Ciaran Laval

November 13, 2015

The IRS, Linden Lab and Paypal Walk Into A Bar But Second Life Content Creators Aren’t Laughing

Linden Lab’s Tax and Account requirements have been baffling Second Life content creators and business owners for a while now. Initially Linden Lab were a bit slow with information regarding why they were sending people notifications that they had to file information. However Linden Lab got their house in order and provided a lot more information and these days they have some good resources.

Linden Lab are bound by US law to gather the required information. There’s a further issue for Second Life residents based in the USA :

Additionally, for U.S. residents with 200 or more transactions with a total amount in excess of $20,000 in a calendar year, we are required to file a Form 1099-K with the IRS reporting those transactions for that year.

Paypal are another payment processor, Paypal are also bound by the same US laws to gather information, as they explain here and this is where some people felt things may go a bit awry :

Under the legislation, we’ll report to the IRS the total payment volume received by US account holders whose payments exceed both of these levels in a calendar year:

US$20,000 in gross payment volume from sales of goods or services in a single year

200 separate payments for goods or services in the same year

IRC Section 6050W applies to all payment processors, including PayPal. Our goal is to help PayPal sellers understand and comply with the new requirements.

This raised concerns on various Second Life related forums that there may be a possibility that an error could be made here, if a Second Life content creator who cashes out to Paypal filed a form for Linden Lab and Paypal, would the IRS miss the fact that it’s the same money. Surely that couldn’t happen? According to Hamlet Au over at New World Notes, it has indeed happened; Second Life Content Creator Couple Double-Taxed $66K by the IRS – Here’s How to Avoid That Fate.

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November 12, 2015

Linden Lab Unleash Marketplace Search Beta

Linden Lab yesterday blogged; Introducing Marketplace Search Beta :

We’re pleased to share that improvements to the existing Marketplace search functionality are now available through Marketplace Search Beta. We’ve made infrastructure changes to improve the relevance of search results – making it easier for you to find what you’re looking for! We have also made changes for search to scale better as more content and categories are added to the Marketplace – and that means the newest creations and additions are at your fingertips.

Search in Second Life, be it inworld or on The Marketplace, will always be a bone of contention. There are many reasons for this, a lot of them human. For example items may not be listed with keywords people are using as a search term for those sort of items. People may act in an unscrupulous fashion and use strategies that poison the well in the hope of people stumbling across their listing and the search engine itself may not contain enough tools to help people refine their search terms to find that special item. There’s only so much Linden Lab or any other search provider can do to mitigate these sort of circumstances.

However with the launch of Marketplace Search Beta Linden Lab are trying to provide an improved search experience for merchants and customers. Therefore they need feedback and they are seeking feedback in a couple of locations.

One place is the Jira, which is an avenue if you want to report a bug. However many people find the Jira a tad cumbersome, shall we say, so another location where feedback can be left is on the official forum and this is a very useful forum where some questions may well be answered, indeed one question has already been answered. Some people have observed that search results are slow on Marketplace Search Beta, Grumpity Linden has already provided an answer on that score :

This may seem counterintuitive, but Beta Search will be slow at first because it’s not getting enough traffic. The web servers spin down if they’re not getting requests. The speed in beta is not representative of what you will see once it’s in production.

This is good information to take forward, the more traffic that Marketplace Search Beta gets, the better it should perform in terms of the speed of returning results.

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November 11, 2015

You’d Better Find a Way out, Hey Kick Down The Door, It’s a Lab Chat and You’ve Been Caught

Linden Lab blogged yesterday; Introducing Lab Chat – A New Q&A Show in Second Life :

In the spirit of the open Q&A sessions held at inworld events like the VWBPE conference and the Meet the Lindens series, we’re pleased to participate in a new Resident-driven initiative called “Lab Chat.”

Lab Chat is an opportunity for you to ask Lindens your questions during a live taping that will be recorded and archived for everyone to view.

The first Lab Chat will be Thursday, November 19th, at 10:30am SLT at the Linden Endowment for the Arts Theatre – with guest Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.

Now this won’t be a session where anybody from the audience can ask any question they want and get an answer. Questions will be curated. The Lab chat production team will pick questions from a forum thread. That’s the link to the forum thread if you have any questions you want to ask, go post them and see if they get picked. Please also pay attention to this part of the blog post :

so be sure to get your questions into the thread no later than Friday November 13th, 2015. Authors of selected questions will be invited to ask their question live at the inworld show. Time permitting – additional questions from the audience will be answered.

Questions are already appearing in that thread ranging from questions about abuse reports, technical questions, community gateways, Marketplace issues and much more. Ebbe won’t be in a position to answer all of them so don’t be disappointed if your question isn’t answered. However you have a far better chance of your question being answered if you visit the forum thread and post a question.

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November 10, 2015

Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet

“Betamax? Is that still around?” I pondered today as I read news on The Guardian that Sony are going to stop creating Betamax cassettes in March 2016. The main reason that Betamax appears have continued long after many felt it had departed is due to the use of Micro MV cameras, which use Micro MV cassettes in Betamax format. However all good things come to an end and over 40 years after its release and almost thirty years since Betamax lost the video format wars, Betamax finally seems to be going beneath the technical waters.

Which brings us on to Second Life. Daniel Voyager recently reported; Second Life regions drop under the 25, 000 mark. Daniel’s blog post was based on a report by Tyche “Statto” Shepherd over at SLUniverse, where Tyche announced :

Well as I predicted , a milestone of sorts was passed this week as the Grid dipped below 25,000 regions for the first time since June 2008.

The scores on the doors on November 8th were :

24,985 Regions
17,888 private estates
7097 Linden owned

The net loss of private regions for this year stood at 712 on November 8th. However let’s compare this to some previous years to try and get a picture of what’s going on.

11/11/2012 – Total Private Regions 21,334. Year to date loss of 2,523 private regions (-10.58%)
10/11/2013 – Total Private Regions 19,462 . Year to date loss of 1,530 private regions (-7.29%)
09/11/2014 – Total Private Regions 18,735. Year to date loss of 538 private regions (-2.8%)
08/11/2015 – Total Private Regions 17,888. Year to date loss of 712 private regions (-3.8%)

Therefore we can see that this year we’re seeing an increase in the rate of net losses of private regions compared to last year, but the rate of losses is still a lot lower than in 2012 and 2013. Let’s play about with some more figures.

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November 7, 2015

Immersive Edge A Hypergrid Story Launches In OpenSim This Weekend

This weekend sees the launch of Immersive Edge, A Hypergrid Story. I initially took a look at this project a week or so ago; OpenSim Storytellers Are Developing Some Impressive Storytelling Techniques. The launch covers more than just introducing people to Immersive Edge, there will also be presentations from writers and designers regarding techniques and tools that can be used in bringing immersive fiction to virtual worlds utilising OpenSim.

Some of the techniques will also be good for other virtual worlds, but OpenSim has made some great leaps and bounds in making it easier for people to create immersive fiction than other platforms. Let’s take a look at the presenters for the launch, or more accurately, let’s take a look at Nara Malone’s blog post introducing us to the presenters; Meet the Presenters for Immersive Edge Launch.

Sande Chen

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer. Her writing work includes 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher. Sande was also nominated for a Writers Guild Award in Videogame Writing for The Witcher.

Sande is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform and a contributor to Writing for Video Game Genres, Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, and Secrets of the Game Business.

Sande was profiled as one of the top 100 most influential women in the game industry back in 2006 for her work as Director of Girls in Games, Inc. On top of that, Sande was nominated for a Grammy Nomination in 1996 for music video direction.

So that’s quite an impressive bio I’d say! Sande will be speaking on Sunday November 8th at 9:00am SLT. The title of Sande’s presentation is : “How Technology is Changing Storytelling”.
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