On January 6th Lil Linden was informing people of server deploys for the week of January 3rd….Americans write dates funny, anyway whilst talking of Magnum (no not the PI) Lil pointed folk in the direction of Grid Survey to see what release channel their sim was on, be it Magnum, Le Tigre or Blue Steel.
The other day I was at an office hour where a question was asked about RC channels to which a Linden mused there was a website which informed people of what release channel a sim was on, a resident piped up that the website was …..Grid Survey! Yes Tyche Shepherd’s Grid Survey is an unofficial, official source of great data on the grid and the reason that Tyche’s site is considered one of such awesomeness is due to Tyche’s extremely ethical handling of data.
The data Tyche collects is informative, public, wonderfully interesting and presented in a manner that makes it a delight to read, indeed I’d go as far to say that Tyche presents the best public stats on Second Life anywhere!
The reason that Tyche has such respected stats is because the data is public, Tyche isn’t collecting stats that people can’t see, Tyche isn’t collecting stats that are then used to identify non public information, Tyche provides an API, Tyche goes about her business in an ethical fashion and when someone doesn’t like Tyche’s data collection bot, she doesn’t throw a wobbly, call them a girefer, call them a copybotter, accuse them of something to hide, she just carries on and accepts the wishes of the land owner.
Grid Survey may mostly be about stats but it can also be used to find photos people have taken on your sim and uploaded to Snapzilla, as well as published incident reports that have happened on a sim.
Tyche has been reporting weekly sim arrivals, departures and renames on a forum post over at SL Universe since March 2008. This is valuable information and Tyche has often released her economic stats before Linden Lab and they generally aren’t telling a different story, then there’s Tyche’s awesome mainland censuses, here’s the one for December 2010.
Tyche isn’t the only person who collects stats, Tateru Nino also deals with stats and includes comings and goings of Linden employees, as exemplified here. Tateru also deals with economic stats but adds her own analysis rather than the amount of pure stats Tyche does, so if you prefer analaysis and commentary then Tateru will give you a great overview as exemplified here. The differing styles between Tyche and Tateru are actually very helpful, they both analyse the same information but present it in different forms.
Tateru and Tyche both exemplify why data is important, they also both demonstate most admiraby how data can be collected and handled in an ethical form and this is why those who abuse data have the potential to ruin things for us all, because their abuse means Linden Lab may well end up limiting further what public data is available and when you consider the great service to the community that Tateru and Tyche perform, that would be a great shame.