This isn't about Linden Lab billing, though you might have thought so from the title. Lordfly Digeridoo has an excellent point about the whole MDC business (that's Metaverse Development Companies). Basically that the whole shebang can fall down because a percentage indulge in poor payment practices.

That is, they pay like money-juggling startups, or impenetrable behemoths. Either way you get paid late or never, which drives the creators away from the problem MDCs (because creators talk to each other), who have to fall back on more inexperienced creators, clients get bad experiences, and the MDCs who do do the right thing start starving for clients too (because clients talk to each-other too).

Granted, I've yet to see someone like Australia's Telstra, who have always paid my invoices promptly (in 4 to 8 years - I have no love for them and stopped doing work for them years ago. Still waiting on payments, however) - but when I've signed a contract which clearly states 30 day payment terms, and I'm told 3, 6, 12 months later "Oh, it takes time. that's how we do things here. There's a process." - Well, why did you give me a contract that said 30 days?

I'm comforted endlessly by the fact that there is a process, of course. As it happens I have a process too, which is to mention your payment policies to anyone I know who might be considering signing up with you.

At the end, maybe one third of the contract jobs that I've taken on have paid up, and exactly one of them has paid on time. Many of the rest are in the 30-day rinse-repeat cycle of "Golly. I can't seem to find your invoice. Could you send it to me again?" which alone can string things out for many months.

And to contrast, there's blogging. It pays. It pays regularly. It pays on time, every time. What should I spend my time on? Tough call, huh?

How many of you are in the content creation MDC-subcontracting business and have been paid late? Or paid never?

Why would you arrange a marketing event or site in Second Life and then make it difficult to find? Get yourself some land, set up your site or event, sneak out a press-release to the mainstream media that doesn't include enough information to find the site, and make sure it isn't in the search directory.

It gives the impression that the marketing team really doesn't want people to find out about the event. Maybe your marketing team doesn't agree with your decision to do something in Second Life. They're certainly showing less commitment and organization that you'd expect to find in the average garage sale.

[UPDATE: Experiencing technical issues; working on it!] [UPDATE 2: FIXED!] Welcome to the fifth episode of On the Inside, Second Life Insider's Official Podcast! This episode features our interview with Adri Saarinen and Peter Newell, co-founders of Metaversatility, Texas's coolest MDC. Aimee Weber co-hosts with me, and we discuss the challenges of developing for SL, There.com, and Hello Kitty buttplugs. As always, feel free to leave your questions and comments!

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Cory Edo will be known to many of you. If she isn't her work surely is. As a member of the MDC Electric Sheep Company, Cory has worked on many public projects, and has also been interviewed on Secondcast. Even though she was officially on vacation, she generously gave me a little of her time to answer some burning questions. More after the jump!

How did you come to be with [ESC]?

Cory Edo: Well Makaio and I had our own development company back at the end of '05 called Tiny Seadog. We did mostly inworld stuff but a few RL projects as well. When ESC approached us about joining up, it was just getting to that put up or shut up point where I'd have to set up a business license, taxes, all that stuff, which I dreaded doing. So this seemed like a good way to be able to just concentrate on building and texturing and letting someone else handle the administrative aspects ... plus tracking down the jobs.

Following on the heels of their SL-driven commercial for Two and a Half Men, CBS Reuters announces that the broadcast company will participate in a $7 million dollar round of financing for the Electric Sheep Company, which has created builds for AOL, General Electric, NBC, and Viacom, as well as CBS itself.

While this is great news for ESC, it does make me feel a little leery that SL, already touted as the next iteration of the Web, is still following the pattern of the boom and bust of the late 90's. While it could be argued that there is more efficacy to supporting MDCs at this stage of SL's growth than there was in VC funding early websites with no real sustainable business model, the parallels are a little too close for comfort. Let's hope this doesn't turn into a 'CBS is doing it, so let's do it too' from other companies, only to have the whole thing fall apart like a badly-baked soufflé.

Mitch Wagner of InformationWeekly has written an article which poses the question "Are virtual Worlds really the Next Internet?" One chief proponent of the 'yes they are' theory is the article's other focus, Corey Bridges, co-founder of MDC Multiverse Network, perhaps most famous for its announcement to create a Firefly MMOG.

Bridges' main point appears to be that the current generation, growing up as it is playing World of Warcraft and enjoying their Second Lives, will come to think of a 3D Internet as the Next Thing simply because they expect that it will be. Given that a percentage of these users will likely go on to develop applications for such a platform virtually guarantees such a vision.

At the same time, take a look at the money and time that big companies like IBM and Cisco are investing in SL alone, and it seems pretty clear that we're headed toward the next wave of Internet browsing standards. VRML, anyone?