Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,372,000 at an exchange rate of L$268.7 to US$1
• Exchanged US$274,000 at an average of US$11,400.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$197,000
• Market sales were US$75,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$1,400
• The busiest time was at 11am when about US$16,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 3am when about US$6,000 was exchanged.

Today in Second Life we had:

• 27,981 new signups bringing us to 10,614,271 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 51,914 at 2:25PM, and a minimum concurrency of 26,808 at 1:15AM. Median concurrency for the day was 39,933.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.58 (lower is better).
• Yes, huge changes are afoot at Second Life Insider. Full details in one hour.
• A short notice rolling restart of the grid.
• A new viewer release candidate (RC2).
• Havok 4 and the beta grid are back up again.

Linden Lab has released a new Second Life viewer release candidate, specifically, 1.18.4(RC2). This fixes a number of issues with since the last release. There's a list of those changes below the fold.

The viewer is available from the optional downloads page as usual, and we suspect that this one might just be a little more plausible as a release candidate than the last one.

Hello? Akela? Moo?! Where did everybody go?!

*tries door*

Is anybody in there? HELLLOOOOO?? Come on guys, this isn't funny anymore! I'm cold and there are wolves after me!

This is like that episode of Star Trek where everybody kept disappearing and only Picard noticed it was happening because everybody else thought the missing people had never even existed in the first place. And that kept happening until Picard was the only one left and it turned out he was just trapped in some shrinking universe-type thing and when he himself disappeared he was back with his crew. That was massively cool.

*whistles to self*

Well. I don't think they're coming back. I guess I may as well go too.

Bye.

According to the official blog there's a rolling restart underway. Details are sketchy, but when they're this poorly announced they usually mean it's an exploit fix and we won't get a lot of additional details, although it is also setting up for the new search, fixing sale auction IDs and (most interesting) allowing inventory databases to switched in and out without booting everyone.

The restart is running North to South, so jump North if you get caught by it. It started at 2:17pm and will run until about 6pm.

I'd been a reader of Second Life Insider for quite some time when I heard that Akela Talamasca was looking for me. I couldn't quite understand why he'd want ME to write for this blog. I'm still not sure what he saw in me, but now I feel like I'm part of the family.

These last nine months have been so enriching for me, but like Akela, it's time to move on. I promised myself that I wouldn't cry, but I'm just so sad to go. I wish I could tell you more, but that's for another post. For now, just know that I'll be taking this massive opportunity to provide you with even better coverage of the things that you love. I'm pouring some liquor out for you, SLI.

If I were a pagan, this would be the first day of the new year. Although it's not a description I'd use, I've known more than enough over the years, and sometimes that feeling of looking forward now (in relative sobriety) rather at the more normal new year (which is also a RL friends birthday and rarely sober if I'm healthy) feels right.

Somehow I think this year to come will be a year of massive changes. Looking back, a year ago I wasn't writing, now I find things to write about in SL most days as well as the "boring numbers" column - although a lot of people read the boring numbers too, and find them useful.

A year ago I was trying to make a living from SL. Now, I still am - having meningitis and recovering from it slowed me down, but I'm close to the point of making a comfortable living now, and writing for SLI helps with that massively. Over 125,000 words so far, and more to come, whatever the future might hold for us all - at least unless LL shut the door!

There have been things of a personal nature that have changed my life massively and that haven't made it into press, but journalism of this sort agrees with me equally massively. Hope you'll follow through whatever changes the next year brings and enjoy what you read.

If Linden Lab couldn't find any evidence of wrongdoing at Wonderland, perhaps they need to hire some journalists to investigate incidents like this. It seems that most everyone else found something broadly offensive in the place, and well, the journalists apparently found the worst sort of offense in next to no time.

Linden Lab has apparently shut Wonderland down now - we don't know if they found evidence of wrongdoing themselves, or if it is a reflexive reaction to the mainstream media putting the story in front of about 150 million people so far.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have heard me refer to this announcement: I will no longer be writing for SLI. As Lead Blogger, and one of the remaining founding members (along with Aimee), I've found writing for you all to be one of the most rewarding experiences I could have asked for. I've seen amazing things, met wonderful people, and generally had the time of my virtual life! Now I'm moving on.

This is not to say you've heard the last of me, though some of you will be sorry to hear that! No, in fact, I'll be jumping right aboard a brand-new blog, which will be announced tomorrow right here on SLI! So, shed no tears for wolfie; I'll be in good hands. Good, warm, massive hands.

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,284,000 at an exchange rate of L$266.4 to US$1
• Exchanged US$257,000 at an average of US$10,700.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$173,000
• Market sales were US$84,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$200
• The busiest time was at 11am when about US$26,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 11pm when about US$5,000 was exchanged.

Today in Second Life we had:

• 32,528 new signups bringing us to 10,585,610 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 50,872 at 3:30PM, and a minimum concurrency of 27,105 at 1:05AM. Median concurrency for the day was 39,968.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.84 (lower is better).
• Famed teen resident Katharine Berry turns her back on Second Life.
• Akela rounds up some of the best Halloween Haunts in Second Life, while Moo brings you an excellent list of Halloween freebies and cheapies!
• It turns out that screen legend, and deft comedian Stephen Fry has a Second Life too.
• A Second Life grid backbone service failed causing some users to have login problems.
• Group IMs have been identified as having some ongoing issues.
• Hamlet Au wants to know what you think about the quality of Linden-to-resident communication.
• The 18th episode of SLI's very own podcast, On The Inside, is available now with Ansel Gasparini, the author of Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World.
• Accounts and Inventory on the beta-grid is being wiped and reloaded from the main grid, there are several upgrades, and improvements to Havok.
• Grady Booch rocks - but then again, he always has.
• DJ Nexeus Fatale gives back to the community.
• slscout.com launches a new social networking site for Second Life.
• Moo provides a quick primer on encoding video for Machinima.

I've been reading about the resident survey that Linden Lab has been randomly sending to Second Life residents via their client. I was surprised to find it on my screen the other day. It asked the question, "Is your Second Life experience getting better or worse?"

The brown noser in me immediately wanted to answer "better", but when I thought about it, it hasn't gotten any better. As you can see by my answer on the right, I chose the simple response that the grid seems to be buckling under the large amount of logins. I don't know if this is the real cause of the problems, but we've had more inventory loss, texture issues, and transfer problems than ever.

Did you receive the survey? How did you/would you answer? Leave a comment!

While it's Halloween and we're embracing our fears, I'd like to chat about encoding video. When you look at all the setting choices that you have, it can be downright intimidating. I recently had the chance to speak with the wonderful Machinimist extraordinaire, Paul Marino, about this very topic and he set me straight.

There are a couple of programs that you can use to encode SL-friendly Machinima. The first being Quicktime Pro. It runs roughly 30 USD and gives you some quick and easy options. Since I'm running the Ed Wood Festival this year, I'm using it to re-encode every video in Quicktime MOV H.264 compression with AAC 48khz, Stereo, 160kbps audio.

Another handy program is something that Frank Dellario, ILLBixby Cerveau of the ILL Clan, recommend. It's called Super C, because it has the copyright symbol after Super. It's totally free, but can be daunting because of the sheer amount of options in it. It also has a hard to find download link, so keep your eye out for it.

Do you have a program you'd like to recommend, or specific settings that you like to use? Leave a comment!

slscout.com is the latest SL-focused social networking site, and it's got all the right elements: embedded videos, forums, etc. Even better, they're holding a contest right now wherein users can post their favorite photos, have them rated by other users, and possibly win the First Prize of 25,000L!

Join up today!

(Thanks, Johnvan!)