Business and Technology in Second Life

In the same day, two bits news were widespread across the SLogosphere: Philip “Linden” Rosedale is going to start another company and Eshi Otawara, a long-time resident and superb content creator, decided to leave Second Life® forever. All this just before the Burning Life festival started.

We usually expect the captain to be the last one to jump ship when things are not going well. But in this case, is Philip really leaving? Are things really that bad?

How can we then explain the latest press release from Linden Lab (from late September), where it shows a lot of statistics demonstrating how big Second Life actually has become?

After some thinking about this, from now on, I have split my usual posting between my other blog (Gwyn’s Home) and the corporate blogs here at Beta Technologies.

When I started blogging about Second Life®, my original purpose was quite naive: create a place where starting residents (newbies!) could find some information about Second Life. It was supposed to be a sort of “guide” — but a guide written by someone who was actually also starting her first steps in Second Life! Each time I figured something out, I would immediately blog about it (well, I had far more free time for blogging, that’s the simple truth!).

Soon, however, I found out that there were far too many “beginners’ guides” out there (my personal blog still gets lots of queries for “tutorials” or “free scripts” or “clothing templates!”), and I should just turn to something else: discussing the implications of living and working in a virtual environment.

That did, indeed, capture my attention for the past five years.