There is a good post on Massively that discusses some of the ill conceived marketing efforts in Secondlife. I have not been spending much time in Secondlife lately. This is partly due to not having much in the way of spare time. I have also found that there is very little new things to see there, or at least if there are they are hard to find.

What is there is a large amount of saturation marketing, most if it for Secondlife businesses. I should not be as surprised as I am that a portion of people cannot see a new medium as anything more than a different medium. I mean that a new medium like SL gives new opportunities for how to interact with an audience. Instead of taking advantage of this, some marketers ignore the potential and simply treat it the same as they treat other mediums. The evidence of this is in the number of billboard style advertisements that proloferate the SL landscape. There is nothing different with these ads from any banner ad on a website.

My disapointment with SL in general is that it seems to have stagnated in a particular form. Most of the changes that are seen in the last year or so is tweaks to the interface rather than any radical new interaction methods. I am surprised that the world continues to be bound by many of the realities of the physical world like size, perspective and physics. With the exception of the ability to fly, the ‘physical’ interactions with the SL world are very similar to those we have with the real world.

For the marketer though, even though the medium does offer new methods of interaction the rules of marketing stay the same. Understand your target market, understand your product and understand how a campaign gets the message you want to the people you want.

My personal view of SL is that there is potential there for a method to better interact with data. The reality of Secondlife is yet to live up to that promise though. I won’t be too critical about this though as I don’t know exactly how they could achieve this.

Linden Lab’s Second Life has it’s first millionaire. Yes, that’s in real U.S. dollars folks. Anshe Chung has used various shopping malls and stores in game to amass her fortune. The friend who sent this story to me also indicated that he pays his land tiers to this individual, in Lindens of course.
Link to story

Since my dad died I have only been in Second Life a couple of times. I just have not been in the mood to visit. In fact I sold a parcel of land I had and consolidated things down to one area.

I had at one point considered buying a portion of a island and doing some collaborative work with some others, but I simply have not had the time or the CPU cycles to dedicate to it.

Today while reading Eric Rics aka (Spin Martin’s) Blog I see that Linden is raising the island prices to a ridiculous level. For the price they are now going to charge for an island along with set up cost multiply that by 12 months and I could rent 12 dedicated servers for a year from the company that host our backup boxes for the same price. 

Whats really sad though is that second life is the ultimate walled garden in that you cannot take your creations with you if you close up shop. Sure they can go in your inventory but we will see if the price of land goes up and if the number of islands go down. [Eric Rice]