That's really funny. I had this post in conversation form just today. With less footnotes, of course.

Oh, bleh, Clay Shirky is just shoring up his own worldview that pays his own bills -- he didn't even make the sort of cursory glance at the economics stats page that you'd chastise a Guardian or a Financial Times for not making.

And while I agree he's de-inflated some important fake numbers, as you have, Tony, he then goes after various other aspects of SL in a way that is merely symptomatic of the scarred, dot.com era geek who can't let go and move aside for a new generation who refuse to be hobbled by past paradigms -- and even older people like me that never accepted that I should be paying people like Mr. Clay Shirky $50 an hour or more to communicate with other human beings.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/12/clay_shirky_or_.html

and what if 90 percent is crap? Crap to a tiny sect of tekkies? It isn't to those who made it. I have two words for you: MySpace.

I await further and better analysis of the numbers without the gloom-and-doom lense, just as I don't want the rose lense.

If half a million people try something once because the old dinosaur push media pushed it to them, don't you think this old media and the experts they rely on need to take a second look?

Consider this backlash Exhibit A wrt it perhaps being too late for LL to get their PR act together.

And fwiw, I think Prok has a point. While I agree with much of what Shirky says, I find fault with some of it as well. In addition, when I read the occasional post by some 1990's-era vr people, I also get a sense of "we tried it, we failed, it'll never work". Some apparently are still pushing their old standards which continue to be mostly ignored. I personally wonder if they're discouraged with the public's lack of acceptance for those things that first made their names synonymous with vr, and that this is why they find nothing redeeming in current efforts; it's become personal for some of them.

"Many of today's tech journalists are too young to remember past failures"

Not to mention a big portion of SL users uhh players, whatevers. Many of the woot SL will last fereverr types are barely scraping 20

And LL employees. And I suppose phillys experience was just fabu during that time - cuz he seems to be suffering from a serious case of amnesia or summat

anyhoo nuff said reely when it comes to SL - its just a waiting game now. (or crying game? I forget..)

;)~~

I dunno, I think Clay was a day late and a dollar short with this critique.

In the first place, he is a good six months behind the SL blogosphere and maybe a day or to in front of the LA Times in his SL hype-deflation. I mean if he had said something 6 months ago it might have made a difference to the way Linden Lab was selling itself (and already getting into trouble), but now the hype bubble has grown to the point where it is absolutely obvious to everyone that it is a hype bubble. It should have been popped long ago.

But the other thing is that all of Clay's numbers seem to be pulled out of his ass, which really surprised and disappointed me. Sometimes his numbers are insanely positive even by Linden standards (60% retention? As Tony points out Philip's numbers are 10%, and the Live Help people say 2%), and then he doesn't address what is genuinely positive (the strong growth in virtual real estate, which from LL's perspective is the only number that really truly matters, since that is the only figure that correlates with revenue for LL).

And yeah, 90% of the content is crap, but that is a lot better than the real world.