Reuters and C|Net in Second Life

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life, and C|Net is following suit. Both companies are joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet. Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit a Reuters news site at: http://secondlife.reuters.com/"

Comments

hmmm what's next?

[Wizzerd911]

I'm still waiting for the in game Radio Shack salespeople that follow you around for hours while you play asking if they can help you find what you're looking for. I'm sure advertising will go absolutely crazy in the game soon so it's really not that far from possible.

Re:hmmm what's next?

[krell]

"I'm still waiting for the in game Radio Shack salespeople that follow you around for hours while you play asking if they can help you find what you're looking for"

The same guys that give you the third degree and have you fill out a 3 page form when you try to buy just one battery? I had one of those refuse to sell me something because the fake zip code I gave for the zip code question was not a real code.

Re:hmmm what's next?

[Wizzerd911]

hey, you have to remember that it's their store and you're just an unwanted guest in it. Don't they have a sign that says that in their window? If they don't, they should.

Re:hmmm what's next?

[krell]

"hey, you have to remember that it's their store and you're just an unwanted guest in it. Don't they have a sign that says that in their window? If they don't, they should."

Which is why I learned to avoid Radio Shack and go to other stores that do not interrogate customers for even the smallest cash purchase. That's the free market.

What about Dan Rather?

[krell]

What about Dan Rather and Jayson Blair? They'd be perfect for a place like this!

Secondlife is the new hype machine

[jandrese]

For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.

Re:Secondlife is the new hype machine

[misleb]

For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.

It also seems to be rather vulnerable to game killing griefing. I tried to start an account but the service was suffering "rolling grid resets" and object spamming all weekend. I just gave up.

-matthew

Re:Secondlife is the new hype machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML.

Umm... that's definetly an apples-and-oranges comparison. VRML is a file format for describing interactive 3D scenes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML. SL is an online game.

Re:Secondlife is the new hype machine

[blueZhift]

I've been wondering about all of the publicity SL has been getting too. It makes me wonder if CNet's masters have some underlying financial interest in Second Life.

Re:Secondlife is the new hype machine

[jandrese]

That's not how the hype went though. The idea with VRML is that you'd load a page with your VRML enabled browser and insead of looking at a big wall of text and pictures, you would be dropped into a 3D environment that would be better somehow. It was the Net, but in 3D. Secondlife is actually much the same way (you can click on a secondlife:// URL and get dropped into a specific place in the game), but it actually works on hardware that doesn't cost $10,000, so it does have a leg up there. Still, it's another case of 3D that's fun, but ultimately kinda useless.

Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[cryptomancer]

Secondlife? Other than pioneering some odd intellectual property (IP) rules, where they don't own things in the game, how is it even vaguely interesting, much less "hottest on the internet?"

WoW is certainly a hot item, but it doesn't need a news outlet to let the outside world know what's going on. ...Actually, come to think of it, news outlets have reported on it fairly often.

Obligatory: So did you see the South Park episode?

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[ethorad]

It is odd the way all the news articles about MMORPGS bang on about SL, when WoW is so much larger. I guess it's easier and more mainstream-acceptable to write about people making a living selling clothes and converting it into USD than writing about the latest guild to down Ragnaros and the latest PvP rankings. Multiple servers don't help there I guess. I did remember that there was a BBC story once where the correspondant logged in as a dwarf or a gnome and promised to give updates on his progress. Never heard anything else - maybe a wolf ate him.

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[cowscows]

Second Life is more interesting I think because most of what you see in the game is player created. WoW may have more people playing it, but they're spread across a bunch of different servers, and they're generally just interacting with pre-made content. Second Life takes place in a huge online world, where almost everything can be modified by players, and almost everything can be sold/traded/exchanged/given away. It's much more open-ended than WoW.

The downside is that you have a lot of less-talented people creating the world, so much of what you see is crap. But there's still plenty of good stuff, and just because someone isn't that great at creating doesn't mean they shouldn't be given the opportunity to try, or to share what they've made.

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[CerebusUS]

There's also almost nothing to do inside the world except buy, create, sell and talk.

And most of the stuff you buy / create / sell either aids social interactions (wow! humping avatars!) or pay-for-play gambling.

There's just a whole lot of nothing besides chat and selling non-tangible items for the "cool" factor alone.

That and they allowed their credit card database to be raided and then refused to remove my personal information from their servers until the standard 90-day culling period had passed. Bastards

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[jandrese]

SL is not so much a game as it is a toy. You can chat and roleplay if you want, but you can do that on IRC just about as well, and the IRC client is a lot lighter than SL. Where it really shines is when you start playing around with creating the most artistic and astetically pleasing objects/structures that you can. If you're really good at it, you can make stuff pretty enough to pay off your monthly game fee (or rental costs if you don't want to become a paying member and instead just rent mall space). You can also fly around and look at what everybody else has done, which can be fun too, even if most of it is crap. There are a small number of people who make real money on the game, but they're almost all in the land speculation business.

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[cowscows]

So? All there is to do in WoW is buy, kill things, sell, and talk.

"Create" is a pretty damn broad term, and in SL it encompasses a whole lot. Modelling, texturing, scripting, and bringing all of that together to create objects, buildings, landscapes, etc.

90% of what happens in real life really boils down to social interactions. Why should a "virtual world" be any different. Humans are social creatures.

The whole credit card thing sounds pretty crappy though. Bastards.

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[AK__64]

I think that 2L isn't nearly enough engrained into the mainstream to deserve all of the hype traditional marketing companies are giving it. There's just not enough of a user-base to support it.

That said, it'll be interesting to see if all of these companies can actually draw users to 2L. Another thing I'm interested to see is whether advertising companies will force Linden Labs to clean up the metaverse. AFAIK there seems to be a lot of 2L that centers around good ol' machinima pr0n.

News of the outside world

[Rob T Firefly]

Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members

Does this seem bleak to anyone else? I don't play SL, but I do get heavily into the games I play, and I don't quite see stuff like "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle. In other news, spinach may kill you, a baseball player just crashed his airplane into a building, and Adam Sandler is working on a hot new romantic comedy. Now, here's Luigi with the latest updates from the Iraq war..." doing wonders for game immersion.

Re:News of the outside world

[CerebusUS]

There's not much to worry about there, because there's really no "game" to be immersed in. Since SL is all about social interaction above all else, perhaps having news right there inside the world makes sense...

But then you could just play the game in a window and tab over to a web browser to read C|Net a whole heck of a lot faster.

Re:News of the outside world

[Knara]

People read C|Net?

Re:News of the outside world

[CronoCloud]

True you can run it in a window, but SL is very resource intensive. For the 1.10 cleint it would crash a few minuts after I tried to run any other application at the same time That problem doesn't happen with 1.12 but it's slow. So any thing that can give me access to web pages/news/information in-world without having to open up a browser would be appreciated.

Seriously, can we get a poll?

[soliptic]

• I play second life regularly
• I have played it in the past at least a bit
• I never have yet
• I never have and never will

Just curious, because we seem to get an awful lot of Second Life stories on slashdot these days, but AFAICS the comments section doesn't support the idea that a large number of people on slashdot actually, y'know... care.

Not trying to have a troll, saying it sucks, or trying to issue some lame diktat that there "shouldn't" be Second Life stories here. I just genuinely wonder if the frequency of SL stories actually tallies with the level of interest/participation in SL amongst /. membership.

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll?

[Anonymous Coward]

i haven't played SL, but in concept it sounds cool, but online i'd rather be kicking my friends asses in CSS, but anyhoo. Look up, look way up - your on Slashdot - news for ...ah you know. Now go read Snowcrash. Now sit and ponder that for a second. SL is the closest thing i have heard of to the metaverse(or whatever they called it, it's been a bit since i read it) in Snowcrash. In other words, SL is the closest thing to what all the cyber-punk cyber-whatevers always wanted the internet to be, now it's just a serious of Tubes geared towards heavy pr0n distros.
 
Now after pondering those key pieces of info you'll wonder why Slashdot itself isn't a SL site.

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll?

[soliptic]

your on Slashdot - news for ...ah you know. Now go read Snowcrash. Now sit and ponder that for a second. SL is the closest thing i have heard of to the metaverse

Yeah, I know I'm on slashdot and therefore a geek and therefore in no position to be bashing a virtual world as lame. Which I why I was careful to say that wasn't my intention. I have read Snowcrash and I know exactly what you mean. "In concept it sounds cool" - that's my opinion too, and yet I've never actually gone and tried it. And given the tiny number of replies these topics always get, I wondered if nearly everyone on /. was like me in that regard... sounds neat, but not actually a part of it...

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll?

[CronoCloud]

I play SL regularly, but I am still surprised by the number of SL stories on Slashdot recently.

IIRC the # players was just under 700000 when I joined in July, it's over 800000 now, and at this rate will probably hit a million by late November.

It appeals to a different demographic than WoW. there's a lot of artistic folks, art majors, people who do jewelry or fashion related stuff in real life, 2D and 3D modeling folks. There's no grind or worrying to have to keep up with guildmates level wise so plenty of casual players too.

It's fun in a way that's hard to describe.

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll?

[FFFish]

Fersure. This subtle advertising of SL piqued my curiousity enough, the other week when I was really frikkin' bored and trying to think of a geek activity I could share with my wiff, I actually installed the client.

I toyed about a bit. It was meh. I lost interest after a half-hour and haven't returned. Can't see what value I'd find in it. Wasn't overly entertaining, didn't learn much, didn't see much potential for anything more than simply wasting time.

If SL were truly the hot damnedest thing to ever hit the web, I'm fairly certain I'd have gleaned a bit more from the experience. I have to suspect that we geeks are being manipulated by our media.

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll?

[Rowanyote]

I play regularly

Rowanyote

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll?

[Rowanyote]

Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and other books of the genre are one of the reasons that I play SL.

It has the possibility of growing into far more than it is now. Maybe even of growing into the massive virtual worlds that cyberpunk has used so often. Currently, it is a little clunky and lag happens, but any new technology starts that way (look at the model T). If SL is it, THE BEGINNING, then it will be very interesting to have been there from nearly the start, to have watched it all develop.

Something will come around, if not SL then some other environment. The possibilities for use demand it. My only question is, am I driving around in a model T or a stanley steamer at the moment?

I look forward to advances in interface technology, which will help to bring the player more directly into the virtual world. Someone has already done an interesting experiment with linking the viewpoints of 2 avs to provide a stereoscopic 3D view of the SL world. (I can't find the link at the moment). I also suspect that the new 3D display monitors may help spur use and developement of 3D spaces such as SL.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/ 16/1739244

i haven't played SL, but in concept it sounds cool, but online i'd rather be kicking my friends asses in CSS, but anyhoo. Look up, look way up - your on Slashdot - news for ...ah you know. Now go read Snowcrash. Now sit and ponder that for a second. SL is the closest thing i have heard of to the metaverse(or whatever they called it, it's been a bit since i read it) in Snowcrash. In other words, SL is the closest thing to what all the cyber-punk cyber-whatevers always wanted the internet to be, now it's just a serious of Tubes geared towards heavy pr0n distros.

Re:Seriously, can we get a poll? - Regularly

[nevermore94]

Well, here is one vote for regularly. I have a little business selling things I make and have made at least $250 or so without investing a single dime in the game. I enjoy creating things in world for fun, and making a real, if small, profit is just a bonus.