Hello Crap, yes, hi. Okay, this is a, open discussion if you want to chat with your keyboards or if you want to talk via voice, either way is fine.

Just keep in mind that if you do talk with voice, I am recording this for a podcast, so people will hear you. Okay, so tonight I want to talk about visitor counters and ways to track people coming to your parcel in Second Life. There are privacy issues regarding this, so it’s also, pretty much keep your best judgment here of what these traffic meters do and what you need. All right, okay, the first traffic meter that I’ve seen was the earliest was Linden Lab traffic meter. And all it really does is it keeps a list of names of people who travel on your parcel.

And it doesn’t tell you what day they came or anything else, it just tells you who’s been there. It’s got problems with memory limitations. We obviously have the 16 kilobyte limit. And that’s also got a problem with next owner permissions, unless you modify the visitor counter. It’s mostly voice operated. So I mainly included this just to prove that Linden Labs did start out with the voice counters, not the voice counters, the visitor counters, so that they did have some participation in spawning this whole thing here. And these are free. I could only find it at Yanni’s junkyard and at that it was only the script.

I still had the original counter, the prims that I found a long time ago. So anybody can take a copy of it here. Let me see if I can move it. This is the counter right here. And it’s got some fixes in it already to get around the next owner permissions. All right. Has anybody seen this counter before?

And then it was from one of the Linden’s. Or perhaps says, I’m using the script of that prep mirror there. Okay. Yeah. These used to be on everybody’s land when I first came into second life. And I didn’t understand what they were at first.

All right. The next one, the next counter that I found looked very similar to the Linden Lab counter. And this counter is made by Maya Realities. And it doesn’t tell you the names of people who visited your parcel.

All it does is tell you how many people visited with in a certain amount of time. You can either say, let me see if I can, I’m having problems grabbing these things off the ground. Here we go. Okay.

I think I put it under my floor. Okay. The Maya counter lets you touch it and it gives you a report and says, over the last hour, there were four unique visitors and a total of 102 minutes spent in the area. The average time per visitor was 26 minutes. So it gives you a status report of just a general idea of how long people stay in your store or your parcel. So basically, it’ll give you that report of the number of visitors in the last hour, the last day, the last week, and the last month. So it’s really helpful for you to figure out how long people are actually staying into your parcel.

Okay. This sensor is free. You can have multiple sensors all over the place, so you don’t have to just be limited to one place.

Then Maya also creates a different sensor, which is you actually have to pay for it. All right. Crap, Mariner says there are some asset server issues going on. All right. I’ll be aware of that. Keep that in mind.

Okay. The Maya realities sensor is actually a lot of money, but $180 for three months. But look at the reports that they give you. They give you heat maps of entire sims. They’re able to tell you where people usually enter your sim when they first appear, where they last appeared, when they left the sim. It doesn’t tell you who those people were, but it really gives you a good idea of where they’re spending their time. One of the interesting things I found with this sensor is that it can also detect where in the world you are from.

I mean, in what country you’re from, what location you’re from, city and state. It is Maya’s impression that it’s doing this through media streams. Basically, the only way your IP can be exposed to the outside world is if you’re being told to play an audio or video stream from a specific location.

Because QuickTime is separate from Second Life, QuickTime actually sends your IP across and makes the call to get to that audio stream or video stream directly. This has potential to cause some really big privacy issues. In that response, Maya reality also requires all of its clients that actually pay for this service to display an opt-out sign so that people can’t be tracked. Or at least people can choose not to be tracked. I should say that. It also checks on your SIM health with the frames per second and time dilation so you can tell if your server is really lagged or not.

The great thing about this is you view your reports through the website. You don’t have to be in the world to see this. Alright, let’s go on to the next counter.

Metaverse Business. This counter is actually pretty small. They’re all black but I colored mine yellow here to tell the difference between two different sensors.

They have a free and a pro edition. And looking at it here, they both look the same. Let me see here. This is the free edition here.

They have it available on SLXChanger on Rez. The interesting thing about this sensor is you can touch it to get the results or you can actually use a HUD that they give to you when you get the sensor. And the HUD is able to look at the last 15 days that it’s been sensing. It might be 14 days.

I’m still a little unsure if it’s 14 or 15. I see different numbers in different places. You’re able to see how many people visited your parcel today in a single day for a single week or previous week. So because you’re able to see the previous week and the current week, you’re able to really get an idea if you’re doing better or worse in attracting visitors to your parcel. I actually like the idea you can have a HUD in late reports in the world.

That’s pretty cool myself. The next one is his pro edition. MetaFIRST Business sells a pro edition for $400 lindens. However, that includes the first month’s fee to view your web reports.

So it’s actually $150 for the sensor and $250 thereafter. They keep up to three months of statistics that you’re able to grab onto. They have a calendar control and a bar chart. I really like graphics when you show reports because we’re all visual people.

It really helps organize the different ways to look at things. Now I found that my regular sensor, the FreeBee sensor, was showing up on the web reports when I started to look at mine for the pro edition. So apparently the FreeBee sensor is recorded as well. I don’t know if it’s recorded for the whole three months though. It might be just the first few weeks. The next sensor is SLBuzz.

It’s this big blueish cyan aquatile sensor here. I originally got my $400 lindens, but now the guy behind SLBuzz is giving them away free. But only one per visitor or one per resident. So you should only have it hosted at one parcel, primarily your main headquarters where you expect people to be or your dance floors and clubs and such. You can change the look of it. It doesn’t have to stand up this large and be this big. It is proximity based, so it senses people up to 96 meters away and you can change that.

So it only detects a smaller area. One of the things I found with SLBuzz, with their analytics, is they keep your stats for well every year. I got mine in September of last year, and so it’s already been over a year since I’ve gotten this, and all of my statistics are still available. The cool thing about it is it also not only tracks the number of visitors, but it breaks it down into who are first time, not who exactly, but how many first time visitors, how many people are repeats.

If they have payment info and file or payment info used, and they break it down even further to figure out the age range. Now they don’t have charts, but you can easily pull this data into Excel and create charts on your own. I put up two charts with me right now that you may have seen that I made out of this data. So the first chart here, I was able to copy and paste most of the data off the webpage and figure out how many visitors were coming to one of my parcels on the mainland over the months. So here you can see I have February of 2007, I had over 5,000 visitors.

And then suddenly from March to July I had a steep decline in who was coming to my parcel, which is really sad. But it really shows you how powerful a chart can be in regards to when you’re just looking at raw data in a table. So the next chart I have here shows me two different simulators. Now I had looked at the data for both of my sims. I was not aware of the limitations of having only one traffic meter at the time.

Until I recently researched this a bit more, so that’s why I have two. So the main thing here is you can see the top report here is my Higgins visitor ages. It tells me what percentage of people were more than a year old, which percentage were less than a year old, less than 6 months, 3 months and so on. So it gives you an idea of the percentage of age range for visitors visiting my shop. The Woodbridge sensor below that starts in March, because that’s when I got my simulator. And you can kind of see this downward trend between both sensors of the number of younger visitors compared to the older visitors.

I have more older visitors visiting my shop than younger visitors for some reason. And then when I look over at the chart to the right of how many people were tracked each month, you can see my Woodbridge sim is slowly going up over the months. And my Higgins sim since July is slowly going down, mainly because I don’t pay attention to that sim over there and I have a lot less eye candy there. So that’s kind of expected. However, I’m still confused over the sharp increase and sharp decline of people who used to come to my sim.

So my opinion on SLBuzz is it’s hard to work with because you don’t get graphs, but because you can import it easily into Excel, you can get some pretty nice graphs from that. Okay, now where’s my presentations? There we go.

Okay, next presentation is on MetaExpand. You may have seen these advertisements behind me that have advertised different clubs and shops to go to in different services. What this is is it’s a free visitor counter with advertising built in. So it’s a really helpful way to promote other clubs and other locations at the same time, figure out how much you’ve already got in your own, how many visitors you’ve got to your own place. One of the cool things about it is they give you two weeks of free advertising and then they have different fees once you get past the two week mark. They do have web-based reports.

So if you sign up through their website and go through onto your reports, you’ll get a bar chart for each day and you can see the names of the different people it detected each hour. They have different models that you can display for your advertising billboards. So there’s the one behind me, which is the simple basic one. And then the one on the PowerPoint slides is the more advanced one. It has more visual effects going on there.

So we’ll go on to the next slide. Okay, one of the trackers I also like here is RabbitGlenn Software. Actually, I like them all.

They’re pretty cool. RabbitStats is what they call it. You do have to pay for it. The script is free and open source. But the web reports, you’ll be paying five Lendons per day for it to collect stats. You pay it up front, and then, and then it decreases over time.

So I have about 30, of credits left for my stats right now. One of the other cool parts about this is, it does record your simulators frames per second, and time dilation. It records daily, weekly, monthly reports. You can have multiple sensors set up. However, it will be five Linden’s per day per sensor.

So if you have two sensors, you’re paying 10 Linden’s per day, and so on. What I liked about it is, I was able to create separate user accounts. So if you are the owner of these sensors and you’re paying for them, and you have a couple people who are in charge of your club, you can give them permission to log in with an account, and look at the stats, so that they can understand what’s going on as well.

Mine I have set up so that the, there’s account called guest, and I gave them a permission to view both the web reports of raw data and the graphic reports. There will be notes available for you to see this for yourself. Yeah, yeah, just about all these things can be used with leasing land, or renting out and such. So, yeah, if you want to set up a place to sell, so that people can rent land from you, and you have five Linden’s per day, or whatnot, and say, okay, here’s your stats that you can access with this location as well. I hear typing. And useful for showing potential advertisers and perspective residents.

Yes, that’s correct. I mean, nobody believes traffic anymore. All right, I’ll see you later. Okay, next stat is the so sensor.com statistics. This was a pretty neat one. It’s a script that you get for free. And you can drop it into any object that you want.

Rabbit stats was just the same. You had a script that you dropped into any object you wanted to. Yes, can make emailing, camping chairs, perhaps. Okay.

Okay, so sensors, a script that you just drop into any object you want. The first 10 days are free. And then you pay 50 Linden’s per month. So you pay the object and the object pays the person who runs the thing. Actually, I believe that it automatically deducts for you.

You don’t have to keep paying. Of course, there’s a big trust issue there. You’ve got to trust that it’s not going to drain your account. I haven’t had that problem yet. So I’ll just say it’s working okay so far for me. And plus, if it did do that, then if it dropped, if it drained everything, that would be fraud.

So there’d be ways to get around that. This is a proximity-based sensor. And it gives you your web reports, 48 hours, 5 days, 31 days, and 365 days.

And how you’ve been doing over the past few months. Now, I have a little cube here that I dropped the sensor script into. I can’t reach it. I think it’s below my transparent floor again. I can’t select it.

Okay. My laptop’s getting a little funny here. Let me try it again. And now it’s invisible to me. Okay, I don’t know if anybody else can see this little box here that says SL sensor above it. Okay, but it’s actually telling me there were nine new customers in the last 47 minutes. So in world, it reacts similarly to the Maya counter.

Telling you how many customers were there in the past few minutes. Okay, crap manor since he can see it. Ah, I’m able to finally grab it. Okay, lift that above the floor.

Okay, and let me just touch it. If you touch it, you get a full menu of what you can do. It gives you a link to your web page. Now, the other thing I found out about this is if you go to the web page that it gives you, and you put in the address, so I’ll just do that right now.

The web page actually has a link to overall sensors. Or the top list. So if your place gets a lot of traffic, it will also appear on the homepage of slsensor.com. And my land actually shows up a little bit up there. It’s like halfway down the list.

So if you’re looking to see how you compare it to other places, you can look at that top list to get an idea. And I don’t recall, but I think Maya did that as well. Not Maya, the MetaExpan.

Because someone said that they found my location through MetaExpan because I was on a list of some of the top places with traffic. Okay, I’ll get to the next one here. Mechanized life. I don’t have a sensor here in front of me.

The problem is because it’s invisible. Mechanized life is a very helpful sensor in that you can walk through it and it detects people based on collision. The business for life sensor had the same option. Or was it business for life? Meta business? I gotta remember what that was. The free visit. Metaverse business.

They’re the ones. Metaverse business, the pro edition, lets you use either a regular little proximity sensor or a collision based sensor. Collision based sensors is self detecting where people are every, I don’t know, five minutes, every minute, every 10 seconds, whichever you choose. Collision sensors only get triggered when people walk through them and then they gather the information.

Of course the problem is you gotta make sure that people walk through them and usually they’re placed over doors into people’s shops. Okay, the sensor actually gives you reports on the website with payment status, age, the day of the week. They show you results by the hour, the past 30 days, and the top five visitor names. Besides the five top visitor names, you can actually follow a link to see everybody who’s visited your location along with the number of times they’ve visited and the percentage compared to everybody else. Oddly enough, I’m at the top of mine.

Just because I keep walking through this thing all the time, just during normal everyday stuff. One of the interesting parts I found is that they provide an RSS feed. And the RSS feed just tells you the name of the last person or the last 10 people who’ve walked through the sensor. So I don’t know if you need that or not, but if you have like a WordPress blog you can say on the side, you can list the last 10 visitors who’ve visited you. And personally I really like the pie charts here.

They really give me an idea of how many people have visited on a Thursday or what their payment info was compared to the other percentage of people. Okay, the last sensor, I was told about this one by the Metaverse Business Folks. And the guy said that Second Labs was a pretty big stat collecting service in Second Life. They seem to be up there with my realities with their pro addition.

Second Labs does offer a zero linden sensor that’s free for the first 30 days, but you have to register through their website to get it. And they say they’ll contact you within two days, but I have not received word back from them yet and it’s been six days I think. So we’ll see what goes on there.

No, I think it’s been three days. So we’ll see. It’s proximity based and it has different packages. Of course the 30 day free trial, but if you just stick with one sensor it’s going to be 5,000 lindens per month. Two sensors it’ll be 4,000 lindens for each sensor per month. And five or more sensors it’ll be 3,200 lindens per month for each sensor. They have very detailed charts that record the location of where people are from in which country. They also record, I think people who have come through in the past hour, the past few days, I could not get access to these reports myself. So I cannot really go into detail about this one.

So with all those sensors I’ve just described, I’ve created a comparison chart and this will be available on the podcast, but it’s also available in the world here. And let me bring up, where is it? Okay, I made a little think book for everybody to take home. Let’s see if I can, it’s downstairs, I’m trying to get my camera down there right now. Let’s see, hit it and I’ll bring it upstairs.

Come on. Oh my frame rate is so horrible right now. I’ll be glad to get rid of some of these sensors and maybe help my frames, I don’t know.

Okay, so this right here is my little think book that has all the slides so that if you don’t have enough time to look at it, you can take the book home with you, it’s free. And a 22 times is still nothing. Wait, did I miss something?

Chat history. Your frame time on the sim is maxing at 22.3. Yeah, the frames I think, I think they’re supposed to be around 40 or so, I’m not sure.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s a class five sim that should be able to show everything just fine. Okay, so the comparison chart really gives you an idea of how much each sensor costs, if they’re proximity or collision based, if they have web reports. How many statistics can they hold? If they support charts or graphics, I should say. If they tell you the names of avatars have come through, different types of reports, they record real life locations such as what country you’re from, the age of your visitors and the payment steps.

And last but not least, I have references to all the different locations that I’ve found these sensors at. Although this isn’t a PowerPoint, you can’t really click through on those links on that last page. However, the book actually has a menu in it, and if you click the menu, you can actually get a note card with this information and the actual links to get to each place on SL exchange or on Rez. Yes, the podcast will have the slurrels and such. It’s just in second life, I can’t really represent that well on a PowerPoint presentation without taking up too many words to make the font smaller. Alright, are there any questions in the audience or comments?

Tips for making a better podcast? Alright, so crap this mirror is saying. One of the powerful things about internet-based marketing is that if you want to, you can tell exactly who is visiting a place or using a service. It’s something that completely destroys the concept of sampling-based services like Nielsen and television ratings. Why would you not want to gather names for follow-up for inviting to notification groups, offer freebies, thanks for visiting, etc.? The main thing about collecting names I feel is that it starts to intrude on privacy. I’m not too certain about how far privacy it intrudes on, but I know there are people who get really antsy about that and they don’t want to be recorded as being somewhere.

For example, let’s say that you have a strip club in second life and someone is invited to a strip club but they don’t know that it’s a strip club. They suddenly appear and then they’re recorded. Now if you record them and then you broadcast to the world that the following people were at your strip club, that gets to be a really big issue. I guess that also indicates once you have the information, what are you doing with it?

If you’re publicizing it, then that becomes a real big issue. Great presentation material. Well, thank you, Nildrig. There are other second life podcasts here. If anybody is interested, I’ve got a whole slew of them downstairs on the columns so you can look up who else is in second life doing podcasting. They’re not all commentary and discussion like I am. Some of them are very amazing, so check them out.

And there are books downstairs from previous podcast episodes. Great. Well, I think that about wraps it up. 45 minutes, that seems about good, about right. If anybody else doesn’t have any questions, I guess that’s it.

Okay. If anybody uses Google Reader, you can add the podcast to your Google Reader just by clicking that button. Let me just move it out here so everybody else can see it. And then you’ll be able to listen to the podcast and get the actual… You can listen to anything that you might have missed. Alright, happy new year to you as well. Bye.