Interview with Linden Lab's Ginsu Yoon

Ian Lamont — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:11:41 -0500

Last week, the Industry Standard interviewed Linden Lab Business Affairs Vice President Ginsu Yoon at Linden Lab's San Francisco office. Yoon discussed the company's enterprise plans, including the Second Life Grid and a new turnkey service designed by Rivers Run Red that lets companies hold virtual meetings in Second Life (look for a special report about this service on the Standard later this month). The executive also touched upon Linden Lab's financial health, the challenges posed by the rise of laptop computers and other mobile devices, and the "heightened rhetoric" surrounding the company's enterprise plans.

The Industry Standard: What is different now about Second Life and the enterprise space now compared to the way it was two years ago?

Yoon: I think over the last two years more general market familiarity with the concept of virtual worlds. There are certainly within our own active user base and our revenue base an increasing proportion of enterprise and educational users.

Ironically, we don't actually have a perfect read on how many of our users are actually buying from enterprises or using it for educational purposes. Because a lot of the data that you need for that has to be relayed from the appropriate billing systems set up for enterprise use. As you probably know, most of our users use their individual credit cards. We don't have the kinds of purchasing systems that enterprises are used to. So we have to take a look as the data as best as we can and tie it back to surveys, and tie it back to spot sampling. From that kind of analysis, over the last year or so, it seems that our enterprise-focused user base, maybe enterprise and education together, are in approximately the 20 percent range. Which is probably obviously a fairly significant portion of the overall usage of Second Life or the overall revenue. And it's also faster growing than probably other categories.

Second Life as always been a place -- from our point of view as the company that operates it -- we go where the customers tell us to go. Obviously we don't have the direction in terms of content and structure of the management of the in-world experience. We're doing more and more of that these days. But that's because we've learned from the user base what they want in a consumer experience. And similarly, we've learned from the user base that they want more enterprise-friendly use. So, I think that that's been the change.

Also, We're a larger company now. I think we grew probably 100 employees over the last year. I think we started the year with somewhere in the high 100s, close to 200, and now we're close to 300. We just didn't have the bandwidth a year ago, certainly not two years ago to attack more market segments.

Industry Standard: Now I remember reading about a year ago that Linden Lab was profitable at that time. Has the new expansion come because you've been growing revenue or more because of investments to help support that?

Yoon: We have not raised any financing since the last time it was publicly reported. In terms of profitability, I don't want to go beyond what our fact sheet says. Our situation is very good.

Industry Standard: Even with the downturn in the economy?

Yoon: The downturn has only been for a month or two. It's too early to say, and I certainly don't want to overly characterize our user base. But I can say in the last month we have had our highest numbers ever in terms of hours of usage, in terms of active users, and I believe in terms of revenue. So we had a very strong month. Now there are all sorts of theories about why, particularly coming out of the gaming press, there are all sorts of theories about why online gaming or other online activities have more recession-proof characteristics, because it drives more entertainment value, high-usage value for your dollar. And if you compare the cost of 10 or 20 dollars spent in a month, and compare that to the number of movies, you only get four hours watching two movies. As you know, you can be in Second Life for hours and hours without paying anything.

So it's been a very strong month. But I wouldn't, with one month of data in the current financial crisis, I wouldn't go so far to say 'oh yeah, it's a recession-proof business.'

Industry Standard: Now you mentioned 20% before. Of the population, or the hours?

Yoon: The revenue base. And I think there's some correlation in that with the active user base and to the hours of usage. Honestly, that wasn't the number that was important to me in my mind about launching an initiative around this business. Again, you launch a business based on the revenue characteristics.

Industry Standard: When you say launch the business, you mean ...

Yoon: Internal launch. We always had some experimentation with different infrastructure deployments. Certainly, different customer segments, so I would say that one that we've looked at for significantly longer than just the last few months, but I would say in the last few months (muddled).

Industry Standard: The Second Life Grid. When did this really start to get off the ground?

Yoon: Second Life Grid just in terms of the name and the branding, the best way to look at that is the domain registration date for secondlifegrid.net. I think that was probably more than a year ago. You can take a look at that fairly easily. And at that time, I can remember us thinking "hey we do want to have some technology infrastructure branding so that people understand that it's not merely the community experience, it's all of what we've created, but really the technology underpinning." We had that thought about the branding and we registered the website in the space of a week or something like that.

That's probably the most accurate historical guideline you'll find today of when we started thinking about that.

Industry Standard: How many staff at Linden are devoted to this (the grid)?

Yoon: Although we are a significantly larger company, we're not one that's really large enough to really segment out into divisions or into a separate business unit. Obviously there's a significant part, the great mass of the technology underpinnings are the same system in many ways, certainly the same software code base. So I couldn't put an exact number on it because there's a lot of overlap. In terms of dedicated staff, and this is exclusive of all the common technology space, it’s like a small startup within a startup. It's not maybe great news for other people trying to do the same thing, but we essentially have as many bodies as some who are doing similar things (muddled).

Industry Standard: Can you give me the one line or two line description of what the Second Life grid is?

Yoon: The Second Life grid is the technology tools and services platform that allows the simulation of Second Life and other immersive and virtual experiences.

Industry Standard: Who are your customers?

Yoon: At the Second Life Grid? I think that it is targeted at primarily anyone who is not interested in the experience of the Second Life community.

You know, obviously there's a lot of heightened rhetoric around business users coming over and taking over the world. In my mind it's very similar to the kind of rhetoric you see any time an early adopter technology goes from a very small and tight community to a larger set of use cases, and that's sort of 'big, bad businesses come in.' From the early adopter point of view, they say, 'that ruins it for what we have.'

I think that a more sober perspective is to look at practically any of the examples that we are talking about. There are a couple of technologies, most commonly the world wide web. You know, you had a lot of experimentation, a lot of early adopters, a lot of really wide variety of use cases. And then you saw this become more and more a part of regular consumer, regular daily life, and eventually regular business essential operations.

That's the same kind of evolution that people expect to see in any kind of technology that has broad applicability. But you will always have that rhetoric about how the world is changing, it's different than the early use. I try not to get caught up in the rhetoric.

Industry Standard: Can you quantify how many people or how many businesses are using the Second Life Grid?

Yoon: One of the things that we know we need to improve to service this segment is to really standardize and make corporate-friendly billing and account management practices. Because we don't have those things fully in place, it's really hard for me to count the exact number of businesses. We made a guess among our billing base, and that's as good as a number I have right now. I don't have the kind of data that I would have if we, or I should say that we will have, when we finish deploying these kinds of systems.

It's always been a criticism of Second Life or Linden Lab the company, that we don't know how to handle the enterprise customer. I'll take that criticism as fact. In terms of what people can see. But it's not like we don't understand the enterprise business. We have been a consumer oriented company, as I said, we've been a small focused company, but we as we continue to have success, as we continue to grow, as we continue to get better data about our user base, and where the growth is, and as we are larger company and able to operate multiple lines of business. We are going to do the things that we know have to be done.

It's not like people in this company don't have a background in the enterprise. This is actually the first company I've been at that's been a consumer focused company. All of my previous experience is around enterprise communications equipment sales. It's very different. But I am not the only one. There are lots of people in the company who understand that business, that just hasn't been our business. We're now, we are going to be more showing and telling next year of what we are capable of doing.

Industry Standard: You mentioned one of the things you wanted to tackle was billing for the enterprise.

Yoon: Billing, account names, account management. There's a whole host of things. There's a whole host of things that an enterprise would expect in terms of security and deployment options. Just in terms of collateral around the technology. Customer service, basically every point of the business.

Industry Standard: Of the technologies that you are working on right now, that your developers are working on right now -- not the ones that are in production, but the things that are on the horizon – what excites you the most, where do you see the most opportunity?

Yoon: It's kind of interesting question. I have a general level of excitement and enthusiasm for the whole thing. But that's not the answer that you are looking for.

I guess the way I look at it, there is just this set of commonly known things. A lot of them are not sexy. Who wants to talk about "ooo, account management!" or "they're going to let me do a corporate purchase order, rather than my personal credit card!" But that's not the stuff that you really write about. But the way I look at it is there is just this whole set of things, we know what they are and we just have to knock them down. I get excited when we knock any one of them down. I don't really care what it is. But none of them are like, "oh, there's going to be an imaginary flame thrower for enterprise users." It's pretty straightforward, actually.

To be honest, that is again returning to my enterprise roots. It's kind of good to know this range of things that are very specific customer-driven requirements, that you know if satisfy those things, if your offering is productive enough, then you really have a shot at making customer sales.

It's kind of nice feeling, and it's very different from the feeling of a mass consumer play, where there's a lot that you won't know, a lot that you can't know, whether it will catch on fire. No individual consumer knows. There's so much that just goes on that's out in the zeitgeist.

There's something incredibly engaging and exciting about being on that side of the business too, and I am also on that side of the business. But if you ask me what's sort of different and new in the enterprise space, part of the reason it's interesting is because you know what you have to do.

Industry Standard: Comparing Second Life as it appeals to early adopters vs. consumers, compared to people who are coming in on the enterprise side, what needs to make it so it's more for them? Just from the user perspective. Like an office worker who is told by her manager, 'we're having a meeting in Second Life. We're going to do something in there.'

Yoon: A lot of things are the same. Our basic issues about the stability and scalability and the performance of the system. That's item no. 1 for both the consumer and the enterprise perspective. That's really why so much of the common underpinning of our technology and the development of our workforce is deployed in those areas.

So, outside of those basics? The next thing that is very big and very common across any user group is to improve the usability of the system, just in terms of the ease of adoption, the fit to a broader base of user configurations on the terminal end. You know, you want more people to be able to run Second Life on their computers and have a shorter period of training or adoption, and learning time, to be able to become a more devoted user.

Again, same thing. Those two things, just two, but there's a million subtexts in those things, those two things are by far the overwhelming bulk of this company's work right now. Then, where it does start to diverge? It's about having the kind of account management and billing systems, customer support, documentation, you know those departments are different for a consumer and an enterprise. But that's pretty much a layer at the top.

Industry Standard: For the second point that you brought up, ease of use, what is this company doing to change that or make it better?

Yoon: I think that there are things that we can do to make it better, in terms of the user experience. Ad that has to do with the user interface, that has to do with the experience that you first have when you log in, that is more directed toward what you are interested in when you first found out about Second Life. So imagine that interest in that first user experience? It's actually quite a difficult task. We've been trying to do it for years, but I think we have some better ideas about how to do that for 2009.

Beyond that first experience, the general usability of the experience, in terms of finding the things that you want to do, discovering the things that make the experience engaging for you, that typically has to do with the content that you are looking for, hooking up with your friends or your colleagues, depending on what you use, that are going to be most beneficial to your experience -- those are all pretty common problems on the Web. There are things that people have tried that have been successful and unsuccessful, and you know, I think we have as learned a view as any about what to do in those areas.

Industry Standard: There's a new generation of hardware coming out called netbooks. Is that something that's not going to happen with Second Life? Or are you changing something to make it happen?

Yoon: It's very similar to the effect of laptop growth. Remember, when this company started in 1999, laptops were not the majority of computer purchases in the U.S., or worldwide. I believe they are now, right? And the change has to do both with the processing power on the computing end, on the terminal end, and the fact that laptops being mobile, are much more often used on a wireless network which is less reliable than a cable network or a wired network. [Linden Lab founder] Philip [Rosedale] always gave me a hard time about that, because the company I worked at previously was one that made wireless equipment for enterprises, and [he's] like, "It's because of companies like yours that spread the laptop religion, and slows the adoption."

And you know, to a certain extent, you continue to see that. There is a continued movement toward mobility. And I think netbooks are a much smaller factor than, for example, iPhones, and more powerful handheld devices.

So I would say that it's probably still the core part of the experience or the highest-end part of the experience of Second Life, the one that really shows to me the capabilities of the environment, on the higher-end computing platform. We certainly do not need to limit that. If you don't show the capabilities that are possible on the high end, I think that you don't really get an opportunity to develop toward where the world is going.

I know that there's a lot of theory in the industry that what you really ought to be focusing on is the light-weight experiences, Web-embeddable experiences, you can run it on any machine, you can run it on mobile devices, or wi-fi networks. Those things have their applicability too. Absolutely. By no means do I mean to say that you know, any other way of doing it is dead or has any hope. It would be like saying "there's no such thing as an engaging Linux experience." Well, of course there is. But an engaging Web experience, a 2D experience that runs fast and slick -- fundamentally it doesn't show the top end of the range to what I believe we're developing toward as an industry.

I guess I am in the true believer category that says "there's something here that's different that we're trying to accomplish from what you can currently accomplish in your Web experience, your online experience." It's different. The complexity of those 3d objects adds something to the experience in a way that you're not going to get away with, with a two and a half D experience. That's my view. I am not saying that that's the corporate view, but that's the belief that I've had since I have joined this company.

So, you've always got to be developing toward that core. That said, there are a lot of technologies that are available now to start from that base, and call down the experience and make it available on more platforms. The only question is when they are going to be scalable and how they are going to get to production status. You can imagine pretty easily streaming a view of Second Life, like you stream any kind of video. What you do on your iPhone, or all sorts of mobile devices. That is certainly possible. It's possible to do and even have an interactive view as well. And those things are certainly things that we are interested in the future. But it's not sort of the core of where we think we develop toward the leading edge. It's doable.

I don't know if anybody warned you before you came in, but sometimes you only get to ask one or two questions, so I just keep talking.

It goes back to the earlier questions that you asked about: What has to be done for broader adoption of these kinds of technologies in general?

Some of these things are things that we can do. Some of these things are things that we ... just depend on the general enhancement of the computing ecosystem.

Remember, this company was founded, as many startups are founded, on the idea that you're throwing the football to where you think the receiver is going to be. At that time, there wasn't enough broadband penetration or computing power available at all to run any kind of satisfactory experience in Second Life. But the founders here, the early folks here said "look that's coming at a certain point, so we need to develop toward that point" which was relatively further out.

That technology infrastructure point as come in some. But it's got more to come in as we develop our technology out towards it. There's a great deal of things that need to happen in the general computing infrastructure for Second Life, for immersive environments, for 3D environments, online in general to become really broad consumer experiences.

One example is the input devices. It's sort of laughable to me. We all do it, even myself. People just sort of assume that what exists now is the way things are always going to work. One of the things that is so fundamentally obvious, but people don't want to think towards, or plan towards, is the fact that your interaction with the computing environment is not always going to be about a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. I understand that the majority of computing history we've had a monitor and a keyboard, but although if you think about the evolution of monitors over 20 or 30 years, there's been a significant (muddled) But keyboards had a sea change when they introduced the mouse. And the mouse and touchpads, and variations on a theme. But there's going to continue to be leaps in the kinds of input devices that you have.

You do envision a point where maybe it's not quite so embedded in the human existence of plugging a cable into your head to interact with your computer, but you will have more natural interactions, in terms of gestural interface and the kinds of things that lend themselves very well to interacting in a 3d environment. You know, I am talking about things that you've already seen and heard about outside of our sphere of influence, really, but Minority Report-type interfaces , 3d cameras that capture both color and distance so you can use your hands to move objects on a screen, brainwave devices, I think you may have seen some of those on YouTube. People putting the cap on their heads and thinking "Left! Left" to make their avatar, their cursor go left..

There's experimentation with that stuff out there. It might seem very far off, but we've all been around here long enough to see how fast the computing industry evolves. And those kinds of things are in the five- and ten-year range of the future. We're very, very likely to become part of a mass-computing experience. And those are things to think about in terms of how important is it going to be to have an immersive environment.

Industry Standard: I heard Craig Mundie of Microsoft speak at MIT two months ago. And he said that they had looked at Second Life, and the way they saw it was user-created objects and spaces. He said that their vision seems to be based on 3D constructs of reality and applications off of that. Would you care to comment on that?

Yoon: I am certainly not going to argue, mostly because of ignorance, but I certainly wouldn't argue to whatever the record of Microsoft research has in terms of predicting the future, and being able to productize around it. That's a difficult task for any of us as technologists.

What I would say thought, is that there has been a long-standing debate, a theoretical debate in the field of virtual worlds. And sometimes the name of it has changed over time. But I'd say 25 or 30 years or so, people have been talking about, trying to design a way to operate in this kind of 3D computing environment, immersive computing environment. And there's been a long-standing divide between the augmentationists and the immersionists.

The augmentationists, which I think is what you are describing Craig Mundie as, is someone who talks about having this computing environment to augment your life, really be part of the way of the way you interact with real-world environments. So there's a whiteboard there, and I have computing overlay over here, and it says what I see is somebody else and we're in the virtual space together that way.

That's versus the immersive perspective, or sometimes it's called the synthetic perspective, where there's an entire environment that's completely composed of these user-created or computer-generated objects. Whether they're created by users or by companies is kind of irrelevant. That's the immersionist perspective. It's the idea of the difference between Minority Report and the Matrix. You take two movies, and one you're living in this computing environment where Tom Cruise is running past ads that speak to him. That's augmentationist. Where in the Matrix, you're entirely in an environment that is completely, has no relationship to the real-world environment.

You can't settle this argument by talking about it. You know it has been going on for 25 years. There are two things though, that I could say that I could point out in favor of the immersionist view. One is, look, if you are talking about online environments where users and companies have created the vast majority of the content and all of the content that is in that online environment has value that is determined by people's use of it? They use it with respect to their real lives, but it exists in this online environment.

You know, that's a pretty fair description of the World Wide Web. The Web isn't interesting because "oh, I go on this website and it relates to this desk I am standing next to." No. It's completely about that online environment. Basically, all of the online computing history to date really fits the immersionist version.

What fits the augmentation theory I suppose is the spread of mobile devices and such. But that's kind of a cheap reach right now. You are not really using your mobile devices to you know make a computing environment around you, it's just to connect with people. But maybe that's the technology development in the sort of the immersionist camp.

But the rise of mobile computing vs. the rise of the online Web, they're both very significant, they both have a great deal of economic and social meaning over the last 20 years or so. But I think it's more about the Web, if you talk with meaning in computing over these last couple of decades. So, the evidence is there for the immersionist theory.

And the other evidence that is there, if I can be so self-serving, is Second Life. You don't have any successful experiences -- I know that we are still a small and fairly early adopter environment in the grand scheme of things -- but you don't have anything that is of similar size that has come out of the technology industry that is a comparable augmentation experience. You've done all of these great things coming out of all of these research houses, saying "oh, in the future you are going to walk in your house and your refridgerator is going to grab food and start making dinner and know that you're there," and all of this stuff. You see a lot of great showcases of that, but there's no production environment, nobody's got any users, nobody's got any money.

We have a lot of criticism, which I am glad to have, as somebody who is early in the industry. You want to have the arrows in your back, because that's where people are aiming from. But we have actually demonstrated that this is something that is possible to build, something that has got some enthusiasm among this user base, and we're going to continue to grow it. So the only answer that I can have is just to try to continue to grow it, continue to evolve it, and like I said, that argument is not going to stop in the next ten years. That's not going to get settled.

And at the end of the day, you're going to have significant elements of both. I do believe quite a lot of the Minority Report vision too. But I just think the evidence is not actually there yet, for the immersionists. So I don't understand why there is so much confidence when someone picks the augmentation side over the immersion side.

Industry Standard: Who is your biggest competitor?

Yoon: Our biggest competitor is you know, I am going to give you a highly unsatisfactory answer to that. We don't really focus on competitors. Our biggest competitor, our biggest obstacle is often ourselves. When you are trying to introduce certain new technologies and experiences, you don't have enough guideposts along the way, and you sort of stumble down some false alleyways every once in a while. Sometimes it's a rough ride.

A lot of times it's easier to chase behind somebody who is doing that stumbling for you. But the guy in front, if they stay in front, they don't spend all of the tie time looking over their shoulder. So I honestly can't say that we really look at one competitor as the biggest or most important one. Obviously, we do keep track of developments in the industry, developments online in general. But you have a better answer to that than I do. Right? It's probably going to be highly dependent on segments and use cases as well.

Industry Standard: Where does Google fit into this whole ecosystem?

Yoon: Google is obviously one of these great computing companies, the great Internet companies of our time. Anywhere that they have ambition and even where they don't have ambition, they are going to experiment, and you have to respect and watch what they're doing. Certainly, we've watched the results of the Lively and again, highly unsatisfactory answer, but it's great to see validation in the space.

I can't help it. But you know what? It's true. But what is also true is there are a lot of people who said "I can't wait till someone who knows what they are doing comes in here. Google is going to do this, Microsoft is going to do this, all of these other great companies are going to do this." And you know, I am sure some of them will, as Google already has. But it's not like they're going to open it up, pull the switch, and it works. This stuff is hard. I think people assume that it's fairly trivial and Linden Lab keeps making mistakes and footfalls just because we don't know how to do this.

I guess the most humble way that I can say this, is nobody knows how to do this. These are things that while a lot of them are similar to many other online experiences, you know, doing the package of things that we are trying to do, there's no known formula for success. If there was, we would have done it! It's not like people don't understand how to follow a formula for success. There isn't one, and Google didn't hit it. They'll keep mixing at it, if they want to, they'll continue to focus, continue to get better and we hope we do too.

Industry Standard: What criticism of Second Life and Linden Lab do you think is getting a bit tired or unfair? It could be internally, or from external sources.

Yoon: I have a hard time calling something unfair. Because again, I am honestly grateful that we're the target of so much intention and criticism. But it is the case that in the grand scheme of online experiences, we're still very new, very small, very early adopters. But we get a disproportionate amount of intention. We have to be grateful about that, quite honestly, because it puts many more eyes on a number of problems, and while at times that's painful, it does (muddled) to problems as soon as is humanly possible.

I guess the thing that I do, it does make me unhappy, where these sorts of criticisms come from, the assumption that we just don't care, or we don't want to make things better. We are intentionally trying to hurt people, to hurt users, to hurt our customers.

Obviously, that kind of criticism can and should be ignored, but still it's hard to believe that that's a rational criticism of any company. Companies don't exist to do that to their own customers. They don't exist to make people unhappy, at least companies that want to be successful. So that does affect those of us, especially those who hear a lot of user input. But again, you have to be grateful for it, you have to take it and try to improve. It is a competitive advantage, right? Honestly. Because people don't end up bringing that kind of passion to other kinds of products and services.

Industry Standard: If I were to come back to you and have this conversation one year from now and ask about Second Life, and what has worked well, and ideally, what would you want to be able to show me in terms of the interface, in terms of the enterprise push, in terms of some of the other development, in terms of the user base? Ideally, what would that look like?

Yoon: I would be pretty disappointed if we didn't have the basics that we talked about satisfying enterprise market needs, right? Again, these aren't unknown, these are not complicated. We do mange our development efforts toward the market demand, and we believe there is good market demand. But this is a certainly a very uncertain time in our economy. But you know, that's sort of like the baseline. But if I haven't hit those things by this time next year, I probably won't be here. You'll probably be interviewing someone else (chuckles). It's so basic, we have to hit those.

In terms of the availability, the stability, the performance. Those are things where there a huge number of metrics. It's hard to pick the targets for those. But I think that you do want to see a palpable difference. I am hoping, and I can be reasonably confident that you will see a palpable difference in those things, including, I hope in the user comments, the customer comments, related to those things.

But the real sort of magic is in the user experience and the user interface. Like I said, there are a lot of things that you can do, and there are a lot of things that are known to be good ideas in the industry in similar industries in general. But there is this element of catching lightening in a bottle. It's not easy to do. We do think that we've got really great design sensibility here, really good product sensibility that will continue to grow. It's very significant for us to bring in a great CEO like Mark Kingdon, to bring in a chief product officer like Tom Hale. These are guys with a lot of product experience in their backgrounds. And you know, obviously those are two very important executive positions, and we hired them to make real improvements in these spaces. But it's not like those things we were talking about before, you set 'em up, you nail them, everybody knows that you do these things, it'll work. There are some things you can definitely improve. You can definitely take out some of the complexity, you can definitely improve some tools, improve some search, some findability, the discovery of the experience, but at the end, that last 10% which makes all of the difference sometimes is just magic, which you've just got to keep iterating toward the (muddled).

Industry Standard: One last question: Will we ever see Second Life in a Web browser?

Yoon: I think that that is something that you know, if the demand requires it, it is something that we develop towards, surely. But I don't think that that's the magic. I know that the common refrain in the industry is "Oh, it's got to be in a browser, everything has got to be in a browser." But there are plenty of experiences that are in a browser, that are supposed to be in a 3D world, and that doesn't do it. Maybe that's necessary, but it's not sufficient? Everybody is aiming toward these little bits, "we've got to get everything together in one package," but you know it's pretty hard to do. It's pretty hard to do for a company of our resources, which is probably the largest in the virtual world space. But it is also harder to do with a company with significantly more resources. There are many very large companies are interested in this space and are doing things, but you just can't solve everything at once. I don't believe that the browser is the magic formula.

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Ginsu Yoon, Lindenlab.com, Secondlife.com, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com), Chris Ulbrich/Lewis PR, Riversrunred.com, Mimi Harris/Rivers Run Red.