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Avatars Having Nightmares about Electric Sheep
Apparently there’s a company out there called Electric Sheep, who are attempting to create a sort of SL Google, which will offer users the ability to find anything for sale within the coverage area. Don’t get too excited; apparently it’s been a bit buggy, and has also put the wind up Ansche Chung, property baron extraordinaire, who has banned the “bot” they use to scan for sale items from all her lands.
Naturally Profky Neva, prolific blogger, troll and Bolshevik moralist, has weighed in on this issue from the classic anti-capitalist stance that this “scraping” is Evil and that we must… but I don’t really care for the opinions of someone who apparently cannot tell the difference between griefing and disagreement.
However, Neva does have a point. This bot, firstly, is spidering along and putting people’s items up on the site without permission, and getting important information wrong. Then again, the Google spiders do the same thing on my website.
Second, people don’t trust bots. If a bot can do something as innocuous as catalogue someone’s merchandise on a website, a bot can do something more malicious as well. Perhaps Ansche Chung has the right idea in banning the search bot from all her land holdings; after all, not doing so might result in something nastier than confused would-be shoppers in your private patch.
Thirdly, SL isn’t the WWW. People expect a certain level of privacy; that’s why they invest in erecting walls, banlines, security systems, skyboxes and so on, and not ticking the “Show in Listings” box in the “About Land” menu. With the Web, users can restrict what the spiders, and thus the public, can see by the ultimate content control: judicious editing.
Previously, in the article about ratings sites, I noted and agreed with Allana Dion that opt-in was the way to go. The issue is one of having control over one’s public face. Where I work, most (probably all) business directories my workplace appears in are strictly opt-in. Also, any business’s desire to opt out, whether for financial or other reasons, is always upheld. Why should SL be any different?
Posted in Second Life (News,Op-Ed) by Martien Pontecorvo 18/04/07 10:45 AM Tags: good ideas gone bad, marketing, op-out, second life
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