Valleywag shuts down but still publishes another doomsday prediction of Second Life

Via Gwyneth Llewelyn

Hiro Pendragon pointed me to the latest bit of Valleywag nonsense, where you can see that once more the End of Second Life® is predicted, falsely claiming that everybody has lost interest in SL except educators.

I was angry when publishing the comment which I reprint below (because, well, if I were a moderator at Valleywag I would probably refuse to publish it), but thankfully Hiro was quick enough to point out that Valleywag itself is being shut down:

"But the reason for Valleywag’s shutdown was Denton’s notoriously doom-and-gloom vision of the future–Internet ad spending will decline a full 40 percent, he predicts–and Valleywag was one of the company’s less lucrative titles."

That article further explains that Valleywag was not “hilarious enough”. In fact, the few times I read it, I never noticed any sense of humour in it. Writing once about Second Life’s impending doom might be fun once, if cleverly done, by a good funny writer — like the ones at the Onion or the Register. But Valleywag was never fun. People took it seriously. There is never even a hint that it’s supposed to be “funny”, although, arguably, some found it funny. Not enough, apparently. In fact, you always get the sense that the people writing the articles are furious because everybody else has success and they haven’t. On the last article cited above, you can almost feel the contempt (Germans call it “Schadenfreude“) he has for Reuters’ Eric Krangel.

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Content Theft, Avatar Rights, the RIAA, & The Sound of Music

Wonderful genius Gwyneth Llewelyn comes to us with two brilliant posts regarding the future of music, technology, and the internet. These are must reads!

Content Theft, Avatar Rights, and the RIAA
You had to be very distracted to have missed the recent massive cry-out against content theft in Second Life. As the world grows, and as griefers and similar people commit misdemeanours all the time and get away with it, the situation can not improve by itself, as more and more petty residents find out that the best way to make money in SL — sometimes a cartful of money — is by illegitimate means. ..READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

&

The Sound of Music
Not so long ago, I commented on the future of music distribution via virtual worlds like Second Life®. It is still my belief that we’re assisting at the end of an age where music distribution via records/tapes/CDs and earning an income from royalties is coming to an end. While “free information activists” have long since predicted the downfall of the RIAA and the end of “music piracy” as a crime, they usually just address one side of the issue: consumers, who currently have sidestepped the distribution model by essentially exchanging music for free. Initiatives like Apple’s iTunes tend to combine both models: easy music distribution for a very low price and making sure that the musician gets a cut from the profit.
But these models completely forget one major player in the music industry: the musicians and performers themselves.

How, indeed, shall they survive, if their music is freely copied? ..READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE