Reuters' virtual bureau chief in Second Life?

Yeah...that was my reaction when I first read that too. But it's true. It seems that Reuters now has a link off their site for their Second Life presence.

http://secondlife.reuters.com/

In a bit of media-on-media action, Yahoo new has a story about it here. Very interesting stuff.

The down side? A huge influx of new free-account visitors that pushed SL to over a 1 million users (with undoubtedly some percentage of that being alt characters), and some of the simulators have been been bogged down slow with all the new traffic. OUCH! Everytime SL gets big press, we get a big influx of new people (though this is probably the largest so far), the servers groan under the strain for a few weeks until Linden Labs manages to accomodate the load (and the virtual human tidal wave dies down), and things settle back to normal. And of course myself and the Mad angel of Periwinkle have to go around and clean up our property from litter that the less considerate of the influx of newbs leave laying around our land. Most of the litter takes the form of empty boxes from purchased items, crashed spaceships/cars/aircraft, prefab newbie buildings, basic prims from learning how to create and build things, and the occasion piece of odd furniture and discarded avatar genetalia (err...don't ask). Some peoples children...I tell ya'. *shakes head*.

But other than that, most newbs are nice folks, just amazed with the new thing they've found and no clue what to do with themselves. SL being more of an open ended virtual world than a traditional MMORPG where you have tasks or quest to perform, and levels, and beasties to kill for points, etc...when first porting into SL alot of people have the same question. "So, what do I do?" And the best answer I can come up with is "whatever you want to do, as long as you don't grief people"...though lately seeing this answer result in little more than a virtual deer-in-the-headlights stare, I've started giving them specific suggestions like exploring a particularly cool build in a sim I know or going to a specific virutal club that is focused on helping newbs or going to one of the resident created "SL Self Education" areas that shows you how to build or script. Maybe I need to start calling them quests to ease people into the concept. hehehe
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