This morning I spent a little too much time catching up on my Second Life and my RSS reader currently show 342 unread items. I’ll get that reading done eventually, but likely much later as the cup is overflowing today.

I suppose blogging about one’s second life seems very pointless to those who don’t even like reading about somebody’s first life, but there were some interesting intersections that arose this morning that raised my Hmm meter.

Signed up for a local Seattle Second Life meetup
I found out about this group from Jeff Barr on a Seattle-oriented mailing list I belong to and joined right away. I also wrote back to the rest of the mailing list that if they had a new SL-related product, service or event they wanted our VTOR blogging group to cover to drop a notecard on me in world. We’re looking for new SL-related things to cover on that blog. Jeff already dropped two Amazon-related events in a notecard to me. Most excellent.

I doubted ever using the meetup.com website again after they went off haphazardly on our blogger meetup group last year. The idea to develop something else never went anywhere though (probably more my fault than anybody elses) and I stopped going to meetings pretty much thereafter. Not because we didn’t get something else going but because I got more involved in other things. Retrospectively, it’s strange how one negative situation can impact a positive one. I saw the coordinator, Anita Rowland, of that meetup at Northern Voice 2 in Canada and mentioned that I’d like to start going to the local blogger meetups again.

Given a choice between one or the other I’m probably more intrigued by the Second Life meetup because I still am searching for the best way to coordinate our online business with SL. Haven’t even considered our offline business. I’d like to say it’s been the raging success that Linden Labs likes to trumphet out in the media but the reality is that I’m merely treading water with my RL to SL virtual business. Haven’t taken a penny out of their system, but haven’t had to invest more than the original $200 USD into it. My monthly tier for land of $25USD/month is currently covered by my in-world business and dealings.

No, money isn’t everything
Which brings me to a discussion with one of my SL friends this morning about some of the business-related concerns of SL residents like me. I think my friend misinterpreted my goals as greedy. I’m not looking to be the richest person in SL, I’m simply looking at SL as another possible way to expand our online web business. Yes, I’d like to make that a profitable experience because that’s what every business primary bottom line goal is: profit. Is profit more important than good customer service? No. Is profit more important than making a great product that fits a specific need? Of course not.

Web profitability tax
What sometimes is missed in a discussion of business is that if there is no profit — or no sizable profit — than the business may not be able to continue to provide great service and a great product. No matter what any businessowner says or does, if they don’t reach a profit with their business the longevity of that business remains in constant peril.

Sure there are hobbyist enterprises. We’ve all seen websites that come onto the scene and the person says they are doing it for the love or art and it’s not about the money. Now show me just one of those sites that’s doing a significant amount of traffic singing the same song? It’s the web popularity tax.

I’m sure other readers here with websites who have not taken the SL plunge yet — for whatever reason — would be interested to know the real world value of spending time in one of these virtual worlds.

If I succeed at anything with this blog, hopefully it’s keeping things thoughtful and real. I try to relate my experiences, good and bad, and to see things from many different perspectives, but primarily the perspective of who I am: a business owner on the web. That’s what I’ve been for several years now, officially and professionally since 1999. Unofficially since 1995. You don’t write about what you don’t know if you want to be very credible. That’s why it’s difficult for me to write about creating websites purely for the love. I have made a few of those type sites, sure, but eventually one of two things always happened:

1) they became too popular and needed a revenue stream to pay for the traffic
2) I got bored with them and moved on

Back to Second Life, the world that some might be sick of reading about. I hear you, I didn’t want to turn this blog into Things That Second Life You Go Hmm, so most of the SL-related content is posted to our group VTOR blog. It’s the same with other topics too like the Mac. I write about all things Mac on my Mac blog. This doesn’t mean I won’t write about the Mac or Second Life here, but it will be far less often.

The bottom line
I have five mouths to feed and can’t spend huge amounts of my time in some virtual world making fake items that generate pennies a day in income. I suspect there are readers in the same boat that are looking to spend their time wisely. That’s not me trashing SL, it’s a simple economic reality.

I would have made more money here writing and publishing posts this morning than I made inside Second Life and blogging on our group Second Life blog. That doesn’t mean I don’t think having a separate blog for detailed niche topics is important because I do. So am I doing that group blog for the money? Obviously not if you look at the spreadsheet showing it’s making a little over a dollar a month. This blog didn’t make much money the first year it was in business. It takes an initial investment of time to make a blog rock and roll. I’m still committed to that cause and intend to tell the rest of our group that later on today during our show.

It’s not always about the money and unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to intimate that in chat before logoff, so hopefully this post will fill that void. I did send along a message after my friend had logged off to say this.

For example, me attending the MLB Homerun Derby wasn’t all about the money, but it was somewhat about the money (otherwise they wouldn’t have charged L$1,000 per ticket to attend). It was about the experience and seeing what kinds of events could run successfully inside SL and generate RL income. I learned what was possible and what type of pricing for said event was fair and reasonable. Valuable learning and fun.

This morning I learned that the business interests of some SL residents do not necessary jive with the art and for the love of it interests of other residents. That’s to be expected, I suppose. Look at the recent digg vs. netscape conflict (probalby more media stirring than actual, serious conflict) which has Jason Calacanis offering to buy off at $1,000/month the top content promoters on other sites like digg.

Some were outraged that Jason would offer, others thought it was about time a business was tested for content promoters and others went up the middle. Me? I’m still in Jason’s corner on the offer. I don’t think Kevin Rose is being very credible saying (paraphrasing) diggers do it only for love when he stands to cash in millions when/if digg sells. Ok, so the rest of us do it for love and digg.com does it for the money?

But then it’s not really Kevin’s fault. He didn’t put a gun to the those top digger’s heads and say: hey, come on in and digg your life away. If you spend a lot of your time at a third party site giving them content and getting nothing but a number in the browser and stroked ego for your efforts, that’s your business. And your time.

This brings me back to this blog. I love to write and I’ve said it before that if the economics were such that this blog was time prohibitive I would have to make concessions and changes. The good news is everything is cool. This site is enjoying increased traffic and remains profitable.

From what I’ve experienced with Second Life so far, it’s been a fairly immersive and time-consuming process vs. what economic benefit it has provided. Just like our VTOR blog, I didn’t and don’t expect a real profit to materialize there for awhile, but I do expect that it will turn a proft someday.

Social benefit
From a social perspective I’ve made a few new virtual friends. I don’t want to sound like friends don’t matter because they do, but friends rarely pay the bills. Not in Linden dollars most certainly. But friends do provide moral support when things are not going so well. There is no price for that kind of support and if someone reading is perhaps lonely (I’m not) having a Second Life could definitely add a dimension there.

I think if I was lonely though I wouldn’t be logging on to solve those issues, I’d be attending an event somewhere and meeting people in person.

Hopefully my friend understands the honesty relating to my primary goal in Second Life being business-oriented. Friends can agree to disagree and I think my friend more believes that things in life like SL should be more for love than money. If I interpreted the conversation correctly, that’s at least the perspective of my friend. I understand and fully respect that perspective, but it’s not a realistic goal for a serious business person with limited time. I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to explore SL and try to find where our business fits or doesn’t fit. If ultimately I decide it doesn’t fit, then SL will be just another IM client, albeit a fancy 3D virtual one, to me. I’m not there yet.

My response to the love or money question is: why can’t there be both? And if one has a goal like I do of being primarily focused on making money, does that automatically make the assumption that person is focused on avarice? Does it completely discount that h/she might actually have a love for art at the same time? I don’t think so. It’s a deep discussion for a Friday, but I find the topic fascinating.

There are lots of intentions and motivations for doing something and I don’t believe that someone admitting money and business is their primary reason for being in blogging, podcasting, running a website, whatever online and not still be very passionate and enjoy what they are doing. Also, I don’t believe that someone saying they are “only doing it for love” and then having to take the business side of things into account to pay for their site’s success later is ultimately selling out. Some might feel differently but at the end of the day somebody has to pay for the lights.

What do you think?

• Rave whoring
• Launching VTOR the Virtual TO Reality blog
• Inking in Second Life, sort of
• Meetup to introduce new features
• Web organized team buying in China gaining popularity
• Skype Meetup Wrapup