Under a somewhat camouflaged heading about ”managing freebies”, LL has changed policies for XStreet, introducing a listing fee on every item, and an additional fee for the privilege of giving things away for free, to get rid of the clutter and the hippies who are undermining the “true” merchants.
This has made a lot of people angry, while a few are puzzled, saying it’s only a couple of dollars, so why worry when running a business?
I’ll explain why I do not like the philosophy behind this change, even if the actual money may be ”peanuts”:

I am a small-time content creator. Mostly, I create things for fun for myself, and if I am satisfied with how they turn out, I may put them up for sale. I don’t sell a lot, since I’m not putting any effort into advertising and marketing a brand, but occasionally somebody finds my wares, and the sporadic sales are enough to fund the next asset uploads, as well as give me some pocket change for new clothes or other shopping.

I thought I was participating in the virtual world, creating and sharing things, and helping build some little corner of the world.

Apparently, that is not what I am doing. What I am doing is devaluating the service, cluttering the servers and crowding out the real users who should be there.

The digital world has been praised for “the long tail”, enabling diversity, creativity and self-fulfillment. I simply do not understand why LL is hell-bent on getting rid of that, and cutting off the cycle of creation and re-investment by “commoners”, but I guess the idea of SL as a platform for others to use is no longer a focus for LL. Every major policy they have introduced for a long time has been geared towards turning SL into a hosting/publishing environment controlled by LL and a selection of approved businesses, for good little consumers to spend their money in.
- I guess it is also safe to assume that this is an indication of the form the upcoming “gold merchant program” will take.


(As a side note, I find the apparent notion that you should be hanging around at every office hour on the off-chance that some important policy change is announced and decided by the feedback there to be pretty ridiculous. That is not a valid way of gathering community feedback, and LL knows that. If they don’t want community feedback, fair enough, but billing it as such is just insulting.)

Just a quick note to mention that the Halloween Ghost Train give-away returns again this year.

It's a high-prim display model, meant to be seen in Halloween-style midnight environments.

When I bought land, I chose "Mature". Not because I wanted to do particularly extreme, offensive things, but to have the option of doing what I pleased, without offending somebody by using a dirty word or talking about mature themes.

I am a small-time creator. I don’t have a brand with a dedicated store. I just make what strikes my fancy, and exhibit and sell it. Recently (as I have mentioned in this blog), I made a series of erotic avatar photographs. With "erotic" apparently being one of the filtered words, I can only assume that these pictures will be considered "adult", and as such something I cannot display on my current parcel.

Can I get a land swap, moving to the new adult continent? Almost certainly not. The land swap is being offered to "those most affected", who "simply cannot clean up their (business) plot to confirm to the new ratings guidelines". As a smalltimer, I am definitely not one of those most affected, and since I make many different things, in different styles, I can certainly just remove some to stay within the guidelines.

Alternatively, I can buy a plot on the new adult continent myself. Bay City and Nautilus should give a good indication how that market will turn out, in particular since LL has officially stated that there will be no restrictions on trading the parcels there. (I.e. "Bot runners and land speculators, knock yourself out").

So those are the options: Stop doing what I do now, and bought the land to be able to do, or buy new land from a speculator, at what is almost certainly going to be ridiculously inflated price.

Yup. Nice way to provide your residents with "control over their experience", LL.

The Adult Continent plans are moving along at a brisk pace. The definitions, which were originally quickly pulled, have now returned with a vengeance. Any exemptions for private areas have now been removed, and blanket words like "photorealistic nudity" and any "depiction of death" or "other severe bodily harm" (whether photorealistic or not) have now been added to the adult-only list.
The PG rules have similarly been updated, to forbid "any content that is suggestive of any (even mildly) sexual or violent themes, or references to social drug or alcohol usage".
(The knowledge base article can be seen here).
Blondin Linden has suggested that the PG guidelines are worded too broadly, and will be revised. The unspoken implication here is that the adult rules are not, and will stand as-is. (Also, again, somebody wrote those rules, and must as such think it is how it should be, which raises the very valid concern that it will be interpreted this way once a triggerhappy AR comes in).

Once the LL patrols decide you must move, you’ll be given 9 days to complete the move, to whatever area you’re assigned. We’re promised it’ll be the same size as the one you’re being relocated from, but shape, let alone terrain, will be at the mercy of what’s available, and will, as far as I can tell, not even be a factor when being assigned land. You’ll generously be allowed to keep your old plot for "the rest of the month". If you’re a business, that gives you, at best, three weeks to rebuild your entire marketing, including people’s picks and landmarks, as well as any infrastructure relying on servers with known UUID (which will change when you re-rez them on your new land).

If you’re afraid this will happen at an inconvenient time, you can preemptively apply for a land swap. You’ll not be granted it just for asking, though. You have to qualify, under whatever nebulous criteria, which largely seems to have to do with what words you advertise your parcel with. So given that only 250 adult sims exist, you may well be denied, and according to Blondin Linden possibly be told to simply obfuscate your search words. (Remember, this whole policy is to provide a more predictable experience. So to implement this, we’re actively encouraged by a Linden to use less descriptive search words!)

The real ace is that being denied a land swap does not signify any approval of your content. So if you apply, are denied, and then later AR’ed and found in possession of "expressly sexually themed content" (say, a poseball), you’ll be required to move. That is, be required to buy land on the adult continent at whatever price the speculators sell it for, and move there!
Now people say, "But of course just a poseball wouldn’t run afoul of these rules. It’s obviously only the most extreme content". The counter-argument: One Linden says "no, of course not" in the unofficial forum. The rules posted in the knowledge base explicitly say any "sexually themed content". Which source do you think will be used by the GTeam to judge ARs?
(An interesting consequence of this is neatly summed up in this post).

So, to provide predictability and choice for the "million unheard voices yet to join SL" (according to Meta Linden’s reasoning for this), LL is implementing a system actively encouraging people to obfuscate their advertised search words or be relocated to/forced to buy a designated area with pre-built terrain and buildings.
...and of course, back in PG land, the unverified griefers still bomb the welcome area with penis particles and verbally abuse the newcomers on voice...

I can certainly see a use for a more controlled SL, for business and educational purpose. But creating a verified PG area for this (let alone more advanced options for zoning your land) "does not meet the criteria for this project".
Honestly, my mind boggles. What are the criteria for this project?

Given the latest official blog on the issue, I will once again point out how misguided the new policy on adult content is:

It seems to me that the proponents of the upcoming adult continent fall into two categories:
1)    The people who reserve the right to gatecrash whatever, whenever and wherever they want and be offended at what they see, requiring people to “correct their ways”.
2)    The people who do not want a nude avatar with prim parts appearing on their conference table and start spamming particles with porn pictures.

The first... I honestly do not know where they get this sense of entitlement from. I suspect that these people have very strong opinions on how others should live their RL life, too, and would prefer to be able to enact similar measures in RL. They are not to be reasoned with, and I frankly see no reason to cater to them.

The second are totally missing the point that this new policy will in no way help against that. Such instances are newbies goofing off, at best, and usually simply deliberate griefing. Neither follow the set rules as-is, and so obviously wouldn’t follow this new policy either. Indeed, staying on the PG continent marks you as even more susceptible to such griefing.
This is also what scares new users away. It is being met with morons and sexual harassment at the PG help island; it is not the knowledge that somewhere on the mainland, there is a piece of interactive erotic literature/roleplaying going on.
(Some may be scared away by a Fox news story about SL being a den of sexual perverts even before entering SL for the first time, but I can hardly see how creating a dedicated red light district would help that perception).

There is a strange disconnect between what LL says the intent is, and the measures they take:

Linden Lab wants to make SL more predictable. So they introduce rules which they freely admit they have no idea how to define even internally, let alone in an international community, to be enforced on a case-by-case basis as abuse reports come in, judged by what history shows will be the personal interpretation of whichever Linden happens to be on duty.

Linden Lab wants to give the residents more control over their experience. So rather than, oh, say, give residents more control over the areas they create, maintain and visit, LL forces people into two broad categories, lumping all vaguely objectionable content together.

Predictability and control for the residents?
“You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.”

I find it weird that LL has entirely ignored any request for better options for zoning, so people could build a community and themed area without something wholly inappropriate moving in next door, be that high-tech in a fantasy area or sex in an educational district.

And then we suddenly get this “lump everybody who’d dare to express a mature thought together in the ghetto, so university students, who’d be mortified and scarred for life by seeing sex or violence, can get a safe, predictable environment”.

There is a huge discrepancy between what Blondin Linden is saying in the forum and what some other Linden(s?) wrote and published in the knowledge base. Given LL’s track record of having the forum being a place for people to vent, rather than to gather feedback, I tend to consider the – now unavailable –  knowledge base article more indicative of the (by and large already decided upon) end result.  –Especially since the server code for it has already been deployed, having silently piggybacked on the last couple of server updates.

LL repeatedly claims that “residents have asked for better ways to control their experience”. That may very well be true. I have said before that I’d love to be able to, say, have different people pool together resources/land for a themed area instead of having to personally buy 8 sims to control the covenant. It just seems LL has entirely missed the point about what it was people wanted to control. I want to be able to build a little pocket of the world, shaped to my, and my friends’ and associates’, imagination; not to be able to (forced to) choose between the “educational” and the “porn” continent.

Ok, I just have to comment on the latest blog announcing a policy change.

I’m sort of worn out. I don’t want another round of LL announcing something, making a show out of “discussing with the users”, and going ahead doing whatever they planned in the first place, and frankly, this new announcement smacks badly of that. The maturity ratings FAQ is already written and the Linden answers on the forum largely simply parrots the announcement.

I don’t actually mind a better tagging and possibilities of zoning. In fact, I have several times mentioned that I think that would be a good idea, benefitting everybody. People come to SL for different reasons, and being able to find what you want and immerse yourself in that – and build communities and areas adhering to a theme – is a good thing.
Problem is, that does not seem to be what we’re getting. According to the ratings guide, pretty much anything currently considered “mature” will be moved into “Adult”, and hence relocated.

I’m actually not sure where that leaves the current “mature” theme, but I suspect it’ll simply largely fall out of use. Either something is Disneyfied enough to qualify for the LL-version of PG (which seems to be almost stricter than what others would call G), or it is to be considered potentially offensive to *somebody*, and hence shuffled into the restricted AO zone.

Blondin Linden has made a clarification in the forum, which actually sounds quite reasonable, explaining that what they want is getting rid of advertising sex clubs and blatant pornography on the typical mainland, while it would still be perfectly ok to, say, have a sex bed in your private home there.

The grey areas abound, and in any case, it is a far cry from what was actually written in the ratings guidelines. –Which, interestingly, have now been pulled from the knowledge base. Did LL tip their hand about what they have already decided to do while sending an unlucky Linden to do the song-and-dance routine of “listening carefully to the users” (like they did in the OpenSpace case where Jack Linden was being made a fool of for keeping the forum discussion rolling while M gave interviews about how people just had to suck it up¹), or does LL truly want to hear feedback before settling on the guidelines? –Somebody must think the guidelines in that FAQ were the right ones, or they wouldn't have written it in the first place.

At the same time, there is the lingering suspicion that this is preliminary work to merge the Teen Grid and Main Grid, like Philip Linden has stated he wants, despite the current answers that “there are no plans to do that”.

With things like the rabid interpretations during SL5B, and the outright lies about it, LL hasn’t earned much trust in their statements, nor confidence that they can/want to enforce the lenient interpretation, and they may even deliberately be playing a word game on the Teen Grid issue: There are no plans to *merge* the grids, but that doesn’t mean they’ll not open the Main Grid to all ages, now that it’s “sanitized and safe”.

I feel a bit incoherent, and very much on the fence. I don’t actually disagree with the options for better zoning (which, incidentally, would also leave people free to build zones where things are mixed), but based on LL’s track record on related topics and “listening to user feedback”, I have very, very little confidence in LL implementing anything but the rabid Disneyfication which people like Daniel and Robin Linden worked so hard for, and Everett “I never said that, and if it’s on record, it’s you reading it wrong” Linden and Katt “nod and smile” Linden carried on.

Others have probably said it better than me, so I’ll link to a couple of posts:

Dale Innis describes the problem of the grey zones very well here, and how LL keeps skirting actually addressing them:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=2351273&postcount=44

Astrofiammante Seminario provides an angrier, yet well-founded angle, worrying that SL is being “sanitized to death”:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=2351745&postcount=76

And Ceera Murakami (who’s usually levelheaded despite having been in the firing line of several policies now) calls LL to explain the striking difference between the supposedly open discussion and the already-written knowledge base article.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=2351887&postcount=98

And Matthew Dowd points out a simple, obvious fact on the issue of "inappropriate content" scaring new users away:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=2356080&postcount=612

1) Any sympathy for Jack Linden extends only to being backstabbed by his boss. I consider him instrumental in the OpenSpace decisions, and fully in on the "let people vent in the forum" strategy, and as such one of the more two-faced Lindens.

The pictures I have been working on are now officially on display, hosted at the Abbey Island Dance Club (head Northwest between the buildings from the landing spot). A big thank you to Darmin Darkes for providing the space.

The exhibition is titled ”Virtuarotica – The Mind is the Vision”, pointing out how entirely an artificial construction the pictures are... and asking whether it makes any difference.

For now, it is eight pictures, somewhere between erotica and conceptual portraits. More will come, as I still have several ideas, but when, and whether they will be added to the Abbey Island exhibition or a separate, different gallery, I do not know yet.

Unrelated to any other idea running through my head currently – of which there are confusingly many – I decided to try to run the SL maps in the OpenLayers API rather than the Google Maps API they are usually presented in. The map tiles are available for direct access, with the specific intention of letting people create other map implementations, so I thought I’d look at what could be done.

I am not entirely sure what I intend to use this for yet. It was partly just for fun, and partly to get rid of the Google API which for several reasons grates rather badly to me. (The way they handle registration for the API; their licensing terms surrounding that it’s still considered a beta product; and just the overall googlified look you just can’t get rid of).

So I wrote a small, simple implementation of an OpenLayers layer, based off the Grid mother class and, well, had the sim maps running in OpenLayers in little time.

So there it is; SL maps with all the power of the OpenLayers project, including overlaying all sorts of data, drawing, and lots of options to get just the look and functionality you want, rather than what Google thinks you should have.

Whether that’s actually useful remains to be seen. SL is not the most obvious case for manipulating GIS data, but who knows…
A demo of the code can be seen at the Trosca toolbox.