While traffic monitoring in Second Life has always been a bit controversial, Clear Ink's  Slogbase tool released earlier this week is about to make it more so.  A free open source tool, Slogbase will give its customers new power to track the movements of individual avatars across sims.

Customers of Slogbase will set up beacons on their property that run an ongoing sensor cycle.  Every 60 seconds, the beacons will collect data on all the avatars within a certain radius, and send this data to a Slogbase server.  Over time, such data can be used to track a wide variety of SL traffic behaviour.

Clear Ink  bills itself as a “Digital Marketing Strategy and Services” firm, and is presently a $150 million integrated marketing communications agency.  While Clear Ink offers the Slogbase product for free, it has a services-based business model for the product.

Slogbase is the brainchild of Leon Atkinson, VP and Chief Technologist at Clear Ink.  SLNN met Leon Atkinson in-world at the SL Clear Ink offices.  Atkinson looks forward to the collaborative opportunities for Clear Ink that will develop through customer interest in Slogbase.  He adds, “The cool thing about releasing something like this is that people will use it in unexpected ways.”

A review of the SL forums on questions of traffic and tracking reveal a pot pourri of opinions.  Many are distrustful of traffic statistics, and think such tracking creates wrong incentives in an idealistic virtual world.  Others see traffic monitoring as a necessary presence, and a way for landowners to try to optimize their investments.  A number of SL citizens confirmed that their avatars had been tracked in the past.

Clear Ink recommends that customers of Slogbase set it up to “send an instant message via the in-world LSL script to avatars within the beacon area, politely informing them that their presence has been noted.”  Nevertheless, when SLNN’s reporter visited a sim equipped with Slogbase, she was messaged only about 10 minutes after arriving on-site.  Even then, while it had a “Slogbase SW” tag, the message was a simple greeting similar to those at thousands of sims throughout SL.

While Atkinson understood certain people’s fears about having their movement tracked in SL, he compared the tool to Web server logs on the Internet.  “Everyone understands that when you visit Amazon.com, they track every page you view.”  He also added that since the product is open source, people can look at source code itself to assuage any concerns about the use of the product.