The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic put on a concert in Second Life on September 14, for what we are told was to be 100 Second Life users. There's not many venues that would have supported that many in relative comfort.

Now, as reported by Reuters, well..

"According to the orchestra, 9 million Second Life denizens watched the performance live on Second Life's own cable network, and the broadcast repeats every couple of hours through November."

Nine million Second Life users watching live. The tensile strength of truth doesn't go nearly that far.

Perhaps counting beyond 4/4 is a mite harder than it sounds.

A special shout-out goes to Anastasia Tsioulcas at Reuters, who could have easily sanity-checked this figure, but didn't.

It's nice to find people who understand. Don Heider, associate at the Journalism School at the University of Maryland and Kim Gregson, professor of Journalism, Park School, Ithaca College, talk in a three way audio interview about Second Life at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto.

The Shelter gets a positive mention (and so it should!). A lot of territory gets covered, what Second Life is, anonymity (and the lack thereof), Second Life as a virchspace extension of the physical world, physical world extrusions of brands and businesses into Second Life, CSI:NY, Linden Lab's business model and more. Not 100% complete (it would be much longer for one thing) and not quite totally correct, but still well worth listening to, especially if Second Life is a bit opaque to you.

Observant SLI reader Matt Bowerman spotted the latest issue of Good Magazine on the stands in Austin Texas, sporting a cover story on Second Life. Unfortunately, the story chronicles one apparently sex-obsessed writer's wanderings and musings on his lack of a virtual penis. [Caution - contains a virtual penis image]

People who are familiar with Second Life will immediately find author Morgan Clendaniel's narrative littered with inaccuracies, and misleading turns of phrase. Heck, there are five assorted penis references by the time you get to the bottom of the second paragraph, where the author felt the need to violate the gambling ban to bankroll himself some genitalia.

Bolstering the "one man's search for a penis" narrative, is some supporting material and research. The piece aspires to become balanced, and it comes close, but seems to fall short of the mark and finishes with penises again. It's obvious that Clendaniel didn't have a great time. "Something fun and social must be happening in Second Life," he writes, "but it certainly isn't happening where I am."

Take a look. Tell us what your own thoughts are.

Yesterday, some discussion sprang up on the metered vs unmetered status of Second Life bandwidth to Big Pond users. Telstra/BigPond is Australia's largest ISP, and for a variety of largely historical and political reasons, bandwidth in Australia is metered - essentially charged by the number of bytes received (this is the case in more countries than not). That makes any site or service that is unmetered unbearably attractive to local Internet users.

Due to some confusion with conflicting statements on the Big Pond website about what is and is not metered bandwith insofar as Second Life is concerned, we contacted the Big Pond staff to get a definitive answer, and got one quite promptly.

ThreeD Raymaker, site manager for The Pond in Second Life gave us the definitive answer from the FAQ and affirms that it is correct:

What's unmetered in Second Life?
As long as you're a BigPond Broadband ADSL, Cable or Wireless member on any plan other than an hourly plan, you can enjoy unmetered access to certain parts of Second Life.

Visiting most islands (but not all of them)
You can spend time on any of BigPond's Second Life islands (The Pond, Ponderosa, Billabong, Pondex, Pondessa, Ponderama, Ponden, Pondfield, Pondice, Pondillion and Pondshen) - browsing, chatting, looking around and attending events.

However, there are thousands more islands in Second Life. Many of those are unmetered too - but new islands are being added all the time so we can't guarantee that visiting other islands won't affect your monthly usage total.

Video and audio on BigPond islands
Any audio or video that you enjoy on BigPond's islands will be originating from BigPond's own servers, so we're able to make that unmetered too.

However, be aware that music and media on any other Second Life islands and even on BigPond's own residential and commercial tenants' land does not originate from BigPond, will therefore almost certainly be metered and count towards your monthly usage total.

Also, please note that the voice services within Second Life are not originated from BigPond's servers, so the use of voice communications will almost certainly be metered too, and count towards your monthly usage total.

Raymaker added,"BigPond unmeters all known IP address ranges owned by Linden Lab, but Linden Lab tends to add new IP address ranges without notifying us, so we can only do our best."

A couple of BigPond's webpages say otherwise but Raymaker assures us, "Currently the FAQ is correct in all respects. Music, Media, and Voice are all metered, with the exception of today the few songs playing in our bars, and the video in our theatres and drive-ins. We can't (nor do we have interest to) control actions of our tenants, so their music and media is definitely not unmetered."

We presume that the BigPond webpages will be updated soon to reflect this, and will keep an eye on them.

Not irreversably. Not irredeemably, certainly. However, their first step seems to have been a stumble. Make a mental list of the things they could get wrong in establishing a Second Life presence. It appears that Armani have managed to check-off most of the high-points there. And it's a damn shame, because people expected better. Hallmark of quality and all that, right? That tallies up to another black mark.

Iris Ophelia takes a critical look at Armani's efforts, and both that and the comments that follow are worth the read, particularly the comment from Tenshi Vielle.

Second Style's Grazia Horwitz also weighs in on the matter, among others.

If this was Wal-Mart, or Joe's Hamster Hut, or even Seven-Eleven, I don't think that there would be such a problem. This is however, Armani, and the expectations of people insofar as the brand reputation just have not been met. It's not classy, or innovative. It's basically pedestrian, and fails to meet basic cost versus quality expectations.

It's not wretched. It's not awful. It's not bad. It's merely mediocre, demonstrating a lack of imagination, a lack of flair, and a lack of willingness to make the most of the tools.

That's not the image we associate with Armani - yet, there it is, for the world to see. It doesn't appear to have been a matter of cost, so much as a shortage of excellence.

I hope Armani will reevaluate their approach and attempt to improve. Few will hold it against them if they do.

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.

September saw a major recovery from the sudden slump in Lindex sales in August. While July had shown nearly US$600,000 in sales, August's sales had dropped to US$163,239, but recovered in September to a much healthier $573,501.

Colourblindness isn't something I'm afflicted with, although when I'm having a bad day I've been known to wear sunglasses to use to a computer (actually I use prescription filters, but they're a very dark green, so they double as sunglasses).

But, there's a mac programme called Sim Daltonism that, given I work with a range of learners with specific learning difficulties and disabilities I just had to look at. The picture at the top is SL with the commonest form of colourblindness. The picture at the bottom is the same view, taken at the same time. Kind of sobering - even if the main thing it's meant for is to check how well your website works for colourblind users.

Every MMO/NGO/VW has bugs. Every patch, every update for every one of them brings a slew of fresh bugs, glitches, imbalances and lost property. Dealing with those bugs, glitches and whatnot can be a pain in the ass quite frankly, but in Second Life, we're not just dealing with peoples' fun. We're also dealing with their revenue.

While Ginsu Linden made quite an effort to make everyone understand that Linden Lab understands the position that it is in, relative to the users, it's obvious enough from reading the comments that many of the users themselves either do not understand Linden Lab's position, or do not think Linden Lab understands it. Pick one.

Part of that position involves a bug. Technically, you'd call it an exploit. That being, a bug which (if you know how to use it) allows you to profit in a way that is unintentional or accomplish some task that is not normally permitted. We're not talking about cheating your cash balance, or purchasing land that isn't for sale, or making prims that are larger than the system nominally permits.

We're talking about the issue with llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(). A sitting avatar becomes a part of a set of linked prims. Until this function came along the fact that a sitting avatar was just another (temporary) member of the linkset wasn't really all that relevant, as there wasn't really anything you could do to the sitting avatar as a member of the linkset that wasn't already able to be done.

With llSetLinkPrimitiveParams() however, the avatar appeared (to this function) to be an additional prim, and that meant it could be manipulated. Those manipulations were pretty much limited to two things: Repositioning the avatar relative to the object, and certain other manipulations that would crash the simulator.

The repositioning tasks were all able to be accomplished by other means, though you needed extra prims to do the job. Being able to handle it directly was a time-saver, although apparently an unintentional one. Yes, it was a bug - or an exploit if you prefer. It was also a superior solution to a common scripting task. It made all sorts of furniture and multi-pose systems more efficient - at the risk of intentionally or unintentionally causing simulators to crash.

The community took to it like wildfire, as it was discovered, and almost all the new creations used the new function to perform tasks that had previously been performed in less efficient ways. Many creators retrofit their old gadgets to work the new way too.

And then, at the beginning of the month, Linden Lab found the simulator crash problem and fixed it. They fixed it by making sure the function did what it was supposed to do - that is, not allow the manipulation of avatars.

Then the screaming began. The use of the function in this way was nearly universal by this time, and the people at Linden Lab who worked on this code were - essentially - completely unaware of that fact. To them, it was a bug - an exploit, even. The code was permitting something that they had not intended to permit, and worse, people were using it to crash simulators.

So they fixed it in the simplest possible way. Hide the avatars from the function. Done.

Did I mention the screaming?

Intentional or not, the use of this exploit was widespread. It was everywhere. It was a part of people's play. A part of their businesses. The fix went in, and everything, everywhere in Second Life that used it stopped working, all at once.

Hastily (it took several days), Linden Lab responded to the huge quantity of broken product and refixed the function. This isn't actually the first time something like this has happened, where an unintentional glitch that has been fixed has caused widespread problems, breakage, or breakdown in user experience. It's probably not going to be the last, either. Sometimes those fixes mess up resident work, and sometimes they mess up the work of other staff at Linden Lab itself, even.

Whether it is intentional, or unintentional, anything that is perceived as a feature quickly becomes widespread. Look at megaprims. They're everywhere these days. Take a tour of the Linden inworld offices and you'll see quite a few megaprims in the construction of some of them.

The problem is one of communication, certainly. In each case, where these fixes went in, the people doing the fixing were simply unaware of the impact of the changes they were making. While I know it is not their policy to discuss exploits, perhaps Linden Lab really needs to bring some of their own bugs and bugfixes to their bug triage sessions for other eyes to look at.

A number of factors lately seem to have contributed to increasing the friction between different nationalities and cultures of residents within Second Life.

Firstly, of course, we have the ... robust nature of some of the political extrusions into Second Life - largely harmless and inconsequential wars between small numbers of ideological groups - though no less deadly serious to the participants.

Secondly there's the whole issue of sexual ageplay - a nebulous and intractable blob of different, and sometimes only marginally related, concepts. Especially with Lolita fashions apparently being the big thing in non-USA clothing stores this season. On the streets and in the stores, loli and gothloli fashions are widespread in the physical world this season in many parts of the real world - though in the USA, this trend is notably absent. In Second Life, of course, even the names are potentially problematic, being inextricably connected with sexual ageplay in a few cultures.

Then we have the gambling bans. Some Europeans blame the USA laws for impacting lucrative businesses and income when Linden Lab began enforcing the regulations.

Now the VAT collection regulations come to the fore. Eric Reuters attended Zee Linden's Q&A and collected the thoughts of European some European landowners. Of course, the smallest fish in the pond are not affected, but for large players - particularly those with small profit margins, the local payable VAT may well exceed any profit that the landowner is making from their activities. Of course, USA sales taxes are not presently applicable to the services for which Linden Lab bills - which furthers the perception of unfairness and imbalance.

Each of these things seems to be contributing to a kind of progressive nationalistic acrimony. You've probably seen it on blogs and heard grumblings inworld. It all seems to lead people to view each-other less as individuals, and more as representative stereotypes of nationalistic ideologies or cultural mores.

To me, one of Second Life's great strengths has been how it brings people together and how it encourages us to see each-other as individuals - varied and diverse. People are people, however, and viewing others in terms of broad (and frequently inaccurate) political, social, cultural and nationalistic stereotypes is frequently an easy solution. It just doesn't strike me as a very good solution. We can do better. We probably should. Why don't we seem to want to?

1. What was the context/situation/challenge for your immersive experience?
2. What were the particular characteristics of the situation that engaged you in an immersive way.
3. How did the experience change you? What forms of learning / personal development / change
4. came out of the experience?
5. What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience?
6. What principles or lessons can be drawn from your story?

I know we've got at least one Linux user on the staff here at SLI (Hi Tateru), and I also discovered that there's a NEW Nicholaz Mac version (bleeding edge-r is now the latest) so I figured I'd post news about the various updates as they come out (obviously an intermittent process).

Whilst hunting around I found this page, which links to all of the Nicholaz versions, for windows, mac, and a variety of Linux builds. Enjoy your Nicholaz builds on whatever platform you run your SL. I'm still loving the return of all my screen real estate with that wide IM window and the occasional tall, thin friends window. The general speed increase is something I don't really notice until I'm doing something fiddly, but it is always there and nice to see.

No, really, because you do have to guess. You must comply with the updated Community Standards which are, as far as we can tell, not available to you.

Today, an abuse department Linden contacted a resident on a matter of sexually suggestive images involving minors. I've been passed a transcript, but I'd rather not quote the piece to avoid the resident suffering from any additional woes. The abuse Linden insisted that 'certain' items of content had to be removed, but refused to indicate which ones.

The resident was certain that they had no such content fitting the description of the infraction. The abuse Linden insisted that they did, but refused to indicate which items, only that the offending items be removed or face suspension/banning.

In order to support his case, the abuse Linden quoted the Community Standards. Only they're not the ones on the website, or in the library folder of your inventory. Apparently there's another set that has never been published.

Throughout the conversation, the resident pleaded, wheedled and begged for some clue as to what content they owned might be in violation of the rules. The abuse Linden adamantly refused to give any indication, repeating the same quotes over and over again. In fact, the Linden in this case was so on-message as to be almost incomprehensible.

What it comes down to is opinions. In the resident's opinion, none of their content was a problem. In Linden Lab's opinion at least one item is, but they adamantly will not say which one, resorting only to canned responses.

Not a good situation. Imagine if I turned in this post, and my editor said "You have to change some of these sentences."

"Which ones?"

"Some of them are offensive."

"I don't get it. Which ones?"

"The offensive ones. Change them to be less offensive, by tomorrow, or you're fired."

That's the situation our poor resident is in.

More about the Nicholaz client on the Mac that I mentioned yesterday. I've blurred lots of stuff for privacy's sake, but you can see the old style friends window, and yes there's a friends button and Cntl-Shift-F toggles the window too. You can make your IM window long and thin. The audio button has moved out so you don't lose it behind the inventory if you have a full height inventory window.