Why take Torley Linden off the blog?

There are some public relations decisions that sometimes leave us scratching our heads. When you have credible faces in your organization, you want them to be as visible as possible.

Yet, Linden Lab has just done the opposite. By putting recently an end to Torley Linden's video posts on its blog, it removed one of the personalities that brought Second Life a large, friendly contribution from the most natural places where someone can find it.

Currently, the video tutorials page, barely visible in various sections of secondlife.com, buries new videos in a single link. Its RSS feed is not even that visible. Anyone who has grown as a Second Life user by finding Torley's tutorials will remember that those casual blog visits were more worthwhile than they will be in the future.

Unless you do extensive research or commit much time to it, Second Life is an insider's world that is hard to grasp. Torley's videos make the learning curve easier to attack, vastly enhancing new user experience. It also added a much needed friendly and human touch to the LL blog.

Now, a complex virtual world that most new users do not understand requires facilitating methods instead of tightening methods. But hey, who am I to know?

Alesia Schumann