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So first, some fun news to report: that I was recently asked to sit in as a panelist at a meeting for SL public relations professionals. It was in fact part of the monthly meetup series hosted by Texas PR veteran Kami Huyse, that I've reported on here before; as I've mentioned in the past, being a marketer during the day myself, I've attended past events both as a journalist and a participant. For the series' third meeting, Kami decided to do a special panel on media within SL, including not only myself but my former colleague Ute Hicks of SL Business Magazine, as well as GreeterDan Godel (Daniel Terdiman in RL), Senior Writer at C|NET and the one-man operation behind their SL bureau. The meetup was hosted by the always delightful Spin Martin (Eric Rice in RL), over at his Hipcast Expo Center, and hosted by Linda Zimmer of SL Business Communicators. Anyway, it was quite a lot of fun, and there were a whole host of interesting subjects that got discussed; Kami has a transcript of the entire thing up at her blog, if you're interested.

(Oh, and on a personal note -- it was at this meetup as well that I got to meet a writer I very much admire, Tony Walsh of Clickable Culture. He's been kind enough to mention me a couple of times there, and in the ensuing months I've become a big fan. Anyway, it was nice to finally meet him.)

And then the bad news, which regular readers have already guessed; that gameplay for me within the grid these days continues to be horrible, especially when combining the insane amount of new signups these days (hundreds of thousands a month), the lagging infrastructure of the existing universe, and the low-end Mac Mini I'm using here in RL Chicago. The problem continues to be so bad, in fact, that I've decided to dub it "The Great SL Struggle of 2006," and treat it like a legitimate crisis; that is, that Linden Lab might become a victim of a significant backlash and thousands of cancelled accounts, if the problem doesn't become better soon.

That said, I'm going to slog on for now, and it's my promise to you today that I'm going to try to get back into the grid regularly and start getting daily entries finished again. Oh, and speaking of getting back up to speed, I already have two significant pieces of ITG news to announce for this week...

--In just another day or two, issue 2 of our monthly magazine will be finished and published; it's a big one, a cool one, an extremely cool one now that the whole thing is being designed by Lonely Planet's Steven Cann, over in Melbourne Australia. Steven is hard at work as we speak, adding the final touches; the PDFs should be ready to be downloaded by Wednesday at the latest.

--And then this Friday, November 17th, we're going to have an interesting feature interview here; it's with Philip Rosedale, co-founder of SL and CEO of Linden Lab. Turns out that Rosedale is pretty much just as accessible as he claims he is; I simply wrote him a random email to his public address a month or two ago, requesting an interview, and he happily obliged. Now, this being a publication about SL, I could of course do days' worth of interviews with Rosedale and still not cover everything that could be asked; and that's why I decided to stick to one specific subject, one that I've never really heard covered before, of how the current iteration of the grid both matches and clashes with what Rosedale imagined the grid to be when first starting the company. I thought it'd be interesting to examine Rosedale's background, his undergraduate dreams of virtual reality and the like; it takes something special, after all, to walk away from a senior-executive position at Real Networks, to instead try to create something that up to then had only been realized in science-fiction novels. Anyway, I hope you'll get a chance to stop by on Friday for that.

So that's it for now, and as always I thank you for your patience with both ITG's and the grid's current growing pains -- and here's to the return of daily entries here, which is something I'm looking forward to as much as you.