Over the years, Linden Lab has put a lot of effort into attempting to reward, or to give recognition to (another kind of reward, really) Second Life users who made positive contributions to the overall user-experience. The Lab staff used to refer to it as a mandate or as a part of "their charter."

So far, almost all of these efforts have fallen a bit flat. By flat, we mean flat at the bottom of a deep hole. A deep hole full of explosives.

Continue reading Peering Inside: Rewards and recognition

Peering Inside: Rewards and recognition originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Completely oblivious to the decoupling of traffic from search rankings in the new Second Life system, Traffic Injection has just started up a business to boost your traffic, promising variable amounts of dwell up to 150,000/day. This apparently seems to be achieved by mule avatars and (if we're reading this right) by spamming group IMs.

It isn't easy to tell, actually, since their Web-site (actually a blogger.com blog) is so poor on the grammar and spelling fronts, that much of it almost defies any attempt at comprehension whatsoever. English, we guess, isn't their first language -- which might be why they seem to be unaware that the basis for their business model is about to disappear (within the next week or two, most likely).

If you don't recognize the .nr on the end of their domain name, that is -- regrettably -- Nauru, the smallest nation in the world, and one with a grim history.

[Thanks Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Boost your traffic, without bots, camping or coherent spelling originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 31 May 2008 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab is having a second stab at reworking the Second Life dwell (also known as traffic, but dwell is a more accurate name since traffic is not actually what is described) algorithm based on user-feedback. Last year, at Linden in-world office hours assorted feedback was gathered from users, and it appeared as though Linden Lab had settled on a new algorithm as a result.

This year however, Linden Lab is having another go at getting user-input for a new dwell algorithm, so we presume that something must have blocked progress on the previous attempt.

Continue reading Peering Inside: Trafficking in meaning

Peering Inside: Trafficking in meaning originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 26 May 2008 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.