sessions always have a pre-announced topic. This allows people with a general interest in whatever you want to talk over to come along, and also discourages those coming along with more general questions. General questions should be dealt with through other means - email, IM, and so on.

2. Don't let other people answer questions for you.

This is a constant irritant to many people, particularly in technical sessions, as Prokofy Neva has pointed out. Although, as is standard with Prokofy, she buries her point under layers of abuse and vitriol, it's still a good one: when another resident jumps in to answer a question, it's worse than useless. There's no guarantee that the answer is correct, and allowing other residents to answer questions encourages people to "show off" their own technical knowledge.

3. Don't be afraid to tell someone to be quiet.

Leading on from that, sometimes you'll find that a single resident dominates office hours, to the detriment of others. In the really bad cases, this will be someone who persistently asks the same question, over and over, and who other residents attack.

There's no simple answer to how to deal with this, but the best way is always private, rather than public. Do not, under any circumstances, tell someone to shut up in main chat - if you're going to ask them to back off a little, do so in IM.

4. Wait until someone finishes speaking before answering.

Despite the advent of voice, Second Life is still largely a textual medium, and the problem with textual, live chat media is that people tend

to talk in small bursts

without you necessarily knowing

when they've finished their sentences. It gets even more complicated when you've got other people's conversations interwoven in this too. So just bare this in mind when you're answering a question - type the whole of your answer in one sentence if you can, and allow others to do their own full answers too.

5. Never, ever lose it.

This one sounds obvious, but you should never, ever lose it with a resident - even to the extent of doing something like "/me rolls his eyes" at someone, even as a joke: your humour may not be the same as the person you're talking to. If you feel yourself getting angry, you're better off calling an early halt to the session than blustering on.

Second Life to Integrate Google Search (via Metaversed)

Second Life to Integrate Google Search | Metaversed:

"Jeska Linden, the community manager at Linden Lab, the company that publishes Second Life said in a discussion (link to recording removed as per InformationWeeks wishes) today at an InformationWeek meeting, that the development team were playing around with Google Search Appliance. Google's enteprise hardware/software search solution would allow residents to search the Metaverse far more effectively"

Reuters/Second Life » Second Life tops 50,000 concurrency

Reuters/Second Life » Second Life tops 50,000 concurrency:

"As first reported in the Second Life Insider, over 50,000 avatars were online in the virtual world simultaneously for the first time yesterday. Usage peaked at a concurrency of 50,528 at 1:45pm Second Life Time (US Pacific) before beginning to fall. Catherine Smith, a spokeswoman for Linden Lab, confirmed the new record."

Whoo! It's not that long since I remember thinking that the architecture of Second Life would be lucky to manage 20,000 at the same time. Evidently the new messaging architecture which the Lab introduced in August has done some good.

In Second Life, PG means "no nipples"

Occasionally, the decisions of Linden Lab make you scratch your head. For example, take the decision by Iridium Linden that a huge statue of a naked woman wasn't allowed in a PG sim because it had nipples.

This simply shows how the catch-all definition of PG in the Second Life terms of service is silly -

"Content, communication, or behavior which involves intense language or expletives, nudity or sexual content, the depiction of sex or violence, or anything else broadly offensive must be contained within private land in areas rated Mature (M). Names of Residents, objects, places and groups are broadly viewable in Second Life directories and on the Second Life website, and must adhere to PG guidelines."

From my office window, I can see a nude statue of a naked woman. It happens to be situated in one of the most heavily-visited areas of London, and is seen by thousands of children under the age of 16 every day.

Yet, were a model of it to be displayed in Second Life, it could not be placed in a zone which is only seen by people over 18 - for, let's not forget, PG zones on the main grid are still only accessible by over 18's. Anyone younger should be on the teen grid - something that the person appointed by Linden Lab to organise Burning Life should know, given that evidence points to him having been on the main grid for the past two years, despite being under age for much of that time.

This situation - something perfectly legal in real life everywhere outside of Iran being illegal in Second Life - is, of course, irrational and absurd. While Linden Lab is desperately trying to avoid giving people hard and fast rules over their conduct (hence the catch-all "broadly offensive"), it is sticking to hard and fast rules about nudity in PG sims.

Clearly, the "nudity" clause is intended to cover avatar behaviour, rather than statues. In failing to take this into account, Linden Lab is turning its law into an ass.