“What I want to see is a way to help the hidden Metaverse of sims and grids to find a common gateway right in a popular viewer. Something that is easy for new sign-ups to fathom and of course easy for grid owners to add themselves.” Gaga Gracious wrote that in a comment to me [...]

last week i wrote about an apparent 200 private sim drop in a very short time period of two weeks whereas the overall last year decline was about an 800 sims. a sudden dip like that seemed worrisome because the decline of private sims in Second Life has been a slow and steady decrease the best [...]

my ever optimistic outlook on perceived simplicity of new projects has been tossed out the window – my dreams are crushed . . . hopes dashed . . . oh the agony . . . i’m referring to my post monday when i took it to heart that the preconfigured OSGrid download of OpenSim would [...]

OpenSim do-it-yourself has come a long way since i first dipped my toes in freedom from Second Life. it’s also become way more stable and i can’t remember anything i miss from Second Life except the physics (and Sunny!) =) along the lines of becoming easier also come tools to help you get setup more [...]

Maria at HyperGrid Business does a great job gathering, publishing, and discussing OpenSim growth. it’s a metric that is getting harder to measure because OpenSim is so open compared to a closed grid like Second Life. add to that how much easier OpenSim is becoming to deploy and you have big growth in personal grids [...]

i see posts every now and then that ask if OSGrid should have its own currency and, to me, that answer is simply “no” people talk about its growth and that it needs to have currency so it can be like Second Life. but Second Life created that paradigm and using funny money is a [...]

here’s a post for those of you that have yet to stick a toe into OpenSim it can be a pain to make a full move from Second Life, no doubt about that, but it is also pretty easy to explore the options. today, OpenSim-based worlds are noticeably better than a year ago, so if you tried them before this [...]

the natural migration of OpenSim is toward “private” deployments of grids because of cost and freedom this is not the same as OpenSim-based “community” grids like InWorldz. i differentiate between private and community where private means for one group, like our Enclave Harbour, or a school, or like a business grid such as Maria from [...]

part one of a mini four part series aimed at corporate, public, and educational users seeking an alternative/supplement to Second Life Second Life is a very good option for many people. for me my pocketbook was getting too thin and my skin was not thick enough to stay with Second Life. while these next few [...]

i look forward to Maria’s mid-month statistics on OpenSim growth. and to be honest, part of that is i want to see OpenSim “stick it to the man”. in this case, the man is Second Life now that is not very Zener-like, but i am a person (despite not being real) and have mixed feelings towards Linden [...]

Breen, an insightful commentator here, made a great observation about OpenSim versus Second Life region changes the other day. i like reading Maria’s stats on OpenSim growth (now including that ab fab Enclave Harbour) and events like Linden Lab dropping the educational discount result in OpenSim growth. and it is easy to imagine that a [...]

two weeks back saw Linden Lab’s SharesPost venture capital index grow a very nice 13+% tonight, the growth is flat which is certainly not a bad thing in light of the decline over that last 6 months it still has a long way to go if it ever wants to hit previous highs, but at [...]

it’s easy to take for granted things like OpenSim, OSGrid, and Imprudence. these are things the iliveisl team use and depend on. we can certainly become a bit more regular in donations, even if a small amount just because the core developers are volunteers does not mean they should foot the entire bill. they use [...]

Wandering through all the Twitter twaddle,  I sometimes find a gem (other than Ener Hax’s posts, which rock). The BrandReact blog (which I know nothing about, really)  had a post that made me think about big businesses, brand loyalty, Linden Lab, Open Sim hosts — and how they treate residents (um, customers). And why peeps [...]

DreamWalker (Enclave Harbour’s scripter extraordinare) commented on good inventory practices and nomenclature. naming your items in a meaningful way helps a lot. being disciplined to do that is where i fall short by thinking “i’ll name that later” inventory management becomes a little more critical in some OpenSim cases than it is in Second Life. in Second [...]