For example, IBM’s evangelists have become a lot more quiet everywhere. The ‘case study’ is far from conclusive ‘evidence’ IBM is still in SL at the same level they were 3/4 years ago. (The case study is shallow and quite frankly, a little bit of a joke - not unlike most things I’ve seen from IBM in the public space on virtual worlds: PPT’s on immersive presentation, the horrible presentation spaces in ActiveWorlds and the hilarious Lotus integration video just to name a few).

You don’t have to agree, but these are his observations, and they make a lot of sense to a lot of people (as well as SL being a niche product and ‘SL dancing is not for everyone’).

Maybe I read a lot of Erics findings and ‘frustrations’ in my own, which is why I am a little surprised to see the pitchforks here

Also - since when protesters that don’t give their name to journalists are ‘wankers’? This is shameful, Krangel.

1. Eric nee Reuters Krangel was at Columbia Journalism school when he got this Reuters SL gig. Don’t forget that it was Adam Reuters who first opened the bureau with a huge splash, but then sort of wandered away, after he got the Davos interview with Mitch Kapor in February 2007, when Mitch basically said, don’t buy any new land, as we’re looking for the “liquidity event” and planning to opensource the servers, so land will devalue. Small wonder when the Geek Chief (then CEO) says stuff like this, that there isn’t a huge swarm to buy land from consumers, but rather a huge swarm of corporations having a look-see.

SL Reuters was a huge opportunity for Eric, walking right into a wire service position before he’d even graduated, and not having to go slog it out at the Potatoe Picayune in Maine like many other J-school grads have to do to earn their spurs. He got a low salary because he was a college kid soon to graduate basically going into something like a glorified internship. Because Adam lost interest he had the space to himself.

2. So remember, then, Reuters already paid a journalist probably a lot more handsomely, but he lost interest because for him, as a tech and economics reporter, there wasn’t enough of a story in SL and not enough glory within the Reuters pantheon, so he moved on to other tech stories. Adam Pasick wasn’t a lifestyle/culture/etc. reporter or interestd in those topics.

3. In fairness to Eric — and I don’t like being fair to him and have been probably the most harshly critical of him in my blog — he reported more stories than Hamlet nee Linden Au reported or ever *will* report, and far more critically, and with far more journalistic curiousity and skill, quite frankly.

Hamlet disingenuously cites a list of Reuter misses as if Reuters didn’t break a whole bunch of others stories Hamlet wouldn’t touch because they were too critical of LL or the geek magic circle. Eric broke the story on the real identity of the character who ripped of Stroker Serpentine’s beds; he did quite a few stories on the Lindens’ island price hikes and such; he was far more probing and interviewed more people per square inch than Hamlet, like a real wire service reporter, than Hamlet will ever interview in a million years.

Hamlet runs a blog, and is lazy, and lets other people report for him live, without editing. He doesn’t go around trying to “get the story,” he just pontificates and does advertorials and informercials, “oooh this shiny gadget” “ohhh that shiny island” “ooohhh here’s an event from my sponsor Rezzable that really rocks” etc. That’s fine, but let’s not compare an inhouse organ-turned-outhouse-lapdog with *Reuters* for God’s sake.

4. Eric, who is a geek and originally educated as a geek and went to j-school as a second career so to speak, although still young, rapidly realized that among his peers, SL wasn’t cool. Geeks in New York in particular just don’t like SL. They think it’s for losers. It meant suffering constant embarassment at parties and such. And the Reuters top dude, who I happened to bump into at a dinner and mention SL, also didn’t appear to be very thrilled with SL. The virtual bureau was something that happened once when two enthusiastic execs, Philip and a Reuters exec, met at one of those fancy tekkie conferences and yakked it up at the spur of the moment on a high of irrational exhuberence and likely other intoxicants, and then the staff had to follow through on the next day..and the day after…and then management got disinterested and they all wound it down. Happens all the time with management enthusiasms that staff don’t like.

4. Eric could have nevertheless turned this low-paying first-job-after-J-school into something more than he did. He was the most visible journalist in SL during the height of its hype season when everybody from CBS to Wired to CNN was covering it and in it. And all he could do was get a job at Silicon Alley? Well, I suppose any journalist these days, especially “print,” is facing very tough times.

5. Great job or no, Eric could have left gracefully, even though he didn’t leverage his position, but instead, he decided to try to buy himself more street cred with his snarky peers in the Gawker type set by being a douche. I am still trying to understand the animosity involved as nobody really did anything to harm Eric and he only thrived through SL and built his resume. What’s especially offensive of his critique is to make *us* seem like we are uncritical fanatic Kool-Aid drinking loons, when we are even more critical than Eric of LL and SL. In fact, Eric, as ultimately a Reuters suit, would wipe all our comments off the Reuters blog out of a sense of “corporate niceness” and solidarity with fellow corporate Linden Lab at some level.

6. Ian leaving IBM strikes me as in fact INDEED a signal from IBM that they are winding down all this virtual world sillyness and you have to expect that people like Eric will read that obvious signal even as IBM denies it. I think there are different factions at IBM. But it sounds like Eric simply didn’t research this story at all to cover his ass, i.e. by calling various insiders within…gasp…Second Life that he might have logged on to talk to.

I think for a time, IBM, like some goofy old dude of 78 marrying a 20-something to relive his youth and make sure he didn’t miss out on everything before he died, was chasing after SL because they thought it might be something like the PC they missed. They fooled around for a few years and then realized, oh, it’s not. Or at least, oh, it will take a lot more time and won’t be a mass market thing. So they began moving on. They are said to be more in opensim, where they can sandbox around and fool around with the software more than they can in SL. Zha’s interoperability experiment is going nowhere. Even the very big boosters of it in LL were given the brake while the entire thing underwent a very severe review by new management. New management is not interested in opensourcing the server code and interoperability is something they’ve only pursued with IBM…and it hasn’t happened for more than a year and…they’ve just outsourced the entire thing to MMOX where it will languish or bog down in committee. In part, it’s hard. It part they should NOT move to interoperability so casually as they will flush out all the content in SL to pirates. This is a huge battle and I think in part LL’s new alphabet suits pay attention to these concerns more than they did when Cory Linden decided it.

IBM may have some stake in *appearing* to look like they still support SL and still use it for meetings but they have definitely ratcheted down the enthusiasm. You will not see Zha racing on here to say the blog wasn’t updated because…because…”I had to go shopping!”

7. A story that I thought was utterly fake and concocted was the IBM “strike” which was merely the publicity stunt of some union in Italy or something deciding that they could really chafe IBM’s butt by going inside SL, which seemed to be an IBM darling at the time, and using it to strike — it was a stunt, a 3-day wonder that was not something “indigenous” to SL. Eric was right to give that story a pass — although if it had been me, I would have traced the entire fakeness to its roots — the one faction in Italy, the 3-day-olds, etc. and more to the point, I’d have interviewed some of those 200 IBMers we know are in SL who were *not* on strike and *didn’t even know about it*. Yeah, IBM’s a big place, but please…It was just some leftist fake people’s uprising shtick of the sort you see all the time and wasn’t something germane to SL per se other than that parcels were exploited in a publicity stunt.

I also want to set the record straight for both of these macho gonzo journos Hamlet and Eric.

A. I’m the one who broke the story about Copybot for the Herald. Hamlet hates me so much because of my valid and persistent criticism of him that he couldn’t even to my article that broke this story — linking instead to a later story by Pixeleen Mistral. I went on to cover many important stories about Copybot facing profound pressure from the Sheep and other vested parties of the sort Eric or Hamlet have never had to face because they never challenged the powers that be to the extent I have.

B. The Herald also broke the original story about Ginkos *years* before Eric got all exercised about it when Duranske put a bee in his bonnet, and massively.com/Tatero Nino also ran many stories on Ginkos before there even *was* a Reuters. At least he reserves his barb about coverage of “only hot men” for Hamlet — the rest of us were assiduously covering Ginko’s. I got some of the best live reporting from the floor of some of the “stock exchanges” and it was later picked up and used by mainstream media.

Eric could never understand my critique of Duranske as someone getting the story wrong for motivations that seemed to have everything to do with trying to make SL appear as a haven for crime and corruption that only his tribe of lawyers could protect the deluge of corporations from. As soon as Duranske figured out there were not going to be any big corporations requiring his services for these things and that the Lindens themselves dealt with crime and some of the corporations eased out, he went and got a real job.

Ultimately, Eric suffers from geek class warfare syndrome. He can’t seem to affirm the identity of his own tribe of geeks and elite cultural workers without putting down people of mass culture. Lots of people love dancing and cybersex in SL. It’s not for the urbane sophisticates of gawker.com So what? Leave them alone? I find it boring to dance most of the time too, but given how many other interesting things there are to do in SL, so what?

The snarky elitist geeky metrosexual sort of culture that Erik imbibed in school and regurgitates in his online tech gossip sheet now once seemed impervious and unstoppable. But with the Recession, they, too have gotten a slap in the face. Valleywag.com is going under. Even wire reporters are getting fired, along with print reporters. Journalists are going into government or non-profits where perhaps they always belonged.

ERIC REUTERS: Sure. Again, than, you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I think it’s funny. Reuters, their history in Second Life, goes back to before I’d been here. I’ve been with Reuters, I’m coming up on my one year anniversary right now. But Reuters’ presence started in around October 2006, I believe. But, first of all, just in terms of Reuters’ strategy, I mean I think Reuters is trying to position itself globally as a leader in technology stories, as on the cutting edge, as an organization that goes beyond just perhaps some of the competing newswires like AP or even Bloomberg, to find sort of newer, more cutting edge, more avant garde stories, and, of course, Second Life is where so much of that goes on. But also, just in terms of ROI, to mention what John said, I mean Reuters came in. They had an island built, which is still sort of my home here in Second Life. But really, although it pains me greatly to say this, I am not paid all that much. So when you think about that

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You’re a reporter though, aren’t you?

ERIC REUTERS: I am a reporter.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I thought reporters got these enormous salaries.

ERIC REUTERS: Clearly, at Cornell School of Management you’re not looking at the journalism industry that carefully.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: No. I’m wondering, you’re saying even within journalism–and reporters I know do struggle. You’re thinking that, even on that scale, you’re not in it for the money.

ERIC REUTERS: No, I’m really not. I’m really not. I mean part of the reason I’m here personally is because I find Second Life absolutely fascinating. And I think no one anticipated, and it’s not just my interest, but also Reuters’ interest, is how complex of a creation Second Life has become. And when you sort of bring together all these metaphors of virtual geography, of a currency, of land that you can build on or sell, I mean I think of some of the stories that I’ve been writing about for the past year, with intellectual property issues, with a recent story I wrote about ad farms, which brings in sort of zoning issues. Stories about Second Life’s currency. This is far more complex than I think anyone realized.

But just to get back to what I was saying earlier about ROI, which is, Reuters had a start up cost. They had to build the island. They had to set up a presence. They had to put in the infrastructure within Reuters as a wire to sort of acknowledge Second Life and come into it. Except now, really, all of Reuters’ expenses are what they pay me, the monthly fees on our island. So what we’re talking about is that Reuters reaches out to the 1.2 million people who are in Second Life every 60 days. It is a tremendous amount of press that Reuters is getting. A lot of knowledge of people who are understanding what Reuters is, what Reuters does, who perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have that. So really, I mean I think they’re extending their brand in a way on a very little expenditure that I think perhaps other organizations might follow suit.

RHONDA IREPORT: Well, we started our project taking absolute numbers out of the equation for a very specific reason because we were very interested in trends and not absolutes. The numbers here, frankly, for a company of our size are miniscule. If you stare at a number for very long, you sort of lose the meaning of why you’re here in the first place. So we look at diversity of stories. We look at the types of people who are coming to our classes we hold, a weekly event, every Tuesday at our iReport HUD. It has two purposes. One is to gather the iReport community together so that they can share stories, talk about unfolding stories, talk about things they want to cover. We cover stories that have been written in the past week. We also try to impart, if you will, what we can bring to the equation, so we help people understand how to take a good photo, how to write good copy, how to write a good headline and give back, if you will, to the community. That’s really important to us is to play equal part in that dialogue. So we look at trends, and the trends for us have been very encouraging and in the right direction. We also see activity flow just like we do in the Real World. It’s easy to start mapping the news stories that come on iReport with the activity in the world and the requisite media coverage so it’s an interesting trend coverage, but we don’t look at absolutes.

ERIC REUTERS: I would like to echo what Rhonda said, and I think that Reuters has a similar policy. Reuters is a global newswire, and we could write a story that Matt Drudge links to about Hillary Clinton or whatever that gets tens of millions of hits. So in the grand Reuters scheme of things, what we do in Second Life is–while it’s important here in Second Life, it’s very, very small in the grand scheme of what Reuters is. So of course, we want more journalism. We want better stories. But I don’t really think that we spend our time worrying or angsting over are people going to Reuters first versus iReport or Prok’s blog or any of the other news sources available throughout Second Life. But I’m really sort of privileged in that our mission here is just to do more quality journalism, to cover stories or angles that perhaps other people haven’t or haven’t with the same depth. And rather than sort of worrying about how many page hits we’re getting every month, as some new media outlets do, we’re more about making for the hundreds of thousands of people who are in Second Life associate the Reuters name and the Reuters brand with quality journalism. So in that, actually, I feel very fortunate as a journalist. I mean that’s a dream assignment.

ERIC REUTERS: Well, really, I want to talk about two stories. The first one is, I guess, Metaverse wide, which is, at least to me, it’s incredibly obvious how successful this metaphor is, how addictive, how engaging, how new, how sticky Virtual Worlds is. But what I’m really kind of agnostic about is whether it’s going to be Linden Lab’s Second Life that goes on to become the Virtual World that is going to expand wildly and whether that everyone in America and everyone in the world is really going to be engaged with. And I think that’s very much in Linden Lab’s own hands. That, to me, is the big story of the next year, which is, is it Second Life that is the Virtual World that takes off, or is it something else, or is it something we haven’t seen yet. And we’re going to find out.

With regard to Second Life specifically, the story that I have my eye most on is probably Open Sim, which is that you look at all the big stories of 2007, look at casinos, the governance issues, tax issues, intellectual property issues. Once Open Sim really gets up and running

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Eric, can I just ask you to explain to our listeners what Open Sim is?

ERIC REUTERS: Oh, sure. Of course. I’ve written a few stories on it. Open Sim is basically a group of developers have sort of approximately how Linden Lab servers work, based on sort of reverse engineering some things they figured out once the viewer code went into the Open Source domain. And now there is code that you can download to host your own server. It’s not Second Life, but it mimics all the functionality of that. And we’re starting to see these very primitive grids, which are completely independent of the Second Life grid. That businesses are starting or hosting their own sims, and it’s Second Life except with zero oversight, with zero connection to Linden Lab. So right now Linden Lab has sort of been the 800 pound gorilla. Everything that they decide happens, and the rest of us just sort of deal with it, write with it and pontificate about it. But, over the next year, that is increasingly going to change, and that’s going to be something fascinating that’s going to change all the rules. So I’m going to be watching that very carefully.

PROKOFY NEVA: I’ll just say I totally disagree with that analysis, but I won’t take the floor.

Ian/Epredator quit IBM

David/Zha’s blog had been silent since AUGUST
http://zhaewry.wordpress.com/

and IBM has been on a manic drive to cut opex by either laying people off:

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/ibm-layoff-count-at-least-2800-in-sales-and-software-ibm

or making life so miserable for people they quit

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/ibm-to-north-american-employees-to-keep-your-job-move-to-india-ibm

So I made an educated guess — and clearly said it was a guess — and promised to update if I heard more. Then I heard more, and I ran it.

But let me take a moment to address some of the more ridiculous statements circulating recently:

The premise that Reuters should have “scooped” every big SL story is the most asinine thing I’ve heard in months. We were there to have an independent, skeptical, non-fanboy, informed view on all things SL and VWs, and I’m pretty proud of what we did. No one paying attention to Reuters/SL would have been suckered by Ginko and the other “banks”, an obvious fraud other “journalists” were too busy throwing “hottest male avatar” polls to pay mind.

And since we’re talking IBM specifically, let me relate an anecdote about a story we “missed”: One day 30 avs showed up on Reuters island waving anti-IBM placards and /shouting “strike!”. I clicked their profiles, and every single avatar in the scrum was less than three days old. They told me their grievances, and when I asked their RL names, they said “we can’t tell you, we’ll get in trouble for protesting!”

Bunch of wankers — I gave them no press.

Lastly, I just want to address the oft-quoted “watching paint dry” remark. It was a shoot-from-the-hip line and I probably would have said something different had I more than 25 minutes to write that piece. But honestly, even after 18 months immersed in people who love SL, and having gave it chance and chance again, I still think “dancing” in a virtual nightclub is deathly boring.

That’s not a slam on people who think it’s “ZOMG GREATEST TECH EVAR!!!1″ If you like it, go nuts. I just earnestly believe based on thousands of hours of first-hand observation that Second Life in its present form will never appeal to more than a small niche community of people it “clicks” with. Second Life’s recent history bears out that I’m on to something, I think. And despite the fondest of memories I retain for my time in Second Life, and despite personal hopes all my friends there (and Linden Lab too) prosper, I’m not going to lie about where I think it’s heading.

I remember my parents telling me that there is no such thing as a “bored” person, only “boring” people, and if you’re having boring time (i.e. “like watching paint dry”), well, guess what?

SL allows each individual to “bring it” with them. I have found SL to be a environment of some of the most creative, interesting, funny, talented people on the planet. It also offers an international environment in which we can all communicate.

Questioning the future and validity of Virtual Environments such as Second Life is being like the people who opposed the development of trains “because if humans traveled over 35 miles an hour they would suffocate” (this is true - people were concerned about that)
or
like when Alexander Graham Bell took the invention of the telephone to Western Union and they asked him “why would our telegraph operators want to talk to each other?” (Thanks for that one, Pathfinder!)

And as far as IBM having visionary leadership, or being a bellwether of technology let’s not forget:
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
- Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

There are many extremely intelligent and talented individuals that work at IBM who were in SL for a long time before they could convince the suits that it was a valid platform, but then IBM came rushing into SL like Al Haig ran into the hospital when Reagan was shot, claiming “ok, I’m in charge here” and everyone knew that they weren’t.

Not having success in SL is a combination of not setting expectations correctly, not understanding SL’s strengths and limitations, and LL not yet creating the “mission critical” platform that will eventually dominate the Virtual Environment worlds, by fully supporting the people trying to use it.

I’m working with an IBM person currently on, what to me is, one of the most import areas ever - helping blind people be able to successfully use SL. IBM can and will make significant contributions to virtual environment technologies as things settle in and we all get back to work on making this work, instead of taking potshots over minor setbacks, and thinking that somehow SL is a “build it and they will come” magical world. Success will come through applied understanding, not by slipshod slapping things up in a manner that no one in their right mind would do in RL.

To Linden Lab’s credit they have been doing their business out in front of everyone for years. Those of us who are sincerely interested in eventually having a stable, dependable, reliable Virtual Environment in which we can prototype objects, spaces, buildings and communities (be they for tinies or real life, fantasy builds or RL builds); and import and export files (including 3D) easily, support LL’s efforts to reach that level with their software. From what I understand about LL’s plans, 2009 could be a great leap forward for us all and the competition that is coming along will be great incentive for LL to achieve what they can.

I continue to support Linden Lab’s efforts with Second Life, and continue to work in SL. I welcome IBM’s incredible talents and resources in helping SL succeed, and after the “hype years” die down, believe that we will see virtual environment technology as world changing as the internet and the http://www.

To paraphrase the famous philosopher, LouieCK - “people are sitting in chairs, 30,000 feet in the air, going over 500 mph, getting from New York to San Francisco in 5 hours………complaining about the 20 minute delay in boarding the plane.” The spoiled generation. : )

Terry Beaubois in RL / Tab Scott in SL