Clay Shirky escreveu, no blog Valleywag, um interessante e caústico artigo acerca dos números lançados pela Linden Labs acerca do Second Life e da forma como estes têm sido noticiados pela imprensa. De relembrar que ainda recentemente foi anunciado que o Second Life teria atingindo os dois milhões de residentes. É exactamente pelo termo residente que Shirky ataca os números do mundo virtual:
The basic trick is to make it hard to remember that Linden’s definition of Resident has nothing to do with the plain meaning of the word resident. My dictionary says a resident is a person who lives somewhere permanently or on a long term basis. Linden’s definition of Residents, however, has nothing to do with users at all — it measures signups for an avatar. (…)
Confused yet? Wait, there’s less! Linden’s numbers also suggest that the Residents figure includes even failed attempts to use the service. They reported adding their second million Residents between mid-October and December 14th, but they also reported just shy of 810,000 logins for the same period. One million new Residents but only 810,000 logins leaves nearly 200,000 new Residents unaccounted for. Linden may be counting as Residents people who signed up and downloaded the client software, but who never logged in, or there may be some other reason for the mismatched figures, but whatever the case, Residents is remarkably inflated with regards to the published measure of use.
Mas se a empresa é atacada por Shirky, ainda sobra espaço para as críticas aos jornalistas que têm escrito acerca do tema:
They work for newspapers and magazines that employ (or used to employ) fact-checkers. Yet here they are, supplementing Linden’s meager PR budget by telling their readers that Residents measures something it actually doesn’t.
Uma leitura que se recomenda.
Tags: Media 
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