MURKETING

The business of Second Life (cont’d)

More random notes regarding Second Life, which continues to draw lots of coverage:

+ Caliandris Pendragon, writing on Second Life Insider, questions the widespread assumption that Second Life is dominated by young people:

My experience of having many friends and acquaintances in SL is that the minority of them are under 30. … I work as a mentor and the incoming avatars must be a fairly random bunch, and I have met a substantial proportion of my friends that way. They aren’t all 19. By a long chalk.

+ More on that, and other thoughts on doing business in Second Life, here.

+ Also on the subject of doing business in Second Life, and focusing in particular on competition from real-world brands/companies: Joystiq argues that “Second Life’s denizens are concerned that the entrance of big business into the world will drive them out. They’re right to be concerned. Their businesses are as at risk as the local bookseller’s business before Barnes & Noble comes to town.”

Akela Talamasca counters such fears may be overblown, because: a) many SL “residents” don’t want their world “tainted by commercialism from RL;” b) instant travel makes real estate less critical (at least I think this is the point being made); and c) “It’s entirely possible that a preexisting SL store could create or emulate a style of clothing designed by a RL store. Therefore there is no material difference between a white t-shirt made by The Gap and one made by Mistress Midnight. What matters then is which one costs less; that is the one the average user will buy.”

Regarding c) — I’d be interested in the intellectual property fallout if a Second Life resident started doing virtual knockoffs of real-world clothes. Once you get beyond white T shirts or other commodities, things get more complicated. Also: In those cases where it really does come down to a simple matter of cost between something made by a real world company, and something made by a Second Life entrepreneur, real world companies have huge advantages.

Here’s a recent Business Week article on Toyota’s SL efforts. Originally the company was going to simply give away cars, since for them this is all just marketing anyway. Realizing that this sort of tactic pisses off the local entrepreneurs, they’re now selling cars for the going rate.
+ Reuters has launched an SL news site.

+ Long Tail Guy Chris Anderson did an event in Second Life. I don’t see what’s good — even for somebody selling his book — about having an avatar that looks like your real-world self.

+ Here’s a pretty good Second Life Herald bit complaining about SL looking too much like RL, thanks largely to marketing efforts (and journalists, I suppose).

+ And finally, here’s another Second Life Herald piece, more serious in tone, about the commercial drift of SL, and what it means to the residents. Here’s what I think is the most interesting passage:

In the Game of Second Life, the losers will be all those homemakers in New Jersey or part-time Wal-Mart workers in Wisconsin or security guards in North Carolina who were making up a storm of content, making a near-living or a substantial amount of money with either content creation, club management, or rentals. There will be less need for them now — they played their roles as early adapters, bug-testers, and server-load-tests, and now they need to retire.

Superconsumer

And in other news of consumuption/art projects:

For several days now I’ve been trying to work out what I think of a project I read about on We Make Money Not Art: It’s called Superconsumer, and was created by Franz Alken and Karl Rueskaefer. Superconsumer is described as a “bot” that buys stuff “autonomously” on eBay, and a little while later re-sells each object it has bought. In between, the purchased items are exhibted in an art gallery.

While transfering ordinary objects from the mass-market to an art space, the bot enhances the objects to pieces of art. This enhancement is temporarily, the bot takes away the “art aura” by selling this pieces again via ebay.The installation gives an constantly updated overview on the mass market. The programming of the process makes the items the bot will buy unpredictable — a search on the topic “football” can respond items like fan-articles, computer games, books or sportswear.

There are elements of this that I like, particularly the conversion of random objects into Things Of Interest (if not exactly art) by some more or less arbitrary process. I happen to think that many of the Things of most Interest to us on an individual level also acquire their value in some idiosyncratic way — albeit linked to biography, not random computer software.

And I like the idea that eBay users are in effect “arranging the exhibition without knowing it,” as the official description puts it.On the other hand, I’m not really sure I that completely get the point of using a “bot” to make this happen. I also think it’s kind of a mistake that (despite the usual nods to tech “interactivity”) the gallery viewer apparently doesn’t have an opportunity to buy the object him or herself. (I guess one could bid for it on eBay.) Maybe nobody would do it, but so what? Art galleries don’t just exhibit aura — they sell aura. Maybe that’s beside the point in this case, but if you’re using the gallery setting to explore the nature of object-aura, that’s an element you ought to deal with.

Broken iPods…

If you’ve had just about enough of products and projects that involve indivualizing or otherwise arting-up the iPod, maybe you’ll enjoy this: Stay Free! is “seeking artists and (broken) iPods for an upcoming project about planned obsolescence.” You are invited to turn your broken iPod into “something deliciously useless,” or to send it to Stay Free, which will hand it over to a participating artist. Details are here.

Sounds promising. For the record I should mention I own two iPods — the original version, and the third generation. Both still work.