We've made a few changes on the site in the past couple weeks. If you're interested in advertising on SL Reports, get in touch with Cash Yiyuan or use the contact form on the site. He's adjusted the rates and impressions to be more competitive, and I only wish I still had a business in-world so I could take advantage of the new rates, myself.
On my end, I've made some more changes to a couple different areas of the site. One of the changes that I'm hoping won't be too noticable is some changes to the URL for the pages on the site. I'll be watching the 404 logs pretty close, to make sure that we're not getting a whole lot (or hoefully "any") errors. I've already noticed a few and have fixed them. I know that this can cause some problems with RSS readers when I change things like this, but this should be the last time. The changes I made will actually make the URLs even shorter than they were, before. This is a good thing, and was actually done for a very important reason, which I'm choosing to not explain in this post.
Something else that was added within the past week is our very own SL Reports Chat Room. Between crashes, downtime, rolling restarts, upgrades gone wrong, I thought that there might be a use for it, here. I've had the link to it buried in the site map for the past week, but hopefully we can throw a link up on the front page, depending on what Cash and Arbitrage think about it.
The web based chat room is actually IRC based, so if you're familliar with registering a username in IRC, you're all set. You don't "need" to have a registered username, but if you want to register, there's instructions for how to do it, just below the room. There's usually always a bot named "Webfeed2" in the room, just to keep things alive and to run certain commands.
As usual, this post was not posted to the front page of the web site, since it really doesn't have anything to do with Second Life news, but rather news about this site. Until next time...
Reading weekly news about Virtual Worlds posted on the vast number of site on the internet a trend appears to be taking place...Second Life smear. One site named Coobico.com points out that Second Life "does not cut a very good figure in the blogosphere", naming and posting links from; Techcrunch, Kotaku, Intuitive.com and The Onion. Coobio.com points out that SL's headlines range from "paedophilia, bestiality, illegal gambling, technical bugs, laggy support (especially when it comes to billing-matters) and user-initiated law suits. Even Time Magazine joins in by declaring SL as one of the five worst websites lately." Coobico.com posted an update in response to an article on Massively.com. Mudslinging anyone?
Bad news travels twice as fast as good. Second Life develops, grows and learns. Just recently we have seen an announcement which supports this statement "We’re very pleased to announce the beta testing of Mono in Second Life". What is Mono? Read the official Linden Lab blog for more details. The underlying message is that Linden Lab is striving to enhance user experience. "Experience" - the observing, encountering, or undergoing of things generally as they occur in the course of time... is making sense? Linden Lab Research - are SL avatars lab rats? That’s a whole different story. Maybe SL Residents are, or maybe not. The choice is in your perception. It is up to how person behind the avatar responds - same as real life. A game or the game of life, it’s how you perceive. Experience is what occurs from day to day - your experience, is your experience. We can all report and paint a picture, but to experience is different to each individual. What I experience and you experience may be related, but cannot be the same.
I recently discussed our bank run and issues with my friends and brother, and they pointed me to a few YouTube videos that, while it has little resemblance of our current situation, really opened my eyes to the business of banking, and what’s really been going on around us.If you have not done so, feel free to view the videos here:
I’m not suggesting what the videos say are true, but I do feel that we should all wake up, and liberate our minds from the conundrum that we’re all in.After watching the videos (and a few Michael Moore documentary including Sicko), I just didn’t know what to think, except one thing – money and greed will corrupt anyone, and I will make certain that I do not fall victim to it.I have always grown up wanting to do business, and becoming rich.But if this is the result of becoming rich, then I really need to reconsider my goals in life.There are just more important things out there then money, power, and materialism.At then end of the day, I can sleep better with my loved ones knowing that I have helped made someone’s life better, then I would knowing what kind of car is parked in my garage.
These ideas have been plaguing me for the last two weeks, and my apathy for the government and politicians sunk to an all time low.Compound it with our Second Life problems, it was difficult for me to wake up and be motivated to do anything.What’s the point of doing anything?What is there to look forward to seeing the ‘Brave New World’ that we’re now entering where our freedom and liberty is being stripped away right in front of our own eyes?How can we look our [future] kids in the eye and tell them everything will be OK when we know that it was us, our generation, who failed them?
Fortunately, I was able to find some hope for us all in Ron Paul.If you’re wondering who he is, then you’ve been living in a cave like me – a cave where I was fed information only from what I see on TV.I would do him injustice to tell you about him, so I’ll just provide some videos that I saw last night on YouTube about him, and for once, it brought tears to my eyes seeing that there is some hope after all.
I watch CNBC and the news all day – I see what’s going on more than most people, and I see what’s going on with our economy and what our government is doing.I’m not telling you this so that you’ll vote for Ron Paul, nor am I trying to be a conspiracy theorist.I’m just sharing with you my feelings, and helping to liberate your mind so that you can do your own free thinking.I can tell you one thing –2008 will be the first year that I have ever gone out to vote in my life.
As you might have seen, we've updated the comments component for SL Reports, once again. After it was upgraded, yesterday, I tested it to make sure it was working. I then changed something (removed the "Title" entry) and didn't test it, afterwards.Something I should have done, obviously, since removing it caused the "send" button not to work.
I'm very sorry about not verifying that it was working, and I'm sure that quite a few of you had probably seen that there was a problem before I did.
Now that it's working, again, the good news! The new comments component gives us the ability to give each comment a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", depending on how you feel about the individual comments. It also gives us the ability to search within all comments from each article. You can also now subscribe to a comment thread via RSS and/or have new comments sent to your email address. In order to be notified by email, you need to leave a comment, first, and select the "notify" option on the comment form.
I will be trying to figure out a way to remove the "Title" entry on the comment form without breaking things, since titles aren't really needed and should be related to the topic of the post when commenting on a particular post, anyway. I'll test this on a different site, to make sure it's right, before making any changes, here.
Particularly since the ban of in-world banking, in light of the continuing coverage we've been providing with regard to the financial sector, I've received a lot of random questions about SL Reports, JT Financial, the stock markets (stock exchanges), and other things.
With my conflicting real-life schedule and persistent duties here at SLReports.net and elsewhere, it would be nearly impossible to answer each question individually. There are, however, a few great things which I felt I might be able to address publicly... in my new capacity as a staff writer, but based on my experience with SLR and Wise Metaverse... during what has been a period of extreme writer's block for me this afternoon.
We'll start out with the most-asked questions as I have noticed...
"What is the future of JT Financial, and how does that affect SL Reports?"
As you may or may not be aware, JT Financial purchased my majority share of SL Reports in May of 2007 in a highly-publicized transaction.
Since then, however, organization of the company has changed. Prior to the banking ban, JT Financial, SL Reports, SL Capital Exchange, and other Second Life businesses managed by Arbitrage Wise were reorganized as subsidiaries of the real-life entity "Wise Metaverse, LLC," effectively making SL Reports a sister company to JTF.
Since I am almost certain that Linden Lab will delete the comment as soon as it is noticed, I am posting it here so that it will be saved for all eternity. A friend graciously sent me the link to the official Second Life blog post for the beta preview of Havok4. It wasn't the game I was interested in, though.
It's good to see that amidst all of the chaos, there is a bit of humor left in the SL community. The comment was made by, and actually links to a banking-ban parody by "Malignant Narcissist," the non-avatar critic of Second Life, assumingly with enough time and so little of a life that he posts about the downfalls of our virtual world every opportunity he can.
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