Rubel does sound like he gets it, and it's refreshing in the world of hype. Of course hype, once hyped, gets legs, and makes its own reality, that's the disturbing fact of life.

I was intrigued by Rubel's comment you quoted:

"It's not about just pitching stories, or going in there and tapping on people [...] or doing some kind of fake buzz marketing thing [...] It's all about empowerment, and I don't think that we do that... I think that we're thinking all about us, not thinking about them.""

We're so used to having the fake buzz marketing things inflicted on us -- and I say "us" very deliberately on behalf of those who either can't make it to the 40-only super special events, or get to them and are unimpressed. The "other us" of the vast majority of people who never hear about these events are even less involved. Stop any avatar at a club and ask them if they knew American Apparel has a store in SL or that Julian Dibbell spoke and signed books recently. They are likely not to have even name recognition.

These fake buzz events are indeed really getting tiresome. And this fake buzz marketing isn't happening by some company like Coco Cola, which isn't there, or even Microsoft, which is there (with the on10.net island). The fake buzz that these entities might cook out might actually be a welcome and refreshing change. The fake buzz marketing I'm talking about is being done by the avatars who have gone on to become Metaverse consultants with big business and have created various "mixed reality" or SL-RL type of events, such as Aimee Weber, Millions of Us, Electric Sheep Company.

Thus, something like American Apparel rapidly aquires the "fake buzz" feel to it and has none of the "what have you done for me lately" feel -- AA didn't even release a free t-shirt when they opened up.

Furthermore, ESC isn't just some company putting on fake buzz events -- making the video for CBS to cover SL with in its own coverage because apparently CBS, this "old media dinosaur" couldn't get it together to make its own video. Within it, that video contained some very clever spin -- so that when even "RL" or "old media" attempts to cover SL, they find themselves "dependent on" the "metaversal services" of something like ESC.

ESC as merely a PR company flogging metaversal services wouldn't be so bad, but its spokesmen and leaders then are intimately mixed in with attempting to rule the world and its features too, not merely augmenting, but immersing and trying to make sure the immersion swings their way.

So that you get FlipperPA Peregrine ruling the SL Community Convention, without any other community input except from his own coterie, and you get FlipperPA also mercilessly flogging the anti-yard sale line and haranguing people who sell other people's goods at yard sales (the first-sale doctrine protected by Supreme Court rulings is constantly under fire in SL by the content-creation class).

This idea of then "listening to them" has to be pushed further. Which "them"? What is empowerment? What a fake buzz word all its own! Like...I need some fake buzz campaign of some fake outside company to empower me when *I'm already empowered, thank you very much?" Or...in another respect, what possibly empowerment can we speak of in a situation where the servers are all owned, where we are merely tenants and squatters?

So what will it mean for the company to "think about them"? This "think about them," one suspects, is not something that even the Lindens do anymore.

Because the "them" isn't the "escapists" (a perjorative term if there ever was one!) anymore. The "them" is the "augmenters" who, evidently, LL and their backers are counting on becoming the *real* prosumers of this "platform" -- the others are "just temp". All sorts of university or government-funded projects and commercial experiments by RL PR or marketing or graphics or web companies that "use" SL and do not "play" SL. The hope is evidently that these people will come to make up "the community" -- at least "the community" that matters. The hope is that the blingtards will melt away and go play WoW once there have been enough of them to statistically show that SL reached the million mark.

People running circuses have always been cynical about "rubes". I think this cynicism reaches new heights, however, with SL because LL and their chosen metaversal consultant partners maintain a false patina about being "concerned about the community".

Meanwhile, despite really liking those augmenters better -- hence the hiring and the amping of Henrik Linden/Kyle Machulis who plays to this attitude -- and not really liking those "escapists" (Henrik even disses furries on his website and tells us they are "the past") -- the Lindens aren't above playing to the players shamelessly and cynically.

Their new website rolled out yesterday has a dramatic screenshot of an avatar naked from the waist up with his six-pack pecs rippling, coming right at you like a rock star, with a microphone in his hand and a new-wave hair-do. Behind him are scantily-clad babes with bare midriffs and push-up bras, and a blue metallic robot and a bull with a ring in his nose. Um, yeah, augmenters, all of them!

Excellent analysis, Zero, thanks.

I'm so embarrassed, first thing I was thinking is "How is it possible that Steve Rubell is still alive?" and then I suddenly realized this is a different Steve Rubel (with 1 "l"). Been in a disco mood lately.

It's kind of strange, I'm an escapist and a realist in SL. Immersive augmentation? Works for me.

It is a simple concept really: think about what the customer/community wants, rather than focusing on what the company/brand wants. It can be hard for some marketers to make that shift, especially if it means letting go of the particular product they want to push. A virtual world, however, is not about outbound messaging, it is about providing something that engages people. Some brands are ready to move to a more engaging, participatory relationship with customers, and some are probably a ways away.

Side note: ESC has no official position on yard sales and most of us actually support them.

Foot note to Forseti's side note: you have many conditions you place on any robust acceptance of "first-sale doctrine," and you know that to be the case. You can say "many of us actually support them" about yardsales and yet you do this is a generic way, while waiting to specify that no, you do not support the resale of freebies or the resale of anything that you feel might be "licensed" in any kind of "software" similarity.

I've extensively debated this with you on my blog, and I won't belabour it here, but I don't think you can get to claim a better position on yardsales among yourselves, when all of you, to a man, tend to take the developers' viewpoint on this matter: IP belongs to the creator, and only reluctantly and with many stipulations is any piece of that ownership ever handed over, even for end use. Given that one of your most visible partners, Flipper, has been adamant and very shrill about this on forums and blogs, and absolutely denies any right to any avatar to sell what was given them for free, or what "appears" to be "unlicensed," then you can't try to undo that damage by saying "well, we have no position on that."

Your most public face has a position on it, and we get it: you get to have a business selling your knowledge and expertise about SL to RL clients and make good income. The people in the world you left behind still selling your old prefabs and texturs and televisions in the scrap yard do not, however, get to make a buck off your creations. They didn't make them, even if they bought them, and it is expected that they cannot benefit them; only the creators can ever benefit.

Meanwhile, most of us in SL treat the environment like E-Bay. You receive it or you buy it, you resell it, it's yours to dispose of as you wish. Yardsalers will fight this in the way people whose RL income depends on an issue like this -- and it does for some -- will fight. However, it's a losing battle, because programmers among the elite developers' population, in conjunction with Lindens, will work to close off the "holes" in the permission system that they feel "insufficiently protects" creators' rights. Overreaching creators will then make it impossible for people to enlarge and invigorate especially the newbie economy with their own sales of others' products.