Spin-less

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I'm no longer writing the Tuesday column for Mediapost's The Online Spin. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which I'd rather not get into right now, but I gave my notice a few weeks back. For those of you looking for the usual marketing commentary from yours truly, check out iMediaConnection.com, where I've been writing weekly on Thursdays. With iMedia, I've been exploring a lot of the social media topics that you're used to reading about here, and iMedia's Editor in Chief and Chief Content Officer Brad Berens has been great at helping me focus my commentary and lending clarity to my pieces. Look for my stuff both here and there.

Hanging in Crayonville

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I was playing around in Second Life again for a bit on Saturday morning. I flew over to Crayonville, not expecting to find anyone there. (Who the hell hangs out at a marketing agency at 8 AM on a Saturday morning?) As I was walking around Jaffe's digs, I was practicing all the little skills I learned in the tutorial. I sat down in some of the chairs, got myself a Crayon T-shirt, played the piano a bit. I was about to steal a cup of joe from the coffee machine when I noticed another avatar outside the building. Turned out it was a guy from a marketing company in Russia, so we sat down and chatted for a while. (My first SL chat - unless you count telling the creeps to get away from me during my brief stint with my female avatar.) We were talking for a bit when we were approached by someone who worked for an adult entertainment company. We chatted for a bit and then Real Life called, so I had to bail.

Speaking of Jaffe, he played my PayPerPost interview from Ad Tech in its entirety on Across The Sound this week, making PayPerPost his "loser of the week." Funny.

Some Thoughts on Second Life

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Right before lunch, Eric asked me "So, should we open a branch office in Second Life?" Of course, my initial reaction was "Nah, it's been done."  So we started kicking around some ideas for what we might do in Second Life.  Some of the ideas I was kicking around:

  • Opening up an office, but doing something completely unrelated to what we do IRL.  ("Hi, we're Underscore Marketing.  Would you like to buy some rubber dog shit?")
  • Buying a deluxe island next to Jaffe's, doing it up medieval style, building a bunch of trebuchets and hurling massive rocks at Crayonville.  (Note: We love Jaffe.  We love Crayon.  I was just entertaining my troublemaker side.)
  • Forming some sort of illegal arms trading cartel.  (That's where the big bucks are.)

Of course, had I actually spent any time in Second Life, I would have known that lobbing rocks at Crayonville would be a big no-no.  So, over lunch, I set up an account, downloaded the client and started messing around.  Some things I discovered...

  1. It's really easy to accidentally pick a female avatar.
  2. Once you accidentally pick a female avatar, the process of giving yourself a sex change isn't very intuitive.
  3. If you accidentally pick a female avatar, really annoying people will start following you around trying to kiss you.
  4. Once you give yourself a sex change, the annoying people stop trying to kiss you and instead say nasty things to you in chat.
  5. I couldn't find the BFG on this map.  If I had, the aforementioned annoying people would have been administered gratuitous beatdowns.
  6. Everybody seems to know what they're doing except me.  I saw somebody sitting on a bench and wanted to test my skillz by sitting on the bench next to her.  Instead I accidentally climbed up on the bench, prompting her to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot me.
  7. I can't figure out how to put an Underscore logo on my T-shirt.  I tried.  SL doesn't like my logo file uploads for some reason.
  8. My computer lets out an audible whimper when I try to run Second Life, Outlook 2007 Beta and Photoshop 7.1 at the same time.

That is all, for now.  I will mess with this stuff some more over the weekend.