There's an interesting post by Forseti Svarog over at SLOG regarding Linden Lab's habit of using resident IP for promotional purposes without attribution. Long story short, Linden Lab used Forseti's iVillage fashion show video, but not only did they fail to credit him, they literally edited the video to remove the existing credits!!

I actually had a conference call with Catherine Smith and former LL Marketing director David Fleck about this very issue about a year ago. At the time the problem was a series of Linden Lab press releases that not only failed to credit the residents responsible for the projects, but were easily misinterpreted as crediting Linden Lab for these projects!

Frans Charming over at SLOG caught the fact that at least 31 of the new Orientation islands are online and under test, getting some percentage of new resident traffic -- It appears to be more than half. Frans was able to get an alt over to one for photographs.

From initial planning to the current test deployment of the new Orientation island appears to have taken just about one year; Linden Lab spoke about the planned replacement of the existing Orientation Island models as a new project just prior to Christmas 2005.

It's not yet clear whether the islands are in test for capacity handling, retention measurements or other fine-tuning and testing. Hopefully we will hear more from Linden Lab about these islands soon, considering how important the initial user experience is to both Linden Lab and Second Life residents (both existing residents and would-be residents).