Stonebender’s VoxBox

Slavery -- eye of the beholder?

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:08:06 -0230

In the past few months two women that I truly admire have left me scratching my head on my very entrenched position on virtual slavery in Second Life and other immersive online communities.

It's role play. I get it. What I've never quite come to understand is why.

Daequix Scarborough posted a composite photo that cut to the chase, inviting a discourse on a subject that represents one of the true digital divides in online culture, and perhaps one of the most controversial and likely misunderstood issues:

http://flickr.com/photos/daequix_scarborough/758894526/

On one side the image depicts a woman wearing silks, something characteristic of the Gorean rp that makes up a significant part of the cultural experiences within Second Life. The other side of the photo depicts the same woman wearing business attire. The word "slave" flanks each half of this image. The pic's creator then pokes us with another stick, tucking the following challenge statement beneath:

" It is my opinion that in any form, women (as well as men) are slave...whether it be to one Master or many."

Talk about food for thought! I immediately "favourited" (my English teacher would beat me with another stick for trying to turn this word into a verb ... ~laughs~) this entry, and left a little comment about the powerful and provocative metaphor Ms. Daequix had presented us with. Here was her reply:

I don't always think people really get that there are many different slaves and slavers....as well as, many different freedoms. It's just in our choices.
Are we more bound and gagged by our system or by a chosen Master....are we more freed by being a kajira or no?
Enuff said! LoL..."i must the soapbox put away" (a little known quote by Yoda)

I'm so glad she opened that door a crack wider, because this is one of the things that I find myself driven to distraction by more often than not, and that I crave an honest dialogue around. Here's the "why" in my own response ...

_____________________________________________________

Actually, don't hurry on putting it away. You wield it very capably. I have to admit that this is one of those issues that has plagued me from the moment I joined SL. I never quite understood why any woman would make giving up her personal freedoms (and part of her personality?) a conscious fantasy choice in RP. This is not a judgemental statement so much as an honest curiousity and need to understand.
Part of my own bias comes from my first life where I've spent a number of years working to help free little girls from the child sex trade in various countries, including in my own. Anything that robs a woman of her right to choose and her voice essentially drives me around the bend, and that has certainly been coloured by the drama of my first life experiences with this.
It seems something entirely different to people in the context of SL, and I have to admit you are the second woman I admire who's made me do a double take on this issue in the past few months. The first is a fellow Canadian -- very bright, articulate, thoughtful business woman in first life. I've never been brave enough to simply ask her about her choices in SL at the risk of offending her, though some how I suspect she wouldn't be surprised if I did open that door.
This picture of your's was such a stark kick in the arse on the hypocrisy of our choices. On one hand there is the literal choice to rp as a slave; on the other something less obvious but in some ways more insidious because we often feel (unlike the first example) that we have no choice.
So, bravo for inviting a discourse on this! Ignore Yoda, wise old soul that he may be. I hope you -won't- put that soap box away, because you've actually hit on something that is an intrinsic part of the SL culture and I suspect is misunderstood by a lot more people than myself.
Thanks for the chance to stop and reflect, and for providing a safe forum to explore this in where some of us are simply too damned afraid to ask. Looking forward to what transpires here ...

_____________________________________________________

I truly am looking forward to the other elbows that get placed on her virtual kitchen table there, and invite you to at least peek in if not tuck a thought or two of your own in the comments section of this very thoughtful exploration:

http://flickr.com/photos/daequix_scarborough/758894526/

So thanks, Dae, for the chance to scratch a truly perpetual itch!

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Social Networking and the Perfect Storm

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:40:16 -0230

It's been a long time since I've posted here.

I find that I often explore a new tool, crawl inside of it and make it home for awhile, then move on. There's a lack of friction with so many of the social networking tools. I don't want to date, toss a shout out to a new band, or increase my network. I don't think anybody hanging out over the Twitter watercooler really gives a damn about what I just put in my coffee or fed my cats. In first life I'm a public figure, so in my second one I find myself compelled to hide. Running a successful business means being swallowed whole by IMs most days in Second Life, and the lack of any truly tangible privacy tools there makes it really damned tough to get a day's work done.

So, I became a bit of a hermit. Okay, a lot of one. And I liked it. (And yes, I admit that it's a real hardship holing myself up with Baron frigging Grayson to build and play ... ~cough~)

I really have enjoyed reinventing myself as a recluse the past two years. I'm a workaholic, and having a partner that shares the same insane work ethic and obsessions has made it all the easier still. So much for the best laid plans ~grins~

Second Life has been a grand retreat, but the past few months I'm finding myself drawn into a very different kind of playground: one that doesn't exist in a single online community, but rather spanning a handful of mixed media tools and sites. It started when Baron rekindled a love of seeing the world through old film cameras again. He began posting notes and discoveries on his own blog here, and some rather cool, kindred spirits were gathering round. Several were people we'd aleady connected with in Second Life as customers, and those connections were rarely more than a handful of brief encounters because of the tendency to cultivate a precious reclusiveness for the reasons I talked about above. But I noticed something odd happening here. In sharing a picture and some personal nugget, we were swapping stories. It wasn't a transaction. There was no obligation on either end. It didn't demand lengthy, real time responses, dropping things in the middle of an inspired work session to reply. No, this was more like slinking down into a favourite old chair in a beat-up pair of slippers with a big mugga joe in your hand, and quietly inviting familiar hearts in.

This began to spill over onto Flickr when we started posting pics there too. Same faces. Same fun, easy-going way of connecting. People that I once thought of as customers I now think of as friends. You see there's this odd little backyard fence, and it doesn't inhabit a space between just two yards, but bridges many, making them feel like the same kind of small, intimate shared space instead of some overwhelming digital geography.

omidyar.net, Second Life, Vox, Flickr, Twitter ... they all feel like rooms in the same house right now. Where before I once dreaded the demands placed on my time by the human interaction, I now find myself craving it. I watch Thaumata's video blog about her grandma Dorothy and am moved in ways I cannot describe. I see this tender, vibrant person, and not just a name on a posting. I watch Arteer romp through digital playgrounds and master them and make them so much fun. I see her pictures on Flickr and her little notes and often end up laughing or connecting to some idea in some new way, and I love it.

It's sort of silly to just share these two women, just two names, but they are both such marvellous examples of the very thing that made me want to come back and post today: a sense of kindred spirits with elbows on the kitchen table, and people I'd love to know in first life. Zeke Poutine, Riversong Garden, Pam Omidyar and Callie Cline were people I connected with that way several years ago, and the ability to dive into Second Life together and culitvate our relationship in new ways was pretty damned incredible at times. Okay, so I admit that having Zeke as a fairygodmother-in-garters (her words, not mine, but damn are they good!) with the same insane fetish for chocolate has less to do with social networking and more to do with Adventures with the Estrogen Army, but that's another post for another day, and my five minutes are up.

Would love to hear how others are thinking and feeling about connecting simultaneously through mixed media and networks. Maybe you'd consider sharing some of your own favourite digital haunts with me here?

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One Hour

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Sat, 05 May 2007 04:24:41 -0230

One Hour

Yup. Totally self-indulgent, just because I can.

A picture I took of Baron Grayson when we were out working on our new Templum ex Obscurum sim. He set the chapel back out there in the sunset along the sea, and has done some gorgeous landscaping. It's a breathtaking view, and I just happened to catch him looking up as he was working and couldn't resist stealing the moment. How could I not? ~grins~

One Hour to Madness and Joy

[Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.]

ONE hour to madness and joy!
O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)

O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings!
(I bequeath them to you, my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you, whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me, in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me -- to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin'd man!

O the puzzle -- the thrice-tied knot -- the deep and dark pool! O all untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
O to be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions -- I from mine, and you from yours!
O to find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature!
O to have the gag removed from one's mouth!
O to have the feeling, to-day or any day, I am sufficient as I am!

O something unproved! something in a trance!
O madness amorous! O trembling!
O to escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts -- with invitations!
To ascend -- to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate Soul!
To be lost, if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

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Invitation to Collaborate: Mud Pies!

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:24:03 -0230

A collaborative publishing experiment ...

"First thought, best thought".

Amen to Kerouac. I'm sticking to it.

I hope people will be inspired to simply grab onto something that calls out to them, and to invite other people that connect with it to hope on the bandwagon too.

I thought I'd toss my own hat in the ring to see who wants to come play. I was reading through postings at a number of your blogs, and kept coming back to the idea that I want to come in here and "get my hands dirty". First thought? Mud Pies!

Baron and I have had this quirky little conversation more than once. We've both got a funny tale that makes this personal in our own way, but what makes the notion of extending it here as a collaborative publishing theme seem like so much darned fun is that wildly mixed metaphors you get from it.

Dirty, creative, colouring outside of the lines. Myg's sassy mouth, B's salacious art and prose, my need to hear my music "not electronically" but dirty and raw, Riv's connection to mother Africa's earth. Dirty pictures. Dirty prose. Dirty recipes. Dirty art.

Whatever it means to you -- and I mean your -very- first thought -- just run with it! Let's start posting snippets of verse we're inspired to write around it, prose, pictures we take or paint or draw, music snippets, audio blogs, recipes for edible mud pies, whatever we're moved to create.

The fun part is that we'll each have an intrisincally different view, and while I may be groking a found and rather funny child hood memory, and others may be off on and adult bent, there's no right or wrong way to interpret.

So, who wants to help me make mud pies?

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

Multimedia publication in the form of an SL flipbook with immersive content

FORMAT:

Text, photos, art, sound, pop-out sculptures and ... ? Text can be verse, prose, recipes, rants, whatever you're moved to create.

DEADLINE:

Friday, April 13th -- because I like thumbing my nose at fate _(winks)_

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Post your entry in a message at the boards here, and then link to it below. Don't worry about making it look pretty. I'll clean it up.

Nothing illegal or harmful please. (Post something racist or in the line of child pornography and I'm coming after your ass with a big stick!)

OPEN DOOR POLICY:

Some of us might dive in thinking this sounds like a fun theme to kick around, only to find once we get into it that we don't like the way some of the other kids are playing in the sandbox. No worries. We can take our toys and go home. It's okay to decide it just isn't working for you, and to take your content and start a whole new project of your own if you're inspired. It's not the stuff of hard feelings. It's a healthy part of surviving collaboration! Recognizing and respecting personal limits is good, and can lead to other inspiring new projects along the way. We each need to find our boundaries and niches. It's a Very Good Thing [tm]

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Yup! The intention is to make it. You contribute to it. You earn from it. Still have to grok the way to determine fair market value for the cost of the book when it's sold. Splits will be equitable. Still need to figure out how to ensure this is done in the fairest way possible.

I'd also like to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book to an first life community project.

RIGHT-BRAIN, ENGAGED ...

Grab your pen, your paintbrush, your camera, your digital chisel, whatever moves you, and get out there and start creating! Not sure how to share your work? Shout at me and I'll walk you through posting it/ uploading it/linking to it below.

WHO'S ON DECK?

Ready to play?

Invitation to Collaborate: Mud Pies

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The Writers Salon

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:35:59 -0230

I've gone ahead and opened up a workspace at Basecamp so we can begin kicking ideas around on a collaborative publishing experiment within the Second Life community :^)

We can start brainstorming here:

http://bigideas.updatelog.com/projects/974262

If you want to participate, send me a private note with the email address to which you want the invitation sent. Make sure it's for your avie so it doesn't disclose your true identity.

I'll open up a writeboard (wiki) so we can start thinking about a theme for our first project.

See you at Basecamp!

Sue.

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We are Smarter than Me -- Can a Community Write a Book?

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:24:58 -0230

It's not very often I get excited reading my email, especially when it's in response to another LinkedIn request. The latter is usually followed by a groan, but this morning a colleague of mine forwarded a note inviting me to collaborate on a book. (We are Smarter than Me -- Can a Community Write a Book?)

*blink*

I've covered collaborative online authoring through my radio show before, and while it intrigues the hell out of me, there tends to be a common denominator at play: I do lots of work/someone else makes lots of money. "Open Source Business" is gaining real traction, and while I continue to actively participate in and value open source communities, I'm also increasingly frustrated by the trend for them to become exploitative sources of great personal investment and a grossly inequitable return.

First, let me tell you what I mean when I say "open source business". Most people are familiar with the notion of "open source" in the context of software. I wrote one of the first postcard scripts on the web many years ago and chose to release it in the public domain right from the start. I had a lot of people ask me why I didn't simply sell it, because at the time it was still a concept that was fairly unique. My answer was this: I was paying it forward. The only reason I had been able to author that software in the first place was because people before me had created really wonderful online communities where I was able to tap into resources to learn, free of charge. People like Eric Tachibana (Selena Sol) and Gunther Bierznieks put their own scripts out on the web, inviting people to download them, learn from them, improve them and share them back in the community. I got so much personal value from participating there that I wanted to give something back. Hence, putting my postcard script in the public domain.

It was a double-edged sword giving something away for free. While it was cool to see it used by everyone from the City of Prague right down to NFL football teams, people came out of the woodwork, and many didn't only need but demanded support in a downright unfriendly way. So, I set up forums using more code that I had written, and established a developers workbench to make it easier for this new little community to collaborate long before wikis made joint editing/publishing so easy. That workbench ran for years, and while I never made a dime off of it, I gained something invaluable. Not only did I make lifelong friends and connections with people that remain helpful to me to this day, I was also offered programming contracts, keynote speaking gigs, teaching contracts and a host of other tangible rewards for having shared my work. The Developer's Workbench was an "open source business", in that many of us came together to co-author and share web-based scripts and resources. It was a mutually beneficial open source business because no one got paid on the backs of the others, and almost everyone came away with a toolset that had some level of intrinsic value in our own work.

Not all open source businesses are fair.

In recent years I've become actively engaged in "the business of building a better world". This is an example of where the lines start to grey. The only thing worse than being a person with a bleeding heart and a mission is one with access to a community where they can endlessly invest themselves in it as a fulltime job without pay.

Huh? Getting paid to make the world better? I've got to be kidding ...

But I'm not. It's what brought me to Second Life. After spending several years participating in open source businesses online where the purpose was to tap into contacts, resources, know-how, talents and time, I was just plain burned out. I was putting in fulltime hours for virtually no personal return. Seems like an odd thing to say when you're there because you're "world changing", but when you find that you have a talent as a "bridge builder", and that this skill is invaluable to other people but not recognized as a "paid job", it's a problematic thing. You don't expect people to be in the "business" of charities without pay. Oxfam and the Alzheimers Society and the Make-a-Wish Foundation all have paid employees because those are businesses with recognized value and require a guaranteed fulltime and accountable commitment to continue to move ahead. So why not better world scouts? If the accidental business of acting in a more global way, collaborating on uplift across a broad spectrum of projects and issues globally, was as valuable as it seemed, why not look at ways of taking that new "open source business" and recognizing it in a way that both valued the investment of it's members while allowing them to keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads?

That led some of us to pilot an Open Source Business with a Better World twist ...

I arrived at Second Life and created a SIM called "Better World", a collaborative project that a number of colleagues had been noodling on for some time. In order to pay the hefty bill for both it's purchase and ongoing maintenance, I started an inworld business, creating and selling virtual pianos, and selling some of my own real life music compositions. The intention was to simply create a flow of revenue to support the island project until it became self-sustaining. I wasn't prepared for it becoming a fulltime business on it's own.

In getting sick I let go of the island and was relieved to welcome a new shepherd for that project in Riversong Garden. Since then, I've been able to work with her to share ideas about ways of making that kind of "open source business" -- the island as a collaborative community of people in the business of investing in a better world -- into something that is both self-sustaining, and that creates opportunities for it's members to be acknowledged as paid scouts. This remains a work in progress, and one I hope we'll be lucky enough to get right, because it's something many of us have seen great value in. There are people like Zeke Poutine who add tremendous value to so many better world projects without ever receiving a dime, and yet it's a fulltime calling for her, and one that she is very, very good at. I see a great deal of value in having a mechanism in place that allows people like Riv and Zeke to effectively "leave their day jobs" and take up scouting as a fulltime, paid profession because of the way communities like Second Life pave the way to the creation of easier Open Source Businesses. But that's another posting ~winks~ ...

So, back to this morning's invitation: another chance to participate in an open source business. This time, it's to jointly author a book about the way that businesses are using social networks. It's an insanely cool idea, and one I was excited about being asked to participate in ...

but ...

will the investment I'm required to make, uncompensated, be a wise use of my time?

Someone is going to profit from the final book. This fact is acknowledged up front. It won't be the people who contribute to it's contents. The only thing that made me stop and consider this was the fact that those people who do choose to co-author will be given the chance to determine which charity a portion of the royalties will be paid to in lieu of personal pay. This is a Very Bad Thing[tm], because when you're a bleeding heart, you'll say yes to a lot of things that are good to do, but maybe not a healthy personal choice if the time, energy and resources are not something you can afford to write-off.

Wanna collaborate in SL?

So, I'm looking, thinking. I've signed up and am reading through the contents that have already been posted on the wiki, and while I'm still not certain if I will indeed contribute to this book, it's got me thinking about something else in the context of SL. First of all, the book is an example of a "knowledge product", and this is in fact something I've spent a great deal of time talking about the past ten years in the context of ways that communities can turn their collective knowledge into a form of revenue. I won't go off on this particular tangent right now, but I'll likely come back and share some thinking in a future post.

What I -am- thinking about right now is how this particular idea might be adapted to something else. Baron and I have been wanting to have a coffeeshop/bookshop as part of the new SIM, inviting inworld authors to share their own work there. Ironic that I caught a posting by Saiyge this morning where she was talking about her own musings about finding a way to earn a living off of her writing in Second Life. The "We are Smarter than Me" project got me thinking: what if we were to use something like Basecamp (Baron and I use this now to organize our inworld businesses) and the "writeboards" (simply wikis) to invite people to collaborate on a community book of some sort? Poetry, building know-how, photography, whatever.

Seems like a simple way of testing collaborative authoring, and it would be fun to find out just how lucrative this sort of open source business might be, not for one person or group, but for everyone who collaborated.

If enough people are interested, I'll open up a space at our Basecamp to invite collaboration around a test book. Baron and I have been talking a lot about wanting to cultivate a group of professional communities around technology and various arts inworld. This seems like perhaps a cool and simple place to start.

So, consider yourself invited!

Who's game?

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The Laws of Attraction

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:54:06 -0230

Party in the Basement Club

Baron and I had just finished putting out the new vendor in the Ironworks and Light shop and decided we needed a little play time. We noticed that a spontaneous party had broken out just a stone's throw away from where we were standing. "The Basement Club" is a smokey little hole in the wall beneath one of the shops on Sanctum Sanctorum. Baron threw a wonderful concert and party there last year for my birthday, and since then people have sort of adopted the space. How could they not? He filled it with rich, dark wood, old crates, lush ferns and a walk-in humidor, all fashioned after a sultry little "cigar lounge", speakeasy-style.

A handful of groups and secret societies have spawned around this hidden little space, and also at The Standing Stone Pub. It's wonderful to see the spaces come alive with people that just seem to "fit there"

This got me thinking today about something that Baron does very, very well. He understands the intrinsic value of "attraction" versus "promotion". He knows that if you cultivate a space with character and ambience and care that the right people will naturally find it. He diminishes the retail side of our SIMs in favour of creating wide open spaces that beckon people to explore. He's passionate about interactivity, especially when it means we can secretly inject opportunities for learning along the way.

We joined the crowd in the Basement Club this afternoon, largely German, and kicking up their heels to some fine Irish Rockabilly music by the time I walked in. Baron was sitting in a deep, comfy chair, smiling like a Cheshire Cat. I know that smile. I see it when we break our hermit-dom and get out on the sims to mingle (something we are trying to do more) and have the pleasure of seeing how people are making our spaces their own. That smile is like Christmas.

We're seeing this happen at the Opera House too, where first life magazine photo shoots are being done, concerts with first life artists and opera singers being planned, and even a Gilbert and Sullivan production afoot with an off-broadway crew. None of these things were our doing. We simply created a space and allowed people to find it and decide how it would come to life.

We're about to do a major overhaul of the sims once again, with a fourth one arriving imminently. It's nerve wracking to think about the beloved haunts that will disappear to make way for the new, but I'm learning with time that one of the most valuable things Mr. Grayson imparts is that constant reinvention is the stuff of passion and renewal, and it's always better than ever when it's done with an eye to creating spaces that allow the accidental communities they attract to shape the life within them as they grow.

There's a difference between "attraction" and "promotion", and a reason that Baron has never been one to advertise. He knows the wisdom of creating something you truly love yourself, and letting the right people find it. The rest simply takes care of itself ...

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Service Envy: Lube and a Lesson in Under 15

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:54:31 -0330

Last weekend I was running around and out of time. I needed an oil change and the garages were closed. As I was gassing up, I looked across the way and saw a Mr. Lube shop. It was late. They were open. I wanted it now.

Twice the price? Ouch. But in I went.

I pulled into the bay, and didn't even have to get out of my car. I rolled down the window, was handed a free copy of the day's paper (okay, so it's not -really- free when you're paying twice as much as you do to get this done at the garage, but what the hell, it made me happy and I felt special) and offered me coffee, hot chocolate or tea (and if you've been in Canada lately you know how bloody cold it's been).

As I sat reading my paper and drinking my nice hot beverage, I had three very helpful young men crawling all over my car. They were under the hood. They were spraying the hinges inside my doors. There wasn't an inch of that vehicle they didn't attend to, and right smartly. I felt like I'd just stepped through a tv screen and into one of those 1950's Texaco commercials. You know the one -- guy with the cool cap, armed with a squeegee and a really swell smile.

THIS was service. They were fast. They were friendly. They were making me feel like I was the most important person in the world for at least 15 minutes.

And dammit, I want to do that too.

By the time I drove out, being thanked by these polite young men with the Ultrabrite smiles (okay, so it was a little Stepford Wives at times, but I was willing to look beyond that because I'd just gotten the best lube of my life ~wink~) I was drumming my fingers on the dash and saying "now -that- was service!". How can I do this for -my- customers?

One of the things that impressed me was how they managed to rape my wallet and make me want to thank them for it. I liked the convenience. I didn't have to get out of my car. I liked that I had people hopping to serve me a hot, tasty beverage. I liked that they asked me "upselling" kinds of questions without making me feel like a cheapskate for the ones to which I responded "no". I liked that it was fast, and easy, and that the sticker they put inside of my windshield reporting all those geeky-cool car stats -also- gives me 50% off the next time I go in. Felt kind of like it all works out in the wash.

So, here I sit this morning, a week later, thinking about an oil change that would -never- have crossed my mind again until it was time to have the next one done. That's service gone right. So right, in fact, that I'm blogging about it because once again I know if I say it out loud, I'll hold myself accountable.

I want my customers to feel -just that special- when they walk through the doors of my shop. The rub is that this becomes a monumentally larger mountain to climb when you're in a place that's grown from 20,000 people to over 4,000,000 in a bit more than a year. While I can continue to innovate, scaling the "service" end of things becomes an ever-growing nightmare. I struggle to keep up with my IMs, and while I've blogged a few times about the "embedded office systems" that I continue to cultivate to try to get a handle on this again, it's probably the single biggest thing that makes me feel like I'm just not getting it right.

So, I'll get over myself on that one for the moment, and let myself play a little with the idea that there are other ways of making my customers feel like kings for a day when they walk through my digital doors. For a start, I want to offer a free piano. I've got a new line ready to release, and I want to make the classic ebony something that anyone can own without spending a dime. Baron and I have also spent a lot of time talking about cultivating a rewards program -- loyalty points of some kind. By working on our own vendors, it's one of the things I want to build in, not to invade my customer's privacy by tracking their sales, but to reward them with discounts and other incentives for coming back to do business with us again.

I'm going to continue to noodle this a bit, because while I can't quite invite my customers to drive their shiny prim jeeps through my doors, I might in fact be able to hand them the daily metaverse version of the paper and all the other news fit to print, and that hot mugga joe too.

I'll close with a question, because I really want to get this right:

What makes -you- feel special when you do business with someone in Second Life? What kinds of wonderful experiences have you had that made you really want to go back and do business with that person and place again?

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Recharging with a Little Steampunk

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 03:47:22 -0330

A Visit to Babbage Square

The past week has been rough. Heads-down run at launching the new SL Ubuntu project and SIM, and a ton of work in the background to do it. Too many late nights and absolutely no downtime made me so cranky I didn't even want to be around myself. I'm an incorrigible recluse, and like it that way, but two nights ago I decided to break stride and follow a link to The Willow Tea Room in the Babbage Square SIM, thinking it sounded like a nice little place to drag Baron away to for a bit of downtime that had nothing to do with work. Moments after landing, I had to port out, because the SIM was being reset, but I was there long enough to run into the SIM owner, Shaunathan Sprocket, who I recognized as a kindred soul from Relay for Life last year. After looking around for just a few moments, and then chatting with Shaun afterwards, I knew this was a place I had to come back to.

A Room with a View

The next evening I did. Instead of working, Baron and I set aside the evening to simply go and explore. The past month we've been brainstorming around reinventing our own SIMs with a Victorian Steampunk theme, each with a slightly different flavour. We were delighted to find that Shaun's SIM was not only a page straight out of this genre, but a truly interactive, immersive city and people. Steam rising from manholes in the cobblestone pavement, airships against dark smoke rising from stacks on the horizon, incredible machines and the rhythmic sounds of pistons and gears pumping all around. The thing that we both loved about this sim was the attention to detail: papers strewn on the floors, intricate steam-powered machines brought back to life, every building different and meticulously crafted.

Reverence

We connected with things we'd been looking at ourselves this past while, in particular some of the machines, and moreover a genuine connection with "toys". We plan on opening a series of shops on the new SIM that's about to arrive on our own continent soon, including one called "Remarkable Toys", a name Baron conjured up after a brainstorming session some weeks ago. We found the same delightful fascination with these things in Babbage Square, and found ourselves saying "Wow!" over and over again.

Peering from the Rooftops of Babbage Square

Grand kudos to Shaun and the team that's been collaborating on this remarkable SIM. He said that he's been working on it since January, which is astonishing given how thoughtfully it's been cultivated and in such a large way. While steampunk embraces an alternative time, one that really doesn't exist anywhere but in the fantasy world, it's roots in Victorian renaissance are familiar and engaging. In Babbage Square you can't help feeling transported back in time. If you've not been for a visit yet, take a trip soon, and be sure to set aside a few hours to investigate every last nook and cranny. There's a lot of really innovative and just plain entertaining things to see and do.

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Re-imagination ...

nobody@vox.com(Sue Stonebender) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:15:26 -0330

2007 Obsidian Baby Grand Piano

One of the reasons that I appreciate and respect Baron Grayson so much as a partner is that he doesn't settle. He's a perfectionist, and when he has a vision of how something should be, he doesn't settle for anything less than perfect.

Working with him is a fantastic brain gym. I watch him and am both inspired and frustrated simulataneously, because his capacity for conjuring up fantastical spaces in a heartbeat is unparalelled. Watching him makes me want to push myself harder, think smarter, work more efficiently.

When I first met him I had barely months before created an accidental business, making virtual pianos originally to satisfy a personal need as a composer to have my favourite vice close at hand in my digital digs. WIthin months I had 76 shops, crafting a presence at virtually every major telehub back in the day that there was no point-to-point porting. It was manic. I spent most of my time running from site to site, trying to make sure that rent was paid, that products were up-to-date, and that my merchandising fit the unique parameters of each space. This is the stuff that nervous breakdowns are made of, spreading yourself too thin as a one-woman show, and trying to find the balance between creating and maintaining.

Baron was my customer. He crashed his airship in front of one of my shops and found my piano by accident, and bought it. When the transaction record came through, I realized it was old product, and sent along an updated version with a quick note of apology. Being the hermits that we both are, it's a wonder that we bothered to chat at all, but we did, and that evening was life-changing in ways too numerous to spell out in a blog.

2005 Christmas Piano

So, Mr. Grayson became my muse. He challenged me to think in different ways, to imagine that I'd created an image strong enough and widely-known enough that I could stand in a single place and sell my wares without having to depend on the manic nature of sheer volume. He opened up a Christmas shop and encouraged me to do a piano for the season and place it there, and while it scared the hell out of me to take a leap of faith that included winding down the small hub empire that had been feeding my business for so long, I did, and it worked brilliantly.

Credit where credit is due: I didn't know him at all when I met him, but it didn't take long to recognize that he was a very bright, inspired man who had already crafted a much larger and more successful presence of his own. The traffic in his shop allowed me to cultivate a new market, and the very act of "re-imagining" the piano that I had been selling was both cathartic and wise. I created the first Christmas piano again, and again, and again (ocpd being a shared gift and affliction ~grins~) but finally decided it was "good enough" (words that are generally unfamiliar in our domain) and set it out. That began a metamorphisis in both the way that I did business, and in the way I approached creating my products.

Today, Serendipity Studios exists on it's own SIM, and has become a fulltime business/nightmare to manage, and I'm challenged to re-imagine things once again. There are three key problems that I'm faced with today:

1) Burn out. I'm simply tired of doing the same thing over and over again, and need to either radically reinvent it, or leave it. The pianos are a vital part of my business, and what I am known for, so I don't really want to simply abandon them, especially when I've got so many ideas for the ways I want to recreate them to make them more fun and more vital.

2) Sheer volume. When I started making pianos and bringing my compositions in, there were only 10,000 people in SL. Two years later there are more than 4,000,000, with that number growing exponentially every month. Be careful what you wish for. Yes, I wanted more business, but the logistics of trying to stay on top of such a large and growing market are daunting.

3) Perfectionist bug. Baron blogged on this very early this morning: the challenge of being a content creator with OCPD and ADD. It's a gift if your job is just "thinking stuff up", but a curse when it comes to pulling the trigger and finally releasing what you've been refining for entirely too long because it's still not right. Last winter I completely rebuilt the pianos and the way they play music from the ground up, had three new Christmas pianos, and two new Valentine's pianos ready to go (ready being a relative word here). They're still unreleased.

2006 Tannenbaum Baby Grand Piano

In spite of having released very little new product these past months while I've been sick, my profit margin is holding it's own. This makes me feel both relieved and guilty. I hate coasting on old product, especially when I feel like that product could be far better. It feels like ripping the customer off, and this is another point where B and I both struggle. We want to give our customers the best quality we possible can, but there's so many other shiny new things to chase ... ~sigh~

So why blog about this? For the same selfish reason I blog at all: to hold myself accountable. If I put it out there, I have to do it, and dammit, missing the two biggest retail holidays of the year is just grounds to be shot.

I've not bothered to think about my challenges in terms of labels, but it's been healthy to recognize it in shared conversations the past few weeks and to say "okay, that's me ...now what?". Seems like dodging to engage in a flurry of blogging in the middle of a pseudo-crisis, but it's in fact been the thing that's pushed me to just put things out there and be done with them.

So, note to self: finish the darned dynamic songbook and get these pianos out!

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