Hamlet Au is running a poll over on New World Notes. He's asking Second Life users to rate the quality of Linden-to-resident communications in recent months about updates, downtime, policy and so forth.

Think they're doing well, or doing poorly? Go and register your vote. We'll all be watching the results.

New World Notes embedded reporter Hamlet Au steps out-world to cover the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose for GigaOM, and has written up a summarized list of his top 5 Conference highlights here. Among the 5: news on HiPiHi, the Sheep's new viewer, and the diversity of the attending crowd.

I was only there for Wednesday, and only got to see a few people, and I'm sorry I missed meeting Hamlet in RL. His work has been inspiring. He also asks of those who attended: What were your highlights? For me, it was just getting to meet my favorite SL residents face-to-face, including Adri Saarinen, Peter Newell, Haver Cole, and Colleen Desmoulins of Metaversatility; Spin Martin of Saijo City; Satchmo Prototype of the Electric Sheep; and even Philip Linden himself, chatting with Eureka Dejavu!

As always, it's the people who keep me coming back to SL.

(Via GigaOM)

Linden Lab weighed in on Yankee Group's highly dubious figures this-morning, even as the Yankee Group was apparently hurriedly distancing themselves from the 12 minutes per month claim that has been spreading so far recently. As we've discussed in the past, the mainstream media loves numbers. Exceptionally large and exceptionally small ones are a favorite. There's not much better way to catch their attention than with a surprising number, and the "12 minutes per month" claim was just such a number.

"One number seems to be a lightening[sic] rod for a lot of attention," Senior Analyst Christopher Collins. (via Virtual World News)

As reported by New World Notes, on VWN, Collins tries to convince us that the rest of the report holds water, while trying to sweep the "12 minutes claim" under the rug.

"According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month." -- Yankee Group's own press release, via Virtual World News.

"I've looked at that sentence several times, and can't make head or tail of it, because it's totally at odds with all meaningful available metrics." - Hamlet Au, New World Notes.

This story's starting to spread all over the mainstream media, so let's actually do the math - because Yankee Group doesn't seem to have done any themselves.