I’ve never looked at the showcase page on the website before, I’ve never taken much notice of that at all. Now that its pointed out to me by the blog I’m left wondering why the heck Linden Lab are promoting inworld business?
The issue now is that this is going to replace the popular places tab inworld. Who chooses these business ventures to promote? Is it fair? If people were paying to be highlighted that would be one thing, but I don’t really think Linden Lab should be in the business of promoting inworld business like this.
I’m all for Linden Lab promoting innovation, events, arts, culture, campaigns, news, health, fitness, well being, education yadda yadda yadda but I’m extremely reluctant to give a thumbs up to free advertising. The fact that it has been going on for some time via the website makes some of my concerns a little redundant, but the blog highlights it and states that this promotion will go further and it makes me a little uncomfortable, it’s like the government endorsing a brand.
The bigger issue in all of this is the discussion on traffic. The future of traffic is up for debate and it’s going to be a very complicated debate, because love it or loathe it, traffic has a place in all of our hearts. If you’re looking to rent a store, nine times out of ten traffic will be a factor. The more important factor is visitors to business transactions, how much business you do there, but traffic is a metric that people check.
As a parcel owner I want to know how many people visit my parcel. I could of course write a script to do this but I think some raw data should be available for all parcel owners. Does this figure need to be available to others? I’m torn, it does have a use and if a location isn’t full of bots or camping farms then the figure can be pretty accurate, but, we all know it gets gamed.
I’m not anti camping and I think it serves a purpose under the current system in terms of paying people to advertise your location, because of how the current system works that’s a viable model. Having a bot farm is a different story and I don’t think there’s a place for that but camping itself, it’s like collecting sweat in Entropia Universe, incredibly tedious but if you stick at it long enough you’ll get somewhere. Camping to me is just an advertising resource.
People are already getting overexcited and think that traffic is about to bite the dust, I’m not sure it will. I think the aim is to put traffic under the radar but still try to use it as a metric. I really welcome the traffic debate, it’s long overdue.
If you want to join the traffic debate then make sure you get yourself into the “LL Traffic Future” group, it’s a free group that Linden Lab have created, of course I don’t have any spare groups, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish!