2 Years Later - A Special Report

Editor’s Note: I expect to be going in and adding information to this if I notice something that should be mentioned.

I find it hard to believe that I will have been a citizen of Second Life for 2 years tomorrow. I can still remember arriving on Orientation Island, going through all the tutorials, and then teleporting into the welcome area. The first day I wandered around the welcome area and surrounding sims, doing all the things a noob does. A few days later I had accumulated some money and went and bought a car that I later discovered to be a freebie. I promptly crashed the car off one of the roads and into a tree.

Fast-forward to October 27th, 2005. I started this publication/blog. I had one previously in The Sims Online, but I did something wrong and deleted the entire Alphaville Times blog due to stupidity the month before (I promptly asked a friend, who had been “hired” onto the team to do graphics, to head up all web services from then on).

The first story I wrote was about Linden Labs updating the Community Standards after a W-Hat attack, and a link to the Second Life Herald story about Ginko Financial. The stories to follow talked about Ginko, Anshe calling it a Ponzi scheme, and one or two more stories about her.

On New Years Eve, I held the Newsworthy awards just to continue tradition from the last few years on the Alphaville Times. The event, in my opinion, was a waste of my own time along with the other 4 people that showed up, which were just a few Ginko employees from the sim next to Pumacity, where the event was held.

In January 2006, not much happened besides changing the company that “owned” the Times’ name and a story about Ginko’s future plans at expanding their island “nation”. Sometime during this month, I found out about furries, and got my first (free) furry avatar.

In February I hired Jon Venkman to help with the editing, writing and promotion of the Times. We rented office space in Ginko Island for a week, then bought our first office on a piece of First Land in the Areumdeuli sim.(Picture to come soon, must find it). During this month, Urizenus from The Second Life Herald announced his “retirement” from the Metaverse news business.

March came and nearly went before anything was published. On the 28th, I did a story on our neighbors in Areumdeuli. The Phoenicia Gallery. The Office got a Ginko ATM and we hired one more person for writing.

In April, there was a story on Anshe Chung being banned from SL (Never did post why she was), We moved the blog from Blogspot to WordPress here. Did a “Live Blog” of a grid attack, and a story on Second Life Boxing. I had just randomly chosen to do a story on SLB because I had heard about it. So I headed over to their arena and was allowed in. It was there where I met Areth Gall, and we’ve been friends more than friends ever since.

In May, I had to take a break from the Times because my computer stopped working. At the end of the month I posted about how Marc Bragg was suing Linden Labs for “financial damages in the thousands, in part for a breach of a virtual land auction contract
and for violation of the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law.”

In June, I hired Luke Birdbrain who became Editor and Project Manager for the time (I was trying to work on a few other things. Luke purchased the land next to the SL times office and allowed me to expand on to it. In News in June, Linden Labs had removed the credit-card requirement for registration, The 3rd Birthday with an exclusive interview with the event coordinator and the crash that delayed the speech by Philip Linden.

In July, we began making an in-world version of the SL Times, Alerted readers to a scam involving Ginko, and did another “Live Blog” of the asset servers failing.

August came and I closed the company for a week in order to rest and restructure it. I shut down the projects I gave up on, and restarted some projects that went nowhere. Some news stories we covered after returning were the SLStats Watches that tracked you and your friends and published that information on the internet, Linden Labs closing the Official Forums, and some Economy changes.

In September I reported on a scam that was targeting Areth Gall, Illegal Prims on SL Exchange, Linden Lab’s computers being compromised, A horrible update day, and a post about the future of the Times.

October was an interesting month. We celebrated our 1st birthday, I wrote an editorial on the Novus Ordo Imperialis attacking Areth, a story including 1 Million Residents in SL and Urienzus return to the Herald, and Linden Labs move to price private islands higher.

In November, I took a vacation from the Times, I hired Areth to a General Assignment Reporter position, and moved the SL Times newsroom.

The Month of December I wasn’t very active either, but Areth managed to do two stories. One about the Alliance Navy’s “Operation: Pear-Tree”, that gave dropped gifts from the sky to unsuspecting people below. The other was about the death of the typist behind Jordan Witherspoon. I also gave out the Newsworthy awards for 2006 online, without an official ceremony.

I disappeared again in January 2007, and was able to get out a short article on SL going Open Source. This trend continued into February when I got a different job doing the same thing at the same place in RL, just at a different time. I temporarily closed the Times, and the only post from that month was about Linden Labs discontinuing First Land.

Things didn’t improve in March, I was able to get a press release up that was sent to me.

Everything got better in April. We started with an April Fools story on Newscorp buying us out. Then a story about Linden banning advertising in the classifieds for casinos, followed by the Lindens removing Live Help and Ratings from the game. Areth pretty much took over the rest of the month releasing a couple stories and an Editorial. During this time we received our 10,000 hit.

In May a friend informed me he saw that The Sims Online was experimenting with Custom Content, and a story was written on that. Areth did a story on the SL military groups that honored Memorial Day by surrendering, and another about scams in the Beta Grid.

June featured the SL Times at SL4B, Second Life on “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet” on TV, and Areth posted a series on griefing groups.

No one did anything in July. In August we covered the collapse of Ginko and a RL story about the severe weather affecting Chicago shortly before the Second Life Community Convention being held there.

Last month I wrote up how ABC News had a story on Second Life on their i-Caught program, and Second Citizen Forums shutting down.

Present Day
Wow. I can’t believe I just covered all the news that has happened over the last two years. As far as the Times 2nd birthday October 27th goes, Events were planned but had to be canceled when we lost our office in Pumacity. I hope to still do something that weekend.

The Future
I’ll admit it, I haven’t spent much time on SL since we lost the office. Losing the office also meant I lost a place to put my SL Exchange servers, which meant I lost money. I rented some space at a in-world datacenter but was too lazy to log in and pay the rent there and lost that too. Maybe I’ll do that later today. I also want to start a new division of Metaverse Communications that builds stuff. I don’t want to give too much away about what I would build, but I’ve shown them to some people.

“Now that I think about it..”
This post was supposed to be about my 2 years in SL. Oh well.

Special Thanks:
To everyone who I’ve met in my SL journey. I also want to thank the people behind the Ginko sims for practically letting me live there for free for a few months (I spent almost all my time on their islands, just visiting), Jon Venkman and Luke Birdbrain for all your help with the Times, Casey Benton for allowing me to rent a office floor in Pumacity Tower (even if you did just evict me and return all my objects one day) and, last but not least, Areth, for all your articles and mostly for putting up with me.

Thank You.