21. Mistake. I am not interested in MMOG's, and a quick (hour long) run through of Massively shows I won't be back much if at all. This was where I came to get the real information about what was going on inworld, and even the occasional pointer to other worlds in the SL style. There are plenty of other sites where I can go to learn of Warcraft style games, and almost none (which means of course, none that I know of) that deal with virtual world types.

Given the majorities tendency to crush all minority viewpoints and make SL look like just a carbon copy of RL, and worse yet, LL's decision to kowtow to them and treat things that happen in SL as if they were real instead of imaginary (aside from those that must be treated as real, as they overlap, like fiscal transactions), and SL's myriad technical problems on top of that, many residents are looking for someplace else to go..similar but different. If you had changed into a blog for those people, all well and good, but going someplace to get lost in the crowd of MMORPG'ers seems to me to be suicide. For example, I went to an article linked from the new site that claimed to link to 50 other sites that I might like...at least half of which were for children, and the other half seemed mmorpgs to my eye..and no..I'm not going to click on 50 links in order to check each of them out and see where I might be wrong...all I'm saying is that the huge majority of them were not sites those of us who congregate here will be interested in.

It's been nice reading you for the last year or so...but I suspect it will be pretty much the last time. I'll be off searching for a more virtual world centric site at the very least...and preferably someplace SL centric..at least until I leave for someplace better..when (and if) it arrives...^_^

Posted at 10:13AM on Nov 2nd 2007 by shin

22. Congrats on the new venture! Sounds really exciting.

As someone who doesn't necessarily believe that Second Life is the be-all-and-end-all of virtual worlds, I will be happy to see a news service that covers a broader spectrum of MMORPG and VW issues. Adding to my RSS feed now.

Oh and the new site looks great.

Posted at 10:24AM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Rik Riel

23. Thank you for writing to the comments here and adding the URL to filter for the SecondLife tag. Please make sure that your authors use the 'tag' appropriately for articles that are really about Second Life, not just for articles about WoW etc that mention Second Life.

I think you should also consider providing the URLs on Massively's homepage that would allow each world's users to filter for their own world.

Perhaps that would give you a way of looking at the stats and finding out whether a single site for all worlds is really what your readers want or if, as I guess is the case, the overwhelming majority of them would prefer to regularly visit their own world's site and occasionally dip into articles about others.

Posted at 11:08AM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Mr. Oh

24. I will really miss Second Life Insider; it was the only blog that I read daily. I don't know what event caused this split and disintegration, but I will not be migrating to Massive. Please reconsider; you had a massive amount of (silent) support for SLI and you're tossing it aside.

Posted at 11:17AM on Nov 2nd 2007 by eponymous trenchmouth

25. Pouring out a 40 ounce for SLI... and cracking open a bottle of Jack for the Coke Zero for M.

Posted at 11:17AM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Crap Mariner

26. @eponymous - Alas, silent support is the kind you don't know you have.

I'm hoping we can bring SL to a larger audience and overcome the false impression that everyone in SL is "geeks or freaks".

Plus, with so many virtual worlds under development pitched to provide competition or alternatives to Second Life, it really was time to get some more manpower and try to cover more.

Examining alternatives can often improve the ways we see what we have. I believe that.

I have, and still am shedding tears over the laying aside of the SLI name, focus and the small, tight-knit team, but I really do think this is a good piece of growth - though give us a bit, we've really only just hit the site, and it's going to take us a few days to find our feet and keep the SL material coming - hopefully more of it than ever.

There's more happens in and around Second Life than about any 20 other virtual worlds or MMOs you care to name.

Posted at 11:31AM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Tateru Nino

27. There is a lot of talks about other VW's, not MMOG, or whatever the various game forms are using for abbrevations (I left the gaming industry at the beginning of the 90's d haven't really kept up, mainly because of a complete lack of interest)

While I find other VW's interesting, well at least the future of them, since Kaneva puts me to sleep within 10 minutes, the problem is of course what we actually define as a VW.

The chaps over at Metaversed have tried, and instead of a long, long list, like the one on Massive's right margin, they ended up with only 8 of them.

Debate as we may, I think that the general audience of SLI may perhaps agree with those 8, some more, some even less.
I am not saying that I won't read you guys on Massive, heck it's you who made SLI what it is!
Maybe I be more inclined to read the RSS instead of the actual site, since the overall design strikes me as way too teenagerish, but that is a matter of taste. Some like it, some not.
But I think what worries some of your reades is that it will be a watered down, mixed up continuation.
That what was a distinct, interesting and multiperspective read will be mixed up in covering articles on hoblin gordes and starcruiser elves.
If it is a real concern or not, time will tell. Maybe we do get more conservative when we get older. But I know I am older now, at least RLwise. We want the mature coverage (which is not the same as non-humourous) that we could get here.
I read the NWN, Metaversed and Reuters too, but they lack the "catch" that you guys provided.

SLI was unique, our concern is simpl out of that.

Providing the link to the list over at Metaversed:
http://metaversed.com/25-oct-2007/social-virtual-worlds-revised-list

Posted at 12:31PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Sin Trenton

28. Well there goes my dream of being a freelance reporter for SLI :-(

Good luck you guys, and congratulations.

Posted at 1:53PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Neptune Rebel

29. While I am happy that you have a new venture up and running, I am saddened that it has happened this way.
Second Life Insider was a daily read for me, and more importantly, if anything at all was wrong with the grid, the info was out about it here before the Lindens even pondered posting about it on the SL blog.
My first impression of the Massively page was "gamer site". Literally.
It is your data, time and money, therefore your choice. I am sad however that this is what has been done. :(

Posted at 2:19PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by neural

30. We still beat Linden Lab to the punch this-morning, reporting on the mass region outage. Unless they get a whole lot more responsive, we'll likely keep doing it too.

Posted at 2:21PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Tateru Nino

31. I agree with Neural, I will miss SLI and I like it's informal manner. Massive does look like a Gamers report site to me.

Posted at 5:43PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by ShockWave Plasma

32. While I don't know if this is the reason, I think I should bring it up.

SLI is part of Weblogs, Inc owned by AOL. Overall, there are reports that many of their blogs are being closed down because of lack of money or traffic.

Valleywag isn't the *greatest* source of info always, but Jason Calcanis also backed this up in a comment on one of his podcasts, http://valleywag.com/tech/aol/a-warning-to-niche-blogs-230122.php

I would hazard a guess that SLI is one of the niche blogs being closed down, and all of the other lesser similar niche blogs are being consolidated into Massively.

Posted at 7:10PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Geuis

33. Case and point: Grid go boom. No logins for lots of people, and nothing but the sound of silence and the gentle breeze blowing where once stood proud and tall the Second Life Insider.

*sniffles*.

I say us commenters take over and use the comments in this thread to post new stuff for SLI. WE WILL KEEP IT ALIVE DAMNIT!! AUHHHGG!!!!!

ok. I feel better now.

Posted at 7:12PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by neural

34. Whoa, my comment wasn't insensitive! I love reading SLI. I'm checking it like 10 times a day! Sorry you took that wrong, but what I said was not an insult or demeaning. I was just stating a guess on why everyone from SLI is moving over to Massively. 99% of the other 30 comments on this post were expressing the same thing that I feel, which is most people read SLI because we just want SL-related news, not having our SL news mixed in with all the other more or less closed-platform MMO platforms out there.

Posted at 7:35PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Geuis

35. Well, first of all, congratulations! I'm expecting that the move is for the best, and wish you and all other bloggers on SLI a great success!

From a marketing point of view (and I have discussed this with a few publishers...) I have a few qualms about the new format. In effect, the "Massively" site provides a weak answer to the following question on http://www.massively.com/about :

"Why do we need one more MMOG blog?" (in the sense of asking why does the public need yet another generalistic blog covering all MMOGs out there; there are already so many!)

The answer we got from the same page is:

- "because this is the place where all of those things come together" (disputable, since so many others, starting with the old MMORPG.com, claim precisely the same)
- "because of our commitment to producing top-notch original features" (again, I would say that all the other multi-MMOG blogs will claim the same)
- "because our incredibly talented staff of writers have spent as much time leveling their word-smithing skills as they have spent leveling characters in the virtual worlds we're going to be covering" (granted, at least that's something that nobody can deny, but it doesn't really answer the question, does it?)

So we have no clear answer to "why?". We're talking about moving from a clearly segmented model towards an unified mess, where — you can notice it from the new style — bloggers are supposed to be addressing an audience that might be clueless on the MMOG being talked about. Things popping in like "Second Life allows content creators to place restrictions on objects they create: you can set them to be unmodifiable, non-transferrable, and non-copyable." are the kind of infodump-style comments that bloggers will now very likely need to introduce on their articles to explain the issue to an audience that has no clue about how SL works (and, also very likely, doesn't care).

So this is like reading a newspaper on international affairs — you can't be "too deep" on each issue, and have to explain each country's politics in some detail to your audience, or the point will be completely and utterly lost. By contrast, Second Life Insider was a specialist publication, targeted to a potential audience of 10.5 million readers who know what they want to read about. Like so many others, iRL I rely exclusively on specialist publications for my work — I have no patience and no time to go through "soft" generalistic publications, where only a tiny fraction of the information there might be of interest to me, and even that will be framed in a very light way to allow any reader to understand what's all about.

So why the move towards a generalistic model? (Yes, the answer we don't get from Massively!) Very likely because the content wasn't attracting enough readers. Just take a look at the traffic generated by a selected group of blogs run by the same publisher:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=www.wowinsider.com&site1=www.joystiq.com&site2=www.pspfanboy.com&site3=www.nintendowiifanboy.com&site4=www.secondlifeinsider.com&y=r&z=3&h=400&w=700&range=1m&size=Large&url=wikimediafoundation.org

Clearly, SLI was way below all others, or, put into other words, it probably wasn't generating enough traffic to draw advertising to support the effort of keeping it up. Instead, bundling it together with a few dozens of other MMOGs will probably give it a far wider audience. Granted, people looking for a specialised publication will very likely go elsewhere; on the other hand, people playing several MMOGs and sometimes dropping by SL will very likely welcome a "generalistic" blog (and, honestly, Massively beats MMORPG.com any day...). However, on the other hand, Massively will simply treat Second Life as "just another one of many other MMOGs" and not treat it as anything "special" — SL will be just another thing that popped up, enjoyed the fame for a few years, and then disappeared into the background of the MMOGland out there.

Well, for the ones among us claiming that while Second Life shares some attributes of MMOGs — it is, after all, a 3D virtual world; the client has a 3D rendering engine; etc. — bundling it together with other MMOGs is just putting apples with oranges in the same basket and hoping that people will enjoy the fruit salad...

In any case, these are just my rantings... it's a long time since I've been in the publishing business myself, something which I only did at an amateurish level anyway — but always in highly niches! — so things might be different these days and the move towards a generalistic format might make solid business sense in these days. So I can only wish you all the best, hope that Massively gets a huge boost in faithful readership coming from a few dozen MMOGs, and hope that you all keep rolling out the excellent articles you've spoiled us so far here at SLI!

Posted at 11:15PM on Nov 2nd 2007 by Gwyneth Llewelyn

36. Hmm...

Second Life Insider - simple, informed and informative, engaging, reasonable amount of advertising...

Massively - UGLY, FLASH-OVERLOAD, editorial buried alive in adverts, over-ambitious (do one thing well not everything poorly)...and did i mention ugly?

Goodbye, it was nice...it really was... :(

Posted at 10:20AM on Nov 3rd 2007 by Hal

37. Oh, well. I guess all things come to an end. The "Massively" site is garish and ugly, and largely not relevant to my interests. I will be deleting my SLI feed.

Good bye.
--
www.chl-tx.com

Posted at 1:21PM on Nov 3rd 2007 by TX CHL Instructor

38. Gwyneth (post 35) wrote:
"Things popping in like "Second Life allows content creators to place restrictions on objects they create: you can set them to be unmodifiable, non-transferrable, and non-copyable." are the kind of infodump-style comments that bloggers will now very likely need to introduce on their articles to explain the issue to an audience that has no clue about how SL works"

That combined with a comment on an article from (I assume) a MMOG gamer:
"Second life stories make me say WTF... how is this a game that entertains?"

make me sincerely hope this is just a transition phase. Hopefully SLI will shape itself in a new, distinct format, even if still huddled up inside Massive.

Posted at 6:54AM on Nov 4th 2007 by Sin Trenton

39. Too bad that I liked the name "Second Life Insider" :P


Actually... can I have it? heheh

Posted at 3:18AM on Nov 5th 2007 by Nacon

40. I'm in two minds about this move, Tateru. I don't have the same feelings as many other commenters re the SLI site as I see all content in my RSS reader.

A pity to lose the SLI name, though. It's quite a brand.

And the Massively site is one of the worst websites I've ever encountered. Look and feel aside, it takes forever to load a page because of all the ad scripts running. Tribal Fusion, Doubleclick, Served By, you name it. Awful!

If I could get a darn page to load, I'd be able to see how to subscribe to the RSS feed...

Posted at 2:53PM on Nov 7th 2007 by Jangles Junot