We take a moment to pause and reflect on the goings on at Maxping Magazine in it's first month online
Maxping Magazine officially began late at
night on the 14th April when Jani Pirkola made the announcement
that Cybertechnews was continuing as Maxping Magazine. So this
summary of a month in the life of Maxping only really means about
two and a bit weeks - of course a lot of work went on behind the
scenes before that fateful day.
Simon Probert, who in real-life runs a internet consultancy,
originally had the beginnings of the idea for Maxping back in early
November 2008 - round about the time Linden Labs announced the
price hike for Openspace sims. He decided to abandon his well known
nudist colony in Second Life® and run his own
server. (The colony still runs today as the guests took it
over)
He followed the same path that many of our readers have followed
in the discovery setting up his own simulator and connecting to
OSGrid. While help was always to be found on the OSGrid.org forum,
Simon soon realized that there was no single point of entry for the
early adopters of the technology - the information was fragmented
and often misleading. He registered the avatar "Max Ping" ( A long
standing alter ego) and started documenting his journey on the
forum and Opensimulator wiki with a view to eventually creating
"some sort of magazine-like thing" out of it all.
Meanwhile, Jani Pirkola, former project lead of the RealXtend
project in Finland made a small announcement on the OSGrid forum...
OSGrid
articles and writers needed to find content for the
fledgeling Cybertech News. If you read the post you will note that
Max says near the end...
I do intend to start a blog at some point which you will be welcome to take a feed from
In fact, that blog was Maxping Magazine - Simon just didn't want
to show his hand so early in the proceedings. Ralf the Shark, also
known as Ralf Haifisch answered Jani's call and started writing
articles for CTN. Simon watched the growth of CTN with great
interest as it looked like CTN could potentially be an important
piece of the Maxping puzzle
A few weeks later, Simon realizing that Maxping was never going
to work if he tried to do it alone contacted Ralf and Jani and
proposed the bigger project - less of a blog aggregator and more of
a content generator. Luckily they shared the vision for something
bigger (and hopefully better) and thus Maxping Magazine, as we have
it today was born. Of course, Maxping is bigger even than the three
of us so thankfully our latest addition to the team came onboard to
help with the mammoth task of making sense out of all the articles,
often written by people where English is not their native language.
The fabulous Dave Pentecost ( More about him later )
So now lets look at what this article is actually about:
The first month at Maxping Magazine
After one week, we got very positive response. Considering we
have done very little marketing other than to "friends and family"
we nudged over 15000 page views in just under two weeks, with an
even split between returning visitors and new visitors... (Isn't
Urchin, er. Google Analytics great ?) The greatest majority of our
readers are in the United States, followed by Germany and the
United Kingdom.
Comments like "my compliments for the site!! " came in
via email.
Interestingly in that short space of time in addition to our
self-generated content we have already had many submissions of
unique articles and tutorials from our readers. Such as Dave
Pentecost's Installing Opensim on Mac
OSX and Valer Mieshenko's examination of Augmenting
Reality... Ziah Zangshun has been getting down and dirty with
MRM
Scripting. We have lots more in the pipeline, so if you have an
article you want to get out there then send it in!
Of course we continue bring you bits from various developer
blogs such as Adam Frisby and Justin CC
If you have an important piece of news that needs to be
communicated then get it over to us - our audience is growing
rapidly. We are particularly interested in building up the
resources section - how-to's - scripting anything you like.
Furthermore if you are a builder then we need some help with the
Maxping Plaza & so on...
We have also provided a variety of ways to get access to Maxping
content such as the feeds and twitter. You can also join the
"maxping-members" group on Google and "maxping" on Linkedin - See
you there....
We look forward to a growing reader group, introducing great
authors and lots more interesting artciles. The only way is up it
seems :)
Introducing Dave Pentecost
Following Dave's Opensim on Mac OSX article, he was looking for
a polite way to tell us that some of our articles, while not poorly
written had a few er.. grammatical idiosyncrasies. He has offered
to help with the editing and proof-reading of submissions to
Maxping, particularly the articles submitted by non-native English
speakers...
Hurrah for Dave!
Dave, an ex-TV producer and archaeology enthusiast has been
experimenting with Opensim to recreate archeological sites such as
the Maya Temple complex at Palenque in Mexico. So we anticipate
some very interesting articles from him on this subject as well...
nudge nudge
So whats next...?
Well, we exist in an evironment that is constantly changing - so
there's always more news and stuff to publish. There are lots of
cool articles in the pipeline and we will slowly be building up
features and freebies for our readers - not the dodgy free stuff
you can find lying around - but fully legal stuff submitted by some
of the top designers from alternative virtual worlds like Second
Life.
Maxping members will also get their hands on neat web-based
tools that help you manage and communicate with your region such as
"Pingbox" for messaging and "Pingstats" for visitor tracking.
That's it for now, we intend to write a monthly summary like
this one to keep readers in tune with the mag. So just remember,
keep coming back and tell your friends :)
The Team @ Maxping
aka. "A bunch of geeks pretending to be
journalists"
We recommend that you discuss this article on Think, but if you really want to you can leave a comment right here as well: