Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

Linden Lab has released a new Second Life viewer release candidate, specifically, 1.18.4(RC2). This fixes a number of issues with since the last release. There's a list of those changes below the fold.

The viewer is available from the optional downloads page as usual, and we suspect that this one might just be a little more plausible as a release candidate than the last one.

If Linden Lab couldn't find any evidence of wrongdoing at Wonderland, perhaps they need to hire some journalists to investigate incidents like this. It seems that most everyone else found something broadly offensive in the place, and well, the journalists apparently found the worst sort of offense in next to no time.

Linden Lab has apparently shut Wonderland down now - we don't know if they found evidence of wrongdoing themselves, or if it is a reflexive reaction to the mainstream media putting the story in front of about 150 million people so far.

I've been reading about the resident survey that Linden Lab has been randomly sending to Second Life residents via their client. I was surprised to find it on my screen the other day. It asked the question, "Is your Second Life experience getting better or worse?"

The brown noser in me immediately wanted to answer "better", but when I thought about it, it hasn't gotten any better. As you can see by my answer on the right, I chose the simple response that the grid seems to be buckling under the large amount of logins. I don't know if this is the real cause of the problems, but we've had more inventory loss, texture issues, and transfer problems than ever.

Did you receive the survey? How did you/would you answer? Leave a comment!

Hamlet Au is running a poll over on New World Notes. He's asking Second Life users to rate the quality of Linden-to-resident communications in recent months about updates, downtime, policy and so forth.

Think they're doing well, or doing poorly? Go and register your vote. We'll all be watching the results.

For most of the last week, Linden Lab's public data/statistical feeds have been showing signs of being a bit ill. Starting on Wednesday evening, concurrency information started to fall ten or fifteen minutes behind actual data - an unusual occurrence. It's only in the last 24 hours that the system has started to catch up again.

At the same time, the figure for active users ceased updating entirely, with the most recent update to that figure being Wednesday night (24 October), at midnight SLT (US Pacific). Perhaps these subsystems are considered relatively minor, but Linden Lab have said themselves that they consider the accurate and ongoing publication of this data critical to their program of transparency.

The public JIRA has been spitting unusual (and some incomprehensible) Java error messages at people since this-morning. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab's open source liaison says that Linden Lab have been working on the problem, but do not know what the cause is.

It seems to be happening less, at present, but there's been no further word that the issue has been isolated and repaired.

Linden Lab has responded to our request for comment about the Wonderland scandal with a statement. The statement was issued just minutes ago by Lewis PR, Linden Lab's external public relations handler. Lewis PR provides public relations support for a wide variety of companies and organizations.

"At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel."

Linden Lab therefore has not acted on reports about the site from Second Life users and from Second Life's child avatar community (we are told that reports have been being filed since July) because they have not been able to find any wrongdoing.

Linden Lab's full statement follows, after the jump.

News of the Wonderland scandal is spreading through the UK press. Channel 5 News led with the piece - it's all over Sky News. Some of the UK's largest tabloids are picking it up - outlets with millions of readers. UK business magazine, The Business, has just taken up the story.

"users feel the virtual community is unsafe and uncensored; they're also deterred by the huge amount of sexually orientated activity which takes place in the world."

The Business magazine slams Linden Lab for their "unshakeable libertarian positions", and says "This will be a huge set back for Linden Labs [sic]".

Expect to be reading and hearing a lot more about this in the news in the coming days.

Of course, this activity directly contravenes Linden Lab policy - so, why didn't they act days or weeks ago, when this activity was reported to them?

We have been promised an official comment or statement from Linden Lab "shortly". That was nine hours ago.

[Update: 10PM SLT (US Pacific) - Linden Lab has just issued a formal response]

Those you in the twitterverse, and possibly other places, might have just found out that, according to rumour, LL is no longer responding to emails. They will, hereafter only respond to Live Chat or the Web Support Pages.

There is a side comment to the effect that this may not be universal: certainly there are people who still give out their email addresses, it would be interesting to suggest that, for example, Catherine Linden, in charge of PR, can't be reached that way. A policy statement would be useful, but I would suggest not holding your breath for that. There are mailing lists that still request email replies too, so presumably they don't count in this.

We all know SL is growing, and growing faster than LL, appreciably faster. However, is moving to a position of fewer routes of communication a good thing? In light of the earlier news about sexual ageplay in SL, I wonder if anyone will answer our emailed requests for a statement?

Six of Second Life's top brands Eros Designs, RH Designs, Le Cadre Network, Nomine, PixelDolls and DE Designs are filing suit against Thomas Simon (known as avatar Rase Kenzo), and ten other as yet unidentified avatars. The suit was filed in Brooklyn, New York by attorney Frank Taney, a partner with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney who is representing Eros Designs against Volkov Catteneo, for similar copyright violation.

As long-time SLI readers are doubtless aware, there is no technological means that exists to guarantee prevention against copyright violation. Indeed, most such measures are usually bypassed or broken before they are even released into the wild. That leaves one forum for copyright violation - the same one that has always been there. The RL courts and the legal system.

Dear Second Life Resident,
While out and about shopping today, I came upon a product that I wanted to show my friend. Unfortunately, they were unable to come to the store at that very moment. Thinking quickly, I took a photo of the ad and fired it off to them. Imagine my surprise when it loaded and it wasn't mine at all!

The funny thing is, it says that I took it. It also shows the exact location that I am standing as the area of origin. Judging from your picture, it was obviously framed very nicely, so I'm sure you'll want it back. I propose a trade. Let me know if this works for you!

Sincerely,
moo Money

Are you the girl from this photo? Did you take the photo of this girl? Please leave a comment or contact me in-world if you have any details.

Christian Renaud is the Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center. He also seems to be one of the few people writing in public to seem to understand (and express) that the recently announced collaboration between IBM, Linden Lab and others, and the meeting last week is not a fait accompli, but just the first stumbling baby step on the road.

Check out Renaud's thoughts on his personal blog. Renaud's writing is worth reading. He is articulate, witty, thoughtful and eclectic.

With the award ceremony taking place yesterday at around 10am PDT, you would think that the award winners would have been announced shortly thereafter. Instead, I've been pacing the floor and scouring the internet searching for a sign. I finally found the winners on a blog, called Free Pixel, and I must say, 3 out of 9 total nominations for SL aren't bad.

At last year's Machinima Festival, in New York, SLers received 7 nominations over 4 people, and only one person won. That was Eric Call, for his Linden Lab hype machinima, Silver Bells and Golden Spurs. I'm excited to see that our numbers have grown. For the complete list of winners, check out Free Pixel's blog. Congrats to the nominees and winners!

Here is a list of the Second Life winners:

• Best Commercial - When the Postman Spits Twice - SL-Inworld Productions
• Best Technical - Machinima Island - la.interactiva
• Best Series - The Grid Review - ILL Clan

I've been a bit hard on Linden Lab in the past, but I'd like to address something that I started, but never finished. The topic would be that of my loss of inventory in April of 2007. Linden Lab recently announced that they are doing what they can to minimize this situation, and I believe them. Eloise touched upon the subject, but I'd like to elaborate on it more from my standpoint.

What happened to me was like hitting the lottery. If I recall correctly, only about nine of us lost our entire inventory and they worked diligently to fix it for us. At the time, I wanted to calm the hysteria that I caused, so I ceased to report on it, but a funny thing happened along the way. I somehow became a shoulder to cry on about lost inventory. There are apparently many types of inventory loss, from single items disappearing, to folders not showing up. Some of these errors don't have fixes yet, but there are certain steps that you can take to keep this kind of loss at a minimum.