In Second Life, just like Real Life, people compete for our attention by advertising. Of course, as we know, advertising in SL revolves around search and classifieds (when they're working) and blogs and fora. Your position in search is based on your traffic, a crude measure of the number of visitors and how long they spend on your parcel - my home is around the 650 mark, searching for the word money shows a parcel with a traffic around 125,000 at the top of the list.

So, wily attraction owners try to maximise their traffic to get their listing in search up. This has led to the spread of lucky chairs and camping chairs (love 'em or loathe 'em that's what they're there to do). Shep Korvin, who's shop boasts he is the creator of the original lucky chair is bringing us a new marketing ploy for SL, the Mob Vend(or).

Somehow I'm reminded of a backstreet market with a guy selling dodgy VCRs to the crowd and lowering his prices until he gets interest. The principle here is that if you get more folks around the vendor, the price goes down, so you can get whatever is for sale cheaper if you get enough mates together. The seller, as well as hopefully getting more sales of their lead item (if you want it, there's a chance your mates will), gets your traffic minutes too. The sim, lucky sim, gets you and all your mates adding load, and a sensor repeat in the script just for good measure. Advertising success? Perhaps. Lag? For sure.