Linden Lab hiring up to 40 part-time content creators
By Eric Reuters
Linden Lab will be paying up to 40 Second Life residents US$10/hr to create content as part of its “Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW)” initiative, Jack Linden said on Thursday. Linden will pay its workers in American dollars and not game currency, a break from most Second Life-based employment.
Jack Linden said he wanted to get a team of ten workers started immediately, and hoped to have three or four teams building parks, bridges, and roads throughout the Second Life Grid. “The real aim is to make the mainland a better place,” he said.
The LDPW is the latest in a string of recent moves by Linden to increase the attractiveness of the Second Life Grid, the company’s principal source of revenue. Earlier this month Linden Lab introduced a series of user interface improvements named “Dazzle” and banned “ad farms,” a controversial advertising practice considered virtual eyesores by critics.
Rival grids based on OpenSim technology have been rapidly expanding and undercutting Linden’s hold on the Second Life community.
Second Life’s land speculators, some of whom derive comfortable real-world incomes from trading virtual real estate, have taken an intense interest in the LDPW project. “I’m very aware what we do affects the prices of land,” Jack said. “The value of land might go up around the spaces we do things.”
While Jack said he was sensitive to the commercial impact of the LDPW’s work, he couldn’t let that dictate where he would deploy teams of workers. “We have to start somewhere,” he said.
