Kitely News: What needs doing
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 9:47 pm
The title of this post may be a bit misleading, sorry. But today I was chatting with Dot Matrix, and somehow the conversation got around to community building. I said one thing I'd found extremely important for cohesiveness back in the old days of Second Life was a professionally published electronic newspaper called Metaverse Messenger. Many of you probably remember it. When it ceased publication a few years ago, it left a vacuum that has not been filled, although some people have tried.
The reason I mention it is because I think Kitely is at the point now where it can support, and be supported by, such a journal. No, I'm not proposing to do this myself -- my plate is full -- but I have contacted the people behind Metaverse Messenger, Phoenix Psaltry and through him, Katt Kongo (SL names). Maybe they will chime in here with more background than I can possibly know about, I hope. But what I can do is describe it from a reader's viewpoint, and say what I think were some of the factors behind its success.
First, I mentioned "professionally published". As a publisher/writer/editor myself I appreciate the difference between all these roles. Each must be filled if a publication is to succeed, but most people don't really think very much about what a publisher does.The functions of editors and writers are easier to fathom, but unless you have actually been involved in the process of producing some form of tangible word communication, everything a publisher does may not occur to you. Managing the newsroom may be the job of the editor-in-chief, but the publisher manages that person. Generally, the business end of things is the publisher's concern. This includes finances (selling ads, paying bills, meeting payroll, etc., or managing the people who do those things if the outfit is big enough to have departments) and legal affairs, including the all-important IP rights and regulatory compliance. And, working with the editor, the publisher sometimes has a hand in deciding how the product is formatted, and in what way it is distributed. It is not for the faint of heart.
Some of the things I think Metaverse Messenger got right include their division of labor, with publisher, editor, and a staff of reporters and IT people, artists, ad sales people, and someone in charge of distribution. This last job is one thing they did exceptionally well, IMO. The "paper" was published in PDF format, which was downloaded from their website, which in turn was available from web links embedded in objects within the virtual world as well as via normal Web search engines and navigation. This methodology provided many benefits, including the ability to present a (better than) traditional-looking product (instead of a text-only notecard kind of thing), economical distribution, and the all-important in-world presence. Without these things even the best-written articles would not have gotten the audience they achieved. By having a sufficiently large enough staff, all the various tasks got accomplished well and in a timely way. Looking over the masthead of one of the issues I saved, it appears they had over a dozen people working there at any given time.
So, what did all this do for Second Life? Ads and feature articles informed the public about what was happening throughout the virtual world, while editorials and letters to the editor discussed controversies (which lively, innovative communities seem to always have). Yes, online calendars and forums like this one, blogs, and the marketplace website can do some of that, too, but not in as compact a form that is easy to reference, yet expansive enough to provide an in-depth, comprehensive picture of the things it describes.
The hypergrid in general has Maria's HyperGrid Business blog, and Marstol Nightly does a great job of reporting on events in her Facebook posts & blog, and of course this forum is quite lively, and Ilan & Oren keep us posted on Kitely technical and business issues very effectively in the official blog. But none of these things is quite the same as what I've described. Is Kitely big enough to support a major news organ yet, and is there someone willing to create and operate it? I hope so.
The reason I mention it is because I think Kitely is at the point now where it can support, and be supported by, such a journal. No, I'm not proposing to do this myself -- my plate is full -- but I have contacted the people behind Metaverse Messenger, Phoenix Psaltry and through him, Katt Kongo (SL names). Maybe they will chime in here with more background than I can possibly know about, I hope. But what I can do is describe it from a reader's viewpoint, and say what I think were some of the factors behind its success.
First, I mentioned "professionally published". As a publisher/writer/editor myself I appreciate the difference between all these roles. Each must be filled if a publication is to succeed, but most people don't really think very much about what a publisher does.The functions of editors and writers are easier to fathom, but unless you have actually been involved in the process of producing some form of tangible word communication, everything a publisher does may not occur to you. Managing the newsroom may be the job of the editor-in-chief, but the publisher manages that person. Generally, the business end of things is the publisher's concern. This includes finances (selling ads, paying bills, meeting payroll, etc., or managing the people who do those things if the outfit is big enough to have departments) and legal affairs, including the all-important IP rights and regulatory compliance. And, working with the editor, the publisher sometimes has a hand in deciding how the product is formatted, and in what way it is distributed. It is not for the faint of heart.
Some of the things I think Metaverse Messenger got right include their division of labor, with publisher, editor, and a staff of reporters and IT people, artists, ad sales people, and someone in charge of distribution. This last job is one thing they did exceptionally well, IMO. The "paper" was published in PDF format, which was downloaded from their website, which in turn was available from web links embedded in objects within the virtual world as well as via normal Web search engines and navigation. This methodology provided many benefits, including the ability to present a (better than) traditional-looking product (instead of a text-only notecard kind of thing), economical distribution, and the all-important in-world presence. Without these things even the best-written articles would not have gotten the audience they achieved. By having a sufficiently large enough staff, all the various tasks got accomplished well and in a timely way. Looking over the masthead of one of the issues I saved, it appears they had over a dozen people working there at any given time.
So, what did all this do for Second Life? Ads and feature articles informed the public about what was happening throughout the virtual world, while editorials and letters to the editor discussed controversies (which lively, innovative communities seem to always have). Yes, online calendars and forums like this one, blogs, and the marketplace website can do some of that, too, but not in as compact a form that is easy to reference, yet expansive enough to provide an in-depth, comprehensive picture of the things it describes.
The hypergrid in general has Maria's HyperGrid Business blog, and Marstol Nightly does a great job of reporting on events in her Facebook posts & blog, and of course this forum is quite lively, and Ilan & Oren keep us posted on Kitely technical and business issues very effectively in the official blog. But none of these things is quite the same as what I've described. Is Kitely big enough to support a major news organ yet, and is there someone willing to create and operate it? I hope so.