When I was a lad, Friday was Crackerjack day and people could win a Crackerjack pencil. Many moons later Friday is Draxtor Despres day, aided and abetted by Jo Yardley (not Yo Yardley, Yo Yardley is a greeting) and you can’t even win a virtual pencil. As I write this post, there has still been no update from Linden Lab about anything regarding the CEO, but there is a post about the latest episode of The Drax Files video show, which I did say the smart money was on! Alas there was no betting available for that prediction.
The latest edition of The Drax Files Radio hour not surprisingly covers the departure of the beloved CEO, or not so beloved by some, there is balance in the opinions. The show is introduced by Flufee McFluff.
There’s an interesting interview with Venturebeat’s Dean Takahashi regarding Rod Humble’s departure. Second Life artist and Dwarfins legend Jaimy Hancroft calls the show from Belgium.
There’s something in the water in Belgium, not content with finding an absurd amount of brilliant footballers, they are also dipping their toes into the virtual world arena, world domination may be on the cards, you heard it here first.
There are other interviews and one strong theme comes through, Second Life is so diverse that there’s no one size fits all solution to the issues within Second Life. Harvey Crabstick gives a very good interview because he talks from experience of knowing Second Life and company structures, interesting stuff. However he also touches upon some of the long standing issues, doing a good impression of someone asking “Is Group Chat fixed yet?“, and getting the same frustrating answer as everyone else.
There are discussions about whether being a browser based virtual world is the advantage some thought it would be, and the answer seems to be, probably not, it’s the content and accessibility that’s important. There are discussions about the technical issues of Second Life causing people to lose hope in Second Life completely. This is an experience issue, some people don’t experience these issues. However that’s the beauty and beast of Second Life, there are so many different use cases, one person’s requirement for fully working voice all the time in a classroom environment is another person’s minor inconvenience when a music stream goes down at a live concert.
There’s discussion about the Cloud Party closure and some lamenting that Cloud Party got so much right but couldn’t get traction.
Oh and breaking news near the end of the episode, Jo Yardley runs a brothel in Amsterdam, then my feed went fuzzy and scrambled so I didn’t hear what was said next and then when it came back the discussion moved on to a piece about monuments to victims of Nazism. Surprising news hey?
The show ends with some wonderful voice quotes from Rod Humble which are really worth listening to.
During the course of the show there were some suggestions for CEO:
- Torley Linden
- Draxtor Despres
- Someone who is prepared to scale down
- Robin Harper
- Jane McGonigal
- Nicole Lazzaro
- Tracy Fullerton
I’d love my reliable source to be wrong about Robin not being CEO, but the source is really reliable and alas, Robin is not in the running.
Another superb episode, I’d say this is my favourite episode so far, even if it didn’t manage to cover the Eve-Online mega battle. The episode is an hour long, but if you have the time, have a listen.