Last night, out of a mix of sheer desperation and curiosity, I tried the new Electric Sheep viewer for Second Life®. I’m not at all interested in the CSI New York or related TV shows - I hate them vehemently in fact - but I wanted to see if the viewer was easy to use and whether it would afford me a better in-world experience than the official viewer.
Well, during an all-too-brief test, I was able to remain online for approximately 30 minutes before crashing. This custom viewer has the maddeningly annoying habit of always logging in to one of the regions made specifically for this TV show despite my telling it I want to sign in to my Home location, but hey if it’s better I will use it anyway, advertising and all - and if you’ve ever heard me rant about advertising you know that’s a huge concession from me.
Unfortunately, my testing was far from comprehensive because my in-world time was interrupted by my wife injuring her back and requiring immediate medical attention. It will be at least another day before either of us are able to get in-world again for more than a few minutes to catch up on IM’s and such, but I have C:SI (the REAL C:SI, Combat: Samurai Island) obligations this weekend that I am pretty confident I’ll be able to meet.
Popularity: 30% [?]
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This is a question I like to ask (and answer) frequently. When I started with C:SI, there were about 4,500 unique users in the duel database. Even as recently as July 29th of this year, there were only 9,271 users. As of right this moment, there are 10,819 10,820 10,821 unique users recorded in the Combat: Samurai Island Scores Database.
That’s an increase of 1,549 users in just about a month and a half!
I’ve mentioned before how much I like data (I’m such a geek), but the only thing better than raw data is live data, so today I decided that I would take advantage of my new blog theme’s very easy integration of Sidebar Modules to create a live data feed indicating how many people have used C:SI at any given time. The entire process took less than an hour, from adding support for the data feed to the C:SI website to coding the sidebar module and adding it to my blog.
If you are viewing this blog directly rather than from inside the Second Life profile Web tab or an RSS reader, then you will see on the right side panel of my blog that there is an up-to-date count of how many people have used C:SI, how many duels they’ve fought, and how many different sims they’ve fought in:
It’s currently set up so that the data is only retrieved from the source once per hour, so that my desire for live - and essentially useless but personally interesting - statistics does not add significantly to the load of our score database.
I’m now starting to wonder if I should be tracking data like the number of new users per day or month and throwing that in a pretty graph. On the other hand, I have enough projects already, and not nearly enough time to do them in.
Popularity: 29% [?]
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Many of you are probably already aware of the recent advertising policy changes introduced by Linden Labs, but as a convenience to those of you viewing this blog in-world with the itty-bitty browser that Linden Labs has given us, I quote a relevant part below:
“Linden Lab has decided that we will not accept any classified ads, place listings, or event listings that appear to relate to simulated casino activity”
Popularity: 24% [?]
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Following up on my Gold Rush post a couple of days ago, I found the Kzero Brand Map of Second Life (by way of Lordfly Digeridoo’s blog), which highlights real-world brand names and where they can be found in Second Life.
Call me myopic if you will, but I had completely missed the idea that more real-world companies - and their correspondingly deep pockets - are coming into SL. While I don’t expect this to directly impact my niche business in the near future, I think it’s interesting to ponder the impact that large corporate entities will have on the “small guy” in Second Life.
Popularity: 17% [?]
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