Peter alerted me to a pie chart in the Lindens' recent blog post on the SL economy's 3Q stats:
Look at that chart. It divides the user-to-user L$ transactions by country. Do you see what I see? Malaysian users make up 4% of the total transactions. What? 4%! We even beat the Australians and Canadians at 2% each!
I'm like, wtf where are all these Malaysians?! Because in all my time in SL (nearly 2 years now) I've only met one other Malaysian who lives in Malaysia. I know two living abroad, and the two friends I introduced to SL hardly ever come in anymore. Don't tell me that I alone spend enough to account for that 4%! Because I'll sock you one :p
Anyway, it's interesting, isn't it? I want to meet all these Malaysians. I like to think they'd be cool interesting people and not griefers or copybotters. *sighs*
Talking about copybotters, I support the cause of Artist's Voice and the sentiments behind it, but if you would just look at that chart I showed up there, you can see that the grid is really, really large. To "send a message to LL" one would have to mobilise content creators across the grid, not just the English-speaking ones, and not just the ones you know, or the ones you regularly interact with within your circle.
So I understand if some want to stop shopping or close their stores for these 48 hours as a gesture of solidarity, or to show support for the cause. But if they're doing it to "send a message to LL", frankly, I think um.... they must be extremely optimistic people.
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I still have to smile at the idea that it is you alone. But the point wiht the Australians and Canadians is a valid one. I know quite a lot of either, and I know they move quite some L$. So there ought to be a bunch of Malaysians out there.
Maybe adjust your day/night cycle?
/me runs giggling and hides
I really wish i had your same problem, Quaintly. 'cos I have been trying to hide from fellow italians for 3 years now. but i cant, they are everywhere.
Argh, statistics! They should be banned!
In this case, what we have is a massive bulk of English native users (49%), and we can also expect that many of the others are bilingual users, probably raising the English speaker tab up to a 60 or 70%, and making English the optimal target for this kind of initiative.
So, each translation to any language would bring less than a 10% to the pool, and more probably only around a 5%, increasing complexity a lot...
... and for what readers? Nothing stops bilingual bloggers from reading the English proposal and then post about it in their native languages, I could do it in Spanish, but I don't have Spanish readers, at least none who doesn't understand English.
/me puts down her glasses and tsk tsks at statistics in a very annoying way.
The huge problem is we tend to forget that only a very limited percentage of users read blogs; even if they are the best ones *winks*, they aren't enough to dent sales, not unless most mayor sellers closed their shops, something I am pretty sure didn't happen.
So it isn't as if you where wrong, Artist's Voice was pretty pointless. But using statistics? You should be ashamed of yourself, they can be bent to say anything you want :-p
The statistic comes from Linden Lab, covers the user-to-user-L$-transactions and is based on IP-based geotargeting. It does not focus on language, but on country of origin. So if we assume LL's data-source is reliable, there are really 4% of users who are geographically located in Malaysia and who engage in transactions involving the transfer of L$.
As with every statistic, it has dozens of loopholes. We know no absolute number. We don't know how unique those 4% are (multiple use of the same IP-address vs. fixed IP will skew it). For all we know all of those 4% (except Quaintly) could be people from the Spanish embassy in Kuala Lumpur.
The only thing we know is that there is a certain economic activity coming out from the geographical region of Malaysia. And that this activity is the same amount as the activity coming out of the geographic region of Australia and Canada TOGETHER. And this is indeed quite remarkable.
How many real, individual, active Malaysian users are out there, the statistic does not tell. It could be one single Malaysian user (or employee of the Spanish embassy in Kuala Lumpur) who sold or bought 5 islands from LL.
Or it could indeed be Quaintly's shoe shopping...