SL Neighbourhood Update: The hood has changed yet again. The extensive townhouse development west of me vanished overnight, to be replaced with smaller homes and empty lots for sale. There's also, for the first time in eons, a retail development nearby, and it's a half respectable looking mall with an interior courtyard open to the sky (I can literally leap out the front door of my skyhome and land in the middle of it). Meantime, the two big condo towers that sat empty forever to the southwest of me also vanished, seemingly overnight, and have been replaced by a much smaller single building, which is also empty. And that seems to be the cycle of many SL economic hopes and dreams: people enter the world, get excited, buy land, develop it with a retail or housing project, and then stand back as it utterly fails. It's like watching successive government make work projects going on all around me. Meanwhile, the fellow that built his neopagan reserve, which now includes my old lot, seems to have finished his project, but I never see anybody there.
The bigget macro story of past months seems to be a large increase in the number of European residents. In
the old days, SL was populated largely by Americans, Brits and
Canadians, with some Australians. Now there are Germans, Italians,
French and, for some reason, tons of Dutch. (Few Asians
though, which is odd considering how wired places like Hong Kong are,
or that Korea is the most online culture in the world. Perhaps it's
the dominance of English in SL, or the absence of bubble tea houses.)
And what do the continental Euorpeans bring? Dance parties. They like to rave.
They've also altered the most popular sites ranked according to
traffic. When I started SL more than a year ago, the top sites were
casinos and a strip club called Barbies. And some more educational
things. Now the top sites in the world are Ibezia-like dance and
party islands and resorts. Ah Europe: great art, architecture and
lots of flashing lights.
Regular reader Karen sent a link to a
PC Magazine article about how online activities like SL are virtual
flashes in a digital pan and doomed to disappear. I can't say the
article is wrong, but if SL disappears, it's because it will be
replaced with something that's better. Perhaps something that doesn't
crash every 30 minutes. And maybe less like Ibezia.
Today's bLINKit: Is Google the new Big Brother? Opinions differ, especially those coming from Google lawyers.
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