The only problem was with the cost of the services I was providing, and that they were no longer able to afford it. Hosting of SL Reports has been paid through to the end of September, and my services will be limited to just that. I have completely removed myself as an administrator on the backend of the site, and am now only listed as “registered”.

I am hoping that they are able to take care of anything that may need to be done on the backend of the site. If there is something that they don’t understand or need to get get and can’t figure out, I hope that they can find somebody that knows their way around. If they want me to get back in and fix something, there will be an additional charge.

Good Luck, guys!!

Things with the SEO seem to be coming along pretty good and the site is actually coming up in the SERPs for terms and keyphrases that we’ve decided to target on. Before I started working on it, the site was not coming up in the top 2,000 results for most of the terms that we’re looking at.

I’ve made a couple different changes to the URL structure of the site, and realized a few things, along the way. Once you change the structure of the URLs, don’t ever change them again! Decide on the structure that you want and stick with it. I “knew” this, of course, but didn’t think long enough about it when I first changed things. That resulted in another change, only a week or two after the first. I’m really glad that I didn’t wait longer than that, but I still wish I would have made only one decision, and stuck with it.

As far as “non-SL” stuff, I got a wild hair up my ass, last night, and decided to download World of Warcraft. I’ve never tried it, before, but wanted to see what it was all about. It’s a free 10 day trial, which has you download the full 3.16GB file, before trying. If you decide that you like it, you just purchase the full version and enter the key. I might get bored with it after 10 or 20 minutes, so we’ll see.

There’s something interesting about the download that I realized, last night, though. After I started it, I told my friend, who lives up in Canada, what I was doing. He went over to the site, clicked on the same buttons, filled out the same forms, downloaded what looked like the same file, and got into WoW, all within ten minutes. I’m not sure if they are giving Canadians a smaller version to try, or what’s going on, though. I’m pretty positive that he didn’t download the full 3.16GB file within ten minutes, though. He sent me a screenshot of him in the game, and I sent him a screenshot of the Blizzard Downloader that I had running. He had never even seen the downloader, though.

Anyway, I just wanted to update, here, and let you know that I’m still around.

Now, I realize that the point has been argued, but in the basic sense, didn’t the fact that Linden Lab banned gaming “instantly and definitively” at the end of July 2007 “cause” the run on Ginko and other banks, in effect, causing them to default, or not be able to pay their depositors?

Since this is only a quick observation, and a post about something that just sort of hit me as “something to think about”, I haven’t really thought much about the cause and effect of these different “events”. I’m still trying to imagine what the effects of the bank banning will be.

I suppose it will depend on how many (if any) SL banks will be allowed to remain after January 22nd. After seeing the “cashout” effect after the gambling ban and the amount of users that “downgraded” from premium accounts, I’m guessing that the same thing will happen, again.

“As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.”

The last prepositional phrase of that statement means that if an in-world bank provides proof of a legitimate business in the real world, or is actually a financial institution in RL, they will be allowed to continue operating as a bank in Second Life.

While this may seem like Linden Lab is banning all forms of banking in-world, it is really just banning the ones that are not set up as a legitimate business. If there are any Second Life banks that do not provide the correct information to Linden Lab, they will be banned or LL may “may sanction those who continue to offer these services with suspension, termination of accounts, and loss of land.”

So far, from what I’ve seen, only one bank (the one where I have my money), JT Financial has provided this information to Linden Lab. They operate under the Wise Metaverse brand, and have sent their Limited Liability Company certificate (PDF Link) in, already.

Now, when I first saw the news of this, my initial reaction wasn’t too good. It brought back flashbacks of the gambling ban and the huge loss of many users, falling land value, and the bank run that happened because of it. The thought that Linden Lab would, once again “create” a run on virtual banks was really just unbelievable. Since I’ve stepped back and had a chance to look at the overall picture a little more closely, I can see where they’re coming from, at least.

What still concerns me is the fact that a lot of the 150 comments on the SL blog post seem to be “asking” for things to be banned. Some want camping chairs banned, other want the Linden Exchange abolished (removing the ability to “cash out”).

What a lot of them don’t realize is that Linden Lab started down this slippery slope a while ago. By banning this and that, requiring EU “customers” to pay VAT, and now the “banking ban”, they are continuing down the slope to a desensitized, mirror of political correctness that’s already available in real life. They have no belief in personal responsibility, and will choose to set up cameras on every street corner to “protect” it’s residents, and themselves.

Looking back, a lot of people asked a lot of questions after the gambling ban, last summer. A lot of people made predictions about “what’s next” to be banned. A lot of people were right.

Can we start making more predictions about what will be next, now? In order to operate any business in Second Life, will you soon need to become a “proven” real business in real life? To buy and sell land, will you need a real estate license? We’re getting closer and closer to that point, no matter how you argue it.

Sure, the search engine will see their site, but will not see “any” content on the site, at all. Search engines do not look at keyword and description meta tags and base the decision to list the site on those, alone. Sites that are built using flash, alone, usually aren’t indexed, at all.

I just hope that SL Reports isn’t turned into something that can’t be found anymore. If they needed the site to be optimized to make more money on advertisements, that’s something I understand. To not be considered for the job, when I make more than my fair share from AdSense and TLA, due to my optimization techniques, is just frustrating, though.

Granted, even though I never personally “asked” for the job, I will say good luck.

What brought me to this point is this disclosure from Arbitrage Wise. The fact that he needed to make this information public to avoid being blackmailed by IntLibber Brautigan is a shame. The fact that IntLibber threatened to do what he wants to do is absolutely pitiful.

Here is what was said when IntLibber contacted Arbitrage on December 4th (read the above link for more background):

[10:05] IntLibber Brautigan: You and I need to have a talk about Juice Trading
[12:07] Arbitrage Wise: What did you want to talk about?
[12:08] IntLibber Brautigan: Firstly, I know all about it.
[12:09] IntLibber Brautigan: the US House of Representatives Republican Majority Whip wants a report from us about juice trading to forward to the FBI
[12:09] Arbitrage Wise: k - is that it?
[12:09] IntLibber Brautigan: no
[12:10] IntLibber Brautigan: From here on out you are going to fully support everything the SLEC does, and Bo is going to stop obstructing things
[12:11] IntLibber Brautigan: you will announce that given Skip Oceanlanes’ treatment by WSE, you now concur with the SLEC ruling against WSE
[12:11] IntLibber Brautigan: you will stop bashing BNT, and you and your staff will stop trying to bribe and telling my staff to stop working for me
[12:11] Arbitrage Wise: Thanks - but no thanks….
[12:12] Arbitrage Wise: and lastly, we’ve never bashed nor talked about BNT
[12:12] Arbitrage Wise: I’ll end the conversation there…
[12:12] IntLibber Brautigan: Suit yourself
[12:12] IntLibber Brautigan: Expect a news release through third parties soon
[12:13] IntLibber Brautigan: and an FBI investigation

From the outside, this seems like a very heavy-handed thing for IntLibber to do. The owner of one SL Exchange “threatening” the owner of another SL Exchange and using that threat as blackmail to get something they want. What it really is, is a case of somebody not standing by, or standing for, something that they believe in.

Let’s look at IntLibber Brautigan and his well known RL persona, Mike Lorrey, a little bit.

In game, it may seem like IntLibber Brautigan is a pretty good business man. He seems to have a well run company and seems to always be expanding. Sadly, things are not as well on the inside as they seem on the outside. While he talks about how his companies and ACE is growing, the truth is far from the inflated numbers that are released to the public and his shareholders. In time, the truth will be seen, and IntLibber will do anything he can to keep that truth from “getting out”.

In RL, Mike Lorrey seems to be very active in politics. His SL name stems from “International Libertarian”. It seems that his beliefs in RL and his threat to hand over a “report” to Roy Blunt and the FBI are highly contrasting. Since being a Libertarian means that you believe in reduced regulation of business, why is it that he has been in touch with the US House Republican Majority Whip, and talked about this with him?

It looks like IntLibber’s name doesn’t even mean what he stands for, anymore. He calls himself a Libertarian and then wants businesses to be regulated on how they run themselves?

The fact that he is trying to use these heavy-handed threats of real US government officials and departments to try to “get his way” in SL is simply shameful. The fact that he’s not even standing for what he believes in simply makes him “Ass Hole of the Year”.

On May 8th of this year, IntLibber Brautigan left a comment, on this page. Tell me what he believes in, and how this threat to Arbitrage has earned him the “Ass Hold of the Year” title:

 ”This is a great place to test via market mechanisms the claims of big government vs the day in and day out proof we are seeing in SL by small govt and no govt proponents that overburdening government with strangulating regulations are unnecessary, and a detriment to growth. The SL economy has grown by 400% in the past 6 months I’ve been in SL. In that time, I’ve turned a 200 USD investment into a company now valued on the World Stock Exchange at about 400,000 USD. By the end of summer, we will easily be worth over a million or more.”

“Strangulating regulations” and “a detriment to growth”! Did he change his mind? You’re an ass hole, IntLibber Brautigan, and you’ve just doomed your Ancrapistan Capital Exchange and the SLEC with this stupid move. Not that there was much, but the loss of trust and integrity by this has been done. We’ll keep an eye on you to have the next “Tizzy” fit.

With this behind me, I’m likely to spend even less time in-world than I have been (which wasn’t much, anyway).

One of the reasons that I needed to lessen my workload was the work that I’m doing on a new web site. I had a major breakthrough, a couple days ago. After a couple weeks of worrying and 5 hours of “trying” to make something work, I made it work “exactly” how I had it planned. I’ve got plenty of experience in PHP, but editing MySQL databases has never been a strong point. To get this working feels great!

I sent out a final notice to the SL Reports Journalists group, letting them know that payments for articles would be suspended for the month of December, or until the transition is made to the new staff.

Posts on this site might be few and far between, for a while, given my current situation. If anything really interesting catches my eye, though, I’ll be sure to write about it. Recently, I’ve been hearing whispers of Luke at WSE de-listing companies and locking accounts again, for no reason at all. Not really surprising, but there’s not many details right now, either.

Until next time…

One of them that came in, just a little bit ago really just made me wonder.

“Second Life For Condoms In China” - No shit!! First, the condoms are used, then they’re “recycled” and made into hair bands. The kind of hair bands that women will put between their teeth while pulling their hair back into a pony tail.

Not only is China selling some pretty bad crap to companies throughout the rest of the world… they are also selling used rubbers to their own people. Rubbers that are used to protect against sexually transmitted diseases and could still contain bacteria and viruses despite being recycled.

You can get a bag of 10 of these hair bands for about three cents USD… that’s less than L$9!! While selling recycled condoms is illegal in the country, the Chinese industry is flooded with several harmful goods manufactured for domestic or foreign markets.

Here’s what really makes me wonder. I know that in the US, we recycle aluminum, glass, newspaper, and other items. We take the time to separate the items from the “regular” trash and often times have different containers to put the different items into, to be picked up.

How do people go about recycling condoms? Is there a special receptacle that people throw these into? Are used condoms such a problem to the environment that recycling them is better for Mother Nature? Who actually came up with this idea, in the first place and thought it was a good idea?

I know that this post had absolutely nothing to do with Second Life, but just think… with all of the apparent “flying penises” in Second Life, it’s a wonder that the Lifestyle or Trojan companies haven’t set up shop in-world. They could start offering “protection from griefers”, or something.

Most of the talk has been in the SLCapEx forums, in this, this, and this thread. Most of the contention has come from one person, although others have also made it clear that they feel like what I did was wrong.

First, I will say that I know that what I’ve done might not have been completely right and there was probably better ways that I could have done it. I’m not trying to “clear my name” or anything… just simply explain. Some may still think that what I did was wrong.

Over the past few months, there were various times that I had talked with Xavier and he brought up his intention of leaving SL Reports. For various reasons, each time, he decided to stay. On the morning of November 21st, he brought it up, again. During our conversation, I brought up that I had been thinking about leaving, as well. I asked him about the 400,000 locked SLR shares that I had, and what would be done with those, if I decided to leave SLR. He said that they would be unlocked and I would be free to do with them what I wanted.

About an hour later, that morning, we talked again. At that time, for reasons that I totally understood at the time, he had decided to stay, again. After our conversation, I went to bed (since I work nights in RL). When I woke up, I was still thinking that I needed to leave, so I decided to write the previous post on this blog. I posted it at 8:30pm SLT on the night of November 21st. I sent an IM to Xavier, making him aware of the post, which he received.

After arriving at work, Xavier and I talked for a while via IM. He seemed to understand my decision. At about 2:00 SLT, he asked if I would proof-read something, which he sent to my email address. I was actually surprised by what I read, considering the reason he decided to stay, just 18 hours earlier. The overall text and tone of what he wrote sounded good to me.

Then, he “pressed the button” to post it to the SLCapEx web site… about 6 hours after my announcement.

Six hours after that, after getting home from work, I decided that I would sell enough shares to reduce my holdings below 5%, getting my name off of the public stock ownership page. As I was doing that, I noticed that there were some pretty large buy orders being placed at amounts that would be high enough for me to consider selling at. Knowing that the news of Xavier leaving SLR had been posted for the past six hours, I knew that people had seen it, and that I didn’t have any type of unfair advantage that would be considered “insider trading”.

As long as buy orders were being placed, I continued to sell. SLR opened at .45 that day and closed at .47. Selling that many shares to a person that was willing to buy them, essentially had no effect on the overall share price. In the back of my mind, I did think that since I only “announced” that I would be leaving and hadn’t actually “left”, that selling them at that time might have been wrong. My departure is inevitable, though, so it was either 6 or a half-a-dozen, in my mind.

That’s really all of the explaining that I wanted to do. I know it’s nothing that’s overly important, since it’s said and done, now, and the current price is up at .53. The people that ended up buying shares from me got a great deal as well, since they are all worth more, right now.

This post is really about the work that I’ve done at SL Reports and a decision I’ve made. This is the first announcement, and the link to this will be given directly to those who need to know. I’m announcing it publicly so that everybody knows, though.

In early June of this year, I was hired to do a web site redesign for them. It was not a super difficult site to redesign, but moving the site from one platform to another was the hardest thing about it. Even with that, some of the archives were not transferred to the new platform. Since SL Reports is a “news” site, the more current articles were more important than the archives. New content was added quickly and the past articles became less and less of a priority.

It’s been about five months since I did the redesign of the site. Since then, I’ve become more and more involved in working on it by adding features, tweaking templates, deleting spam comments, adding a mobile version, and a couple months ago, I was hired as the General Manager. Since taking over the GM position, I changed a lot of the way the contact information was delivered for the site, so that the CEO (Xavier Mohr) saw less of it. Essentially, that’s what I was hired for… to take some of the workload off of him. Rather than everybody contacting him, they would “have to go through me, first”.

I also ran a highly responsive campaign to get more writers, covering a variety of different topics, for the site. Within the four day campaign, 23 interested writers responded. Only a handful of them have actually written anything, but what they have written has been some pretty good stuff. An in-world group for SL Reports Writers was created and all of the people that responded during the campaign were added to the group. The group is used to send notices of events and other things that need to be covered, in-world.

While I don’t write much content on SL Reports, myself, I do spend quite a bit of time on the site, behind the scenes. Recently, Xavier has begun posting more and more financial articles, as well. He’s much more connected to the “financial world” than I will ever be, so I am thankful that he’s as active as he is.

Getting to the point of this post (believe it or not, this is going somewhere), I just want to say that while SL Reports has been a huge part of my Second Life for the past six months, I think the time has come for me to say goodbye.

Though I have half-kiddingly mentioned this intention to Xavier Mohr, the fact is, I was only “half” kidding. Xavier has been a great person to work with and has become a great friend, something that I hope will not change after my departure.

The one thing that set this decision of mine in motion was a post by Xavier on November 17th at SLCapEx, though. I realize that SL Reports is owned by Arbitrage Wise and that any decisions about major changes would have to go through him, before being implemented. Part of the November 17th post said:

“Arb and I discussed last week hiring a contractor to do a web template redesign or seeking a “prefab” upscale web template to purchase, so I would like to see if we really are going to go through with this or hold off… and how much, if anything, said projects will cost us… before issuing further dividends. I am assuming this would be a big expense if contracted out, but nothing is final right now. I am still looking into some existing more economical template options as well.”

This was the first time that I had heard about another template redesign being discussed. Xavier and I discussed this a few days after the notice was posted, and I was shown a couple templates that were being considered. They were very impressive templates, by the way. Since I was not contacted before this notice was posted, I felt as though I was not being considered for the job of redesigning the template. Maybe those feelings were wrong, but if this was discussed, I would think that it would have been brought up to me, beforehand.

Like I said, that post just set the wheels in motion for this decision. It is not the entire reason for the decision. There are other RL reasons that have also brought me to this decision. One of them is that I need to focus more time and attention to another web site that has very big potential for income.

Even though I am stepping away from SL Reports, I will continue to host the site for the same monthly fee, if desired, for as long as it is needed. I will continue with my current position until December 1, 2007 (again, if desired), and will help with anything I can to insure a smooth transition, during that time.

As with “any” business, you have to change… not just simply be open to change or listen to people talk about change, but actually go through with the changes. If you don’t adapt to what your customers expect and if you don’t give your customers what they want, they simply leave. They’ll find someplace else to go. Many are already doing that, but Linden Lab doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

Simply adding features like better search and more realistic skies do nothing to solve the problems that current residents have been complaining about. Take a look at the latest “Windlight Update” and following comments to see what I mean. In fact, it allows current residents to see the problem much more clearly. How many residents were “yelling” about search or the way the sky looked? How many residents are “yelling” about the ongoing landbot, griefing, and other problems? The answer to those questions reveals just how much Linden Lab listens to the residents.

I love analogies, so I can’t help but compare this to a baby that’s screaming and crying because it wants it’s diaper changed, but all you do is keep feeding it and feeding it. Pretty soon, there’ll be so much shit that the diaper won’t hold any more. After a while, the baby gets so used to sitting in a crappy diaper that it quits complaining. Maybe Linden Lab will notice, once it gets all over them.

Tonight, I received a message from a resident, however, that I couldn’t help but be simply amazed by… and I’ll also add that I was very amused. The resident will remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. Keep in mind, while reading this, that this is a classified ad titled “Writers needed”.

She said, “hi i seen ur employment ad in the classified and i wanted to know what i need to kno to write for the sl reports”.

That was enough to make me shake my head and think to myself “No friggin’ way! This has got to be a joke.” I might not be the best writer (I know I’m not, but leaving the option open… lol). I use way too many commas, most of the time, and when I try to type fast, things don’t always get spelled the way they should. This sentence broke just about all the rules, though.

Because of the first impression that I had, I figured that there was probably no way in Hell that this person would ever write for SL Reports. I sent her back the following message:

“Reply from email: First, I’d like you to correct the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors in the following sentence, before we even think about talking about what else you would need to know, to write for SL Reports: “hi i seen ur employment ad in the classified and i wanted to know what i need to kno to write for the sl reports”

I knew that this was actually a relatively rude comment and suggestion, but considering that the job is a “writing” job, I think that the people writing should actually know how (or at least come close).

A few minutes later, I was actually amazed that she corrected the errors (or tried, at least) and sent it back to me. Things have been capitalized and some commas were added, but words that were spelled right in the first one were now wrong. I had to laugh when I saw the question mark at the end, though:

“Hi, I seen your employement ad in the Classified. I wanted to know what I need to know, to be able to write for the SL Reports.?”

Being an EOE (is there a such thing in SL?), I logged in and sent her a couple notecards with information about the positions that we’re filling. You never know, but with my first impression, I have a pretty good idea.

UPDATE: Two weeks later, and I still haven’t heard back from her. 

I haven’t looked… maybe this has been proposed in JIRA (I’ve never used JIRA, myself). If it has, and you know about it, please let me know what’s been talked about, or if it’s even been talked about, at all. UPDATE: I just found out about Jira MISC-208. Go vote!

I know that this is something that is pretty widespread, as far as people that I know that have their 25 groups full, and have no room to join any others. If there’s that many people that I know, personally, in my small circle of friends, I’m sure that there’s a huge percent of overall users who have the same problem.

I’m trying to envision this whole thing as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for the companies that I’m involved with to market products and services to a lot of “fresh meat” (or fresh pixels, as the case may be). It’s an opportunity for many other companies to do the same. The kind of congestion that this will cause in the SL marketplace could be overwhelming, though, so there are also some big doubts that go along with my optimism.

With this opportunity, there will be a huge jump in the percentage of new residents that will come in to Second Life with no money, at all. They will come in through a whole different experience and for a completely different purpose than the majority of the residents that are already here. A lot of them will see Second Life as a “who-done-it” game and will not even realize the potential of many other aspects of the platform. Will this truly be an opportunity to market products and services or maybe hire some cheap labor?

What this may become is the equivalent of illegal immigration into the US. We’ll have a huge jump in the amount of SL residents that have not had the time or desire to go through the process of getting their “virtual green card”, but all of them will need to make money, somehow. The job market will be flooded with these new “residents”, taking good paying jobs away from established residents and causing the average wages to drop. This is “great” news for employers in SL, since the overhead costs will go down. This is truly bad news for marketers in SL since the average avatar will have less money, and they’ll be frugal with what they “do” have to keep from paying to buy more Lindens, because they can’t earn them as fast.

Of course, this is something that Linden Lab needed. A huge influx of new sign-ups, of which a certain percentage will no doubt become “premium” members, a large media company that invests a crapload of money into buying server space (440 sims - 110 groups of 4 identical islands, each), and the media attention and “free” advertising that Second Life gets as a residual from the CBS advertising.

Is it really what Second Life needed, though? I hate making predictions, because I don’t like to get proven wrong, but in this case, I think I will. About 15 hours from now, or right around the time that the new episode of CSI: NY starts, the problems will begin. The first wave of problems will begin when current residents download the OnRez viewer (just to see what it’s like) and begin to log on. Some of these current residents will use their current name, while many of them will create alts, just for the purpose of using the new viewer. The time that it takes to log in to Second Life will start to slow down, considerably, much like what happens on “update Wednesdays” when the “all clear” is announced.

Suddenly, search will refuse to search and the ability to teleport will be gone. At the same time that this starts to happen, people that are watching the CSI episode will begin the process of creating their accounts and downloading the new viewer. The load-balancing that Electric Sheep has put in place to transport the new users to the various regions will be realized as a futile attempt to keep things running smooth while creating other problems that were not taken into account.

The default avatars will all begin to show up with “missing images” and/or “Ruthed” and the first impression that the new users will get will be highly detrimental to what CBS was trying to accomplish. While not affecting the new users, much, the ability to rezz objects anywhere on the grid will quit working. HUDs will not appear on-screen and users in the CSI sims will not be able to do too much, because of it.

Soon after the show ends (if not “right after”), Linden Lab will announce that something has gone wrong and they will begin a rolling restart to fix the issues. The new users will have absolutely no idea what that means and will suddenly quit moving, not realizing that they’ve been booted out. When they finally decide to log off and restart the viewer, their attempts to get back on the grid will not work. They’ll become frustrated with Second Life and realize that they don’t need this kind of frustration in their lives. Even though they just created an account, they decide that they don’t need to log back in, ever.

Starting on Thursday, there will be a big blitz of people reporting how many new user sign-ups there were on Wednesday, due to the new viewer and the CSI: NY episode. In the days following, the average concurrent users will not reflect the amount of users that recently signed up. It might go up, slightly, but “peak” concurrency will remain around 51,000, with average concurrency around 40,000.

Bloggers who have never talked about Second Life, before, will start to write about their experiences. There won’t be many long posts, because they will not have had a whole lot of experience. The backlash that will come from the bloggers, alone, will begin another wave of SL bashing from big media outlets. CBS and Electric Sheep will stand by their numbers… numbers that they’ll try to justify and spin. They’ll call the whole thing a success and will point out that this is something that is meant to last “months”. They’ll ignore the problems that were encountered on October 24th, and instead, focus on the long-term aspect of the whole project.

Did I say that I hate making predictions?

I honestly hope that my prediction doesn’t happen. I hope that the grid is able to withstand the amount of users that they are predicting and that everything does go smooth. Maybe “Massive Disaster” is too strong of a term for this prediction, too. There would only be a small percentage of residents who would truly consider it to be a disaster, while the rest of us would see it as a “bad night”. Let’s see how close I get, though.

My only question about this is “where” in the Terms of Service is this coming from? When was this changed? If this was in the TOS before the SexGen bed code theft case, the case would have never went as far as it did. Or is this part of the TOS that covers the open source viewer software?

I’ll update this post (or write a new one) once I look into this further.  By the way, just in case you’re thinking there’s some connection to the site that posted this… there’s not! I actually “just noticed” the site that I am linking this to.

The past was pretty well documented here and here, and there even seems to be “some” connection to Eddy Marin who (in 2003) was called “the world spam king”, thought to be responsible for about 200-million to 250-million spams a day (again, in 2003).

Jasper defends himself in the slexchange forum in this post by acknowledging that Eddie Marrin (spelled differently on different sites) is a spammer. He also says that Eddie had servers in his datacenter and that “Big spammers and heavy usage porn operators” pay him a lot of USD every month to put servers in his datacaenter.

He goes on to say, in the same post, “So….. Will Linden Bank be a scam? With over 600,000 USD we take in at the datacenter, I dont think you will ever see a Linden Bank customer have a probelm.” From what’s happened over the past week, we can see that his prediction was wrong.

He continues, “Now I am in SL, like the internet was in 1995. I was a success then, and will be a success in SL too. Im not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Since the post was made on the forum on April 28, 2007, it makes me wonder what his definition of “anytime soon” is. Four months must be longer than what he meant, though.

Another thing he throws in for the pure purpose of name-dropping is that he hosted Audionet which became Broadcast.com (founded by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner). At the time it became Broadcast.com, in September 1995, time they moved to a 30,000 square-foot facility (no need for an outsourced datacenter) in Dallas, TX. Before that, the one-page site was hosted by ccnet.com, based in Walnut Creek, CA. In 1999, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. Jasper Tizzy was well out of the picture before that happened, if he even had any connection in the first place.

At this point, in case you haven’t heard, I’ll point you to a post from Sept, 17, 2007 (a couple days ago) where PatrickJ Ah tries to clear up some rumors and make sense of what’s happened over the past week. He says that in his opinion, “Jasper is gone from SL and I seriously doubt that he will ever return as Jasper.”

Tobia Forcella, who runs VSTEX (the exchange where Jasper’s companies were listed) added something that I found “strange” at the end of the notice, saying “I had only an IM from Jasper on 13 sept saying: “Hello - I have sold my business to PatrickJ Ah - please move all of my shares in all of my companies to him - ty”.”

Since it’s quoted from “hello” to “ty”, I’m assuming that this was the complete message, and that nothing else was said. Why, on Sept, 14th, did Tobia post this message saying that Jasper is “leaving Second Life and is selling out his business”. Supposedly, the IM that Tobia received from Jasper didn’t say anything about leaving SL. What makes it even more strange is the fact that nothing was actually sold to PatrickJ Ah.

As I continued down the rabbit hole, I only found about 92 domain names registered as being hosted on Jasper Tizzy’s servers. Most of the web sites that are set up on these domains are registered with the exact same information. There are a few that aren’t, which may be legitimate “customer’s sites, though not very many, at all.

The web sites that are registered with the same information are all either very poorly designed, or most of the links don’t work. Many of them contain the default template “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” text, and usually all of the links don’t work. In the three servers that I looked most of the registration information listed Florida as the registrant’s address, with a few from Indiana.

On the server that hosts “thelindenbank.com” there is another domain that is listed as being registered to an address in Nevada. Interestingly, that domain has a picture of the exact same credit card that was used to announce the news that Atlas Venture Capital acquires “The Bank”, where the aquisition of World Wide Connect was also announced.

Of course, if somebody wanted to explain that away, they could. They could also explain that some people own many different domains… no big deal. I own plently, myself (15 or so).

The problem comes when all of the information is put together, though. Jasper says that he made enough money running datacenters to retire at 40 years old, but claiming “with over $600,000 we take in at the datacenter, I don’t think” you’ll see a problem, he doesn’t sound “retired”. He says that his name is on “maybe over 250,000″ domains (tech contact, I can understand, but not listed as the registrant, which is all I saw). In 1998 he “sold a search engine” and some software to Lycos for a bundle of cash. This post says that he still has a datacenter on Commercial Blvd.

One big question: Why is he hosting sites with Qwest, in Chicago (65.118.74.213) and with iDAQ Ltd., in Great Brittan (217.168.144.93) when he could easily use “his own” datacenter?

Why was he hesitant to give his RL info. It seems that now we know. From now on, I’ll be extra wary of people that say things like, “But I dont need money, and wont scam the SL bank to get a few bux for sure. I think since I was a leader int he internet, that Im going to be a leader in SL too.. Nothing in my past im scared of, nobody looking to sue me for anything LOL”

… as he walks away, laughing.

ADDED: Now (Sept. 22, 2007) it looks like some of the web sites have been taken down, including the one that looked like the “main hub” (because most of the registrant information for the other domains is using the name “Private Web Communities, Inc”) for the others, called Private Web Communities. It was there just a couple days ago. Why are you pulling your sites down, Frank? Are you quitting that game, too?

As far as what was supposed to be the topic of the discussion, I personally don’t see anything wrong with it. Nobody is “forced” to go to their new religious islands if they don’t want to. If I have no interest in it, why would I go there? As far as not letting people on your land, just ban them like you would anybody else. Simple. If nobody is violating the TOS or the community standards, they have every right to do what they want to do.

What stemmed from the discussion was something that I honestly couldn’t believe, though. Without saying a word about exactly what happened, I’ll point to a couple posts… well, one post, and a page on the Second Life web site.

The first thing I’d like you to read is a post from 2½ months ago called “Identity Boundaries“, over at Metaversed, paying particularly close attention to the third paragraph and the last statement of it that says, “Because the rules of SL are clear: if it is not on your first-life profile, it is not fair game for use in SL by others against your will. It’s wrong. And I stand by that.”

The next thing is (and I’ll paste it here) from the Community Standards page on the Second Life web site. The page clearly says ” The Community Standards sets out six behaviors, the “Big Six“, that will result in suspension or, with repeated violations, expulsion from the Second Life Community.” Number 4, which is called “Disclosure” does mention something to the effect of what Prokofy said, how if it’s not in the first life profile page, it’s a violation of privacy. I’m glad that she said that she will “stand by that”, but let’s look at the rest of what number 4 says:

“Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Lives. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident –including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident’s privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.”

Let’s just hope that she stands by the complete “Disclosure” section, and not just part of it. An abuse report “was” filed because (even though I do listen to her and value her opinion), I also stand by it. Being outspoken, popular, and knowledgeable does not give “anybody” the right to break rules.

ADDED: I filed the abuse report, first, and told Benjamin about it, later. He decided to file another AR. Prokofy has now posted the entire meeting (including the IMs) on her blog. Think about it, Prok… are you really “standing by it”, or just when it suits you? Maybe since you say LL will do nothing about it, anyway it’s okay?

The fact that she calls it a “web site”, aside, many other things about her account of what Second Life is are off the mark. She bases her whole opinion as if conversations inside SL are all one-on-one, saying that “two people can interact unrealistically with each other, both posing as someone they are not.” I actually can’t remember the last time I was in a room with only “one” person. I do remember times that I was interacting with another person, though, and I will say that it was anything “but” unrealistic.

She continues about how Second Life has “caused” divorces and break-ups in the real world, saying that if people put all of the time and energy into real life relationships that they put into relationships online, everything would be all better. Of course it has! Blaming SL for the lack of communication between RL partners is “easy”… that’s why! If the communication and time spent together was good between people, they wouldn’t look for something else… be it Real Life or Second Life.

I have met some amazing people in Second Life, as well as in real life. Meeting people and getting to know them in Second Life is much different than getting to know somebody in the flesh, however. Bonnie says, “…just because your avatar mate is physically beautiful doesn’t mean he or she is a good person…”. Does she actually think people are that stupid? Everybody who is a resident of SL “knows” that the avatars aren’t “real”.

I honestly don’t even pay too much attention to the avatars of people that I talk to in Second Life. It’s more about a meeting of minds. You can tell a lot faster if somebody is a “good person” by how they communicate. The same holds true in RL, but in SL, the communication is “all” you have, so it’s actually a lot easier to make that determination, earlier.

Sure, there’s a lot of “LOL” and “afk”, but for the most part, people usually talk in complete sentences, rather than talking like 13-year-old girls in a Yahoo chat room. If Bonnie had ever stepped foot into Second Life and actually met a few people, she would have realized this. She would have met some interesting people and maybe even became friends with them. Well… she might have. Going into something with such a pessimistic attitude, she would have probably turned into a griefer.

While I have no problem letting people know who I am in RL, I don’t feel that I need to “verify my age” with Linden Lab, through some third party who, in the past, has been known to sell mailing lists to other companies. I can be as open as I want to, without handing over my social security number (or even “part” of it). The use of social security numbers for identification is not legal, and in my opinion, a huge mistake by LL.

The RL information on the SL Reports site will include a history of things that I’ve worked on in the past, things that I’m currently involved in, and a RL picture. Links to various projects will be listed, as well as a list of various IM usernames that I use.

At the time of this post, the information is not on the SL Reports site, but will be coming, very soon.