Rules are as follows:

• Step 1: Follow me on the Twitter social network for free: twitter.com/AnthonyHocken
• Step 2: At a random time this weekend I’ll give a trivia question on Twitter about Crystal Gadgets.
• Step 3: Send your answer to me within 1 hour by private message on Twitter or in Second Life.
• Step 4: A winner is drawn at random from correct replies and will receive L$1000 cash.

Best of luck!…

• Profile Picks: Aspen Munro (L$1000 cash + L$1000 store credit)
• Tricky Quiz #1: Missy69 Aeon
• Tricky Quiz #2: Myrna Braveheart
• Tricky Quiz #3: Zak Zamin
• Random Chat group draw: Melancholy Graves
• Random Updates group draw: Fadou Haystack and Kendall Weston

Visit our store if you want to try your luck in the November draws!

• The scripts have been reworked to use one 10th the overhead. It’s much less laggy now and uses a fraction of the total scripts. Ideal if you like to leave your Prim Finder rezzed in world.
• There’s now no moving parts in the display board. The demo prim uses smooth client-side rotation and the filter panel is made visible/invisible using a single scripted controller instead of sliding in/out using multiple scripts.
• The grid display uses an efficient 2 cells per script setup instead of 1 cell per script.
• Few minor tweaks. The info button gives a link to our website.

If you have an earlier version of Prim Finder visit our shop and click “Upgrade” on the vendor for your free update.

Sidenote: When Second Life 1.21 viewer comes out of beta I hope to release Prim Finder 1.4 which will require much less prims for the board itself.

• RubyTuesday Ballyhoo won the Picks L$2000 draw.
• Prof Meredith, Eneias Pessoa and Kandace Sands won the Tricky Quiz.
• Anthoney Exonar and Irwin Wells win the random draw for being in this group. You guys can pick any two items from the store.

• Profile Picks: Strathis Quandry (L$1000 cash + L$1000 store credit).
• Tricky Quiz #1: Tareeq Khandr (any two items from store)
• Tricky Quiz #2: Sweetpea Wise (ditto)
• Tricky Quiz #3: Davy Eales (ditto)
• Random group draw #1: Entropy Hax (any two items from store)
• Random group draw #2: Musicmaker Contepomi (ditto)

Congrats all.

You spend most of your time creating content on the Internet. What would you think for example if everyone in your home town poked fun at you for doing seedy things all day long, just because you’re using the Internet?

That would be unfair and ignorant don’t you think? And it wasn’t far from public perception a few years ago before the Internet was embraced en mass and not just by geeks.

But why is this unfair? After all, the Internet is crawling with pornographic material.

Just like the Web, Second Life is an open platform which lets its users do anything they like. And indeed a certain percentage of Second Life contains seedy activity. Do you really think the ratio of seedy to non-seedy in Second Life is any different to the Web, the Internet, every day life, the magazine rack?

All the more disappointing is you’ve interviewed people from Second Life like Catherine Omega, and you even have an account. Was this really what you perceived while using Second Life? Or do you just poke fun because it’s the in thing to do and disregard your journalistic integrity?

In Twit episode 155, 10 minutes in (though this isn’t the first time) you said people go in to Second Life, buy nude suits, wonder around naked, and it’s for lonely people.

Having followed most of your work in podcasting from the beginning, and I’ve donated to the TWiT network twice so I genuinely appreciate your work, but the flippant remarks you make every time Second Life crops up in conversation hasn’t done it any favours.

Best,
Anthony Hocken

PS: This also applies to the likes of John C. Dvorak but then he speaks so much crap nobody takes him seriously anyway. Cranky Geeks is a mildly entertaining show, and John is a likeable character, but anything worth listening to comes from the guests and not John’s loose tongue.

• Profile Picks: Natmoud Mannonen
• Last Tricky Quiz: Elissa Sands
• Previous Tricky Quiz: Divad Mills
• Random group draw: JJ McGuire

Congrats all.

The fundamental problem is ignorance…

Websites used to suffer the same issue until people realised it has positive uses too. In the early days people associated the Web with geeks and perverts, but even though there’s many thousands of seedy websites today, nobody associates it with that anymore. People came to realise that the Web is an open platform and therefore most every day analogies also apply to the Web.

For example, if you pass a sex shop on the street on your way to the newsagents, nobody is forcing you to go inside the sex shop. Likewise, nobody is making you visit websites selling sexual material on your way to the New York Times website.

The Web is an open platform. It has its positive and negative aspects. Freedom is a good thing. Do what interests you and ignore the rest.

Now we have 3d platforms which offer even more potential and flexibility than the Web itself. But we have the same issues with ignorance all over again. Second Life, because it’s the most popular, is getting the brunt of the negativity.

Second Life offers the same analogies to every day life, just like the Web does. It hosts social events, university experiments, live music gatherings, business conferences, gaming, role-play, combat - the list goes on. It has been embraced by IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell Computers, Amazon, Cisco, CNN, and many other forward thinking companies.

To apply a similar example to the analogy I gave earlier - if you want to attend a news gathering in Second Life which is located by a sex-themed location, nobody is forcing you to visit the seedy area. There are plenty of seedy areas in Second Life, but there are also plenty of seedy areas in real life and on the Web. It would be plain ignorant to make a one-on-one association between the two.

Real life, Second Life and websites all have their pros and cons. But the cons come from society rather than the underlying platform. Freedom brings with it idiots who abuse the freedom, or merely those who think “outside the norm”. That’s just how it goes.

Second Life is far from dead. It continues to grow in users and content and that will not change any time soon. The statistics shown recently on Second Life’s website emphasize this.

Another issue people have with Second Life is the quality of the content. The thing people need to remember is the vast majority of it is created by the users themselves and varies quite a lot. This can’t be compared directly to games like Crysis which is optimized by hundreds of professional game developers with a budget literally comparable to a Hollywood blockbuster. Even with online play, Crysis keeps all the 3d data and texture maps locally. But with Second Life all the 3d objects and textures (plus animations, sculpture maps, sound, and so on) are downloaded on-the-fly as you visit each area, so it’s going to be a different experience and allowances need to be made.

And probably the other issue people have with Second Life is the stability. But again it’s important to realise that Linden Lab have many engineers dedicated to improving this. They’ve been fairly transparent about what they’re up to and how they’re trying to make the platform more robust to meet growing demand.

Most people who trash talk Second Life either haven’t used it, or couldn’t get past the first few minutes either because they found it too difficult to use or couldn’t find anything to do from the outset. With it being an open platform you can’t expect to be hand held like with traditional games. A bit of patience goes along way.

• Log into Twitter and visit the badges page.
• Select options “Other”, then “Html/Javascript”.
• In the sample code given, copy/paste everything between the div tags (including the div tags themselves) into the sidebar.php file, which you’ll find in your Wordpress theme folder. If you prefer to make the changes straight to the server (instead of locally and then uploading via FTP) then you can do that by logging into your Wordpress dashboard and click “Design” > “Theme Editor” > “Sidebar”.
• Copy/paste everything between the script tags (including the script tags themselves) into the footer.php file, which you’ll also find in your Wordpress theme folder. Place just before the closing body tag. The reason for putting it there is to help your website load when the Twitter server is feeling icky.
• Customize the CSS file if you want, which will also be in the Wordpress theme folder.

• If adding a name fails it now asks if you want to visit a webpage with more info and workaround.
• Added “Website” button to About menu.
• Faster refresh rate.