Forbes Misses the Point
So according to Forbes (video interview), we are all a bunch of losers who like nothing more than gambling and cybersex. Proof, if ever there was a need, that fact-finding and honest reporting are passè. our intrepid reporter even boasts of saying Sl will collapse, and has been saying that for over a year now. With all due respect, everything and everyone collapses, sooner or later. It is no great feat to predict that a new born baby will die one day, and is in fact almost idiotic in its obviousness. Just like people, companies eventually die, and its no great trick to say a particular company will die one day in the future, with no specifics. At least, none he mentioned in that interview that date back to his “over a year ago”.
He says we are losers. I could give the exact quote where he says that, but you can watch the video. He goes on to promote WoW as an example of an effective social networking 3D world. I can’t help wondering whether or not WoW is in a far stronger position to implement advertising or product placement on a mass scale in a corporate-friendly fashion, compared to SL, and what his personal stake in promoting WoW is.
Basically, he was speaking to the corporates. And the corporates can only see a platform that isn’t so good as an advertising platform. Significantly, there are a large number of gambling corporations who were, up until the gambling ban, investigating the potential of SL.
There are corporates who have entered SL successfully, and I have ideas on how it could be improved (which I would be happy to part with for silly sums of money and steady employment).
SL itself won’t collapse as long as the residents are there, because we are the ones who pay the tier on all that land. And while we cheerfully shun most (not all) corporate builds for the mediocrity they are, we are generally more than happy to trade with each other in the ways we always have done. The non-gambling non-sex economy was here long before corporates and the LL gambling bans came down, and they will be here long after the corporates leave us alone in our fantasy worlds.
So why all this bad-mouthing of SL in the news? For a while, Linden Lab and Second Life was the darling of the media. This was back when SL was being heavily promoted in corporate interests. Two things hit SL hard in the last month. First, LL felt obligated by external forces to impose the gambling ban. While the official reason is a matter of public record on their blog, it seems a reasonable guess that it is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to ensure compliance with the strict laws the USA has with regard to gambling. I don’t see the gambling ban as disastrous for the SL economy. Sure, it has removed a specific segment, but it is a segment whose legality was dubious in any case and probably had to be removed, and it is a segment which did not form a major part of the SL economy (fashion and land is more in the centre than anything else).
The other event that got the nay-sayers saying nay was the collapse of the Ginko bank. For anyone with a moderately long-term view of things, this should come up as no surprise whatsoever. The “bank” was completely unregulated. Probably, some police agency should have shut it down, since it was taking on the mantle of a bank and trying to function as one, yet was not formally registered as a bank. In legal terms, it was no different from a ponzi scheme. By our esteemed reporter’s logic, the collapse of a hypothetical ponzi scheme run by a US citizen using real US dollars should therefore be evidence that the USA itself is due to collapse sometime.
Ironically, our reporter would actually be correct, were he to report that way on this hypothetical event. Just like people and companies, nations also must one day die.
But not this week.
August 21st, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Of course Forbes was talking to the corporates. You wouldn’t find Forbes in anyone else’s hands.
As to Ginko - well, the fact that the whole thing collapsed and nothing was *done*, well - that is the real issue. Ginko is just one of many things. However, as I have been covering, the community is trying to address these things through transparency. You could say that people don’t have a right to expect more - but - everyone always expects more. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to have this discussion.
Don’t worry about fighting the corporate hype cycle. We know that they don’t get it, and by the time they do - they still won’t. Lets just make the place better.