Dixie -- Each of us only has so much time in the day to be creative. Creating a grid is kind of like... like cooking a meal. Do you grow all your own ingredients and cook everything from scratch? Not only does it take a lot of time, but you wind up limited to the stuff that can grow in your area -- and is in season. Though some folks do do this, and more power to them!

Other times, you're rushed, and you just grab a frozen meal out of the freezer and reheat it. Boring, but it works, and keeps you fed. Or you can combine ingredients -- some fresh, some canned, some frozen -- into something unique, using your limited time and energy on the combining part, or the seasonings, or just make the salad from scratch and reheat everything else.

(Okay, I'm a little hungry right now as I write...)

Same thing for the grid. Are you going to make all your plants from scratch? Go outside and take pictures to create original textures? Or is the stock stuff good enough? Personally, what Linda Kellie is doing is way better than anything i can come up with on my own. Yes, the plants on my grid will look "the same" as on other grids (though I may arrange them differently) but at least they won't look worse!

Similarly, does everyone need to create all their office buildings and classrooms from scratch? Or use their time when it comes - in creating unique interactive learning or collaboration experiences?

Having stock plants, buildings, furniture, avatars, even entire regions available doesn't hurt creativity -- just creates time and opportunity to be creative in different ways.

Troy -- You're absolutely right. The Internet is the underlying communication network for everything from the Web to email to instant messaging to FTP file transfers to peer-to-peer networks -- and the hypergrid runs on top of it as well.

Troy --

Great idea! And OpenSim doesn't have to wait for a Google to come around -- that will take millions of hypergates connecting grids. Advertising could also be sold off of a curated, Yahoo-style directory.

I hope a viewer developer somewhere is paying attention to this!

Paco -- There are tradeoffs. Free regions often have a catch -- a limit on the number of users, maybe, or limited prims, or limit on scripts, or only available for a limited number of months. Or you can only get a parcel, not a full region. Or no OAR exports. Or max one free region per customer. (Each grid has different limitations.)

As a general rule of thumb, you get what you pay for.

For example, if you want to have 100 regions -- for example, different versions of your builds, where you would then sell the OAR files to your corporate customers -- then Kitely is a great deal. You're only paying for the time you spend in-world, and you can have your assistants working with you, and your customers can come and visit the regions to get a preview, then you export the OAR and sell it to them.

If you want to have a region that you plan to use for a popular club, you're better off with an always-on region from a traditional vendor, on a high-traffic grid. If you want to have a store, and want to make sure your content is protected, you're best off on a closed commercial grid -- and pay for a region that can handle all your prims and customer traffic.

Meanwhile, you have a 100% free region, in unlimited quantities, on your home computer -- but you can only get visitors if you know how to configure your ports and routers, and at most you'll be able to get a handful of visitors over typical consumer broadband connections.

Tween -- Yes. Several articles a week's worth, typically. If you're interested in education in particular, check out: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/07/educator...

Dutch -- 80,000 prims is a factor of the Aurora-sim setup -- and, in a practical sense, you'd still have to deal with viewer limitations. By the time your guests load up all your 80,000 prims, they might be too old to enjoy them. :-)

But, in fact, there is no upper limit on OpenSim regions at all -- the standard 45,000 prim limit that we see is just the default setting. it could be changed to anything. ScienceSim has regions on it with over 100,000 prims. They just take a long time to load! A very long time!

But, aside from complaints like Pam's about usability or customer support -- which all OpenSim vendors can use some help with, frankly -- Nova seems to be delivering what they promise, and I've talked to some satisfied customers.

Nova is an advertiser -- you can see their ad on the top right of the page -- but I have no compunction against running negative articles about advertisers (and have lost one -- maybe two -- advertisers already as a result) and no problems running positive articles about companies that don't advertise.

Dutch, if you have negative experience with any of our advertisers, and are willing to go on the record and talk about it, I'd love to do a story. I strongly believe that negative articles -- about backups, security, customer service, or slow upgrades -- help point out bad practices, and motivate vendors to fix them -- and also help distinguish good vendors. And that helps improve the industry as a whole and grows the market.

I believe that people are more likely to buy if they know ahead of time what the catch is. A particular vendor may offer an enticing package, but if you don't know what the downside is, you might not be willing to buy. But if you know the downside -- say, inadequate customer service, or traffic limits, or a new grid without any social stuff on it yet, or what have you -- you might decide that the downside is worth it and you go ahead and take the free land offer, or the cheap region, or what have you.

In the case of this particular deal, the downside is that you won't have more than 10 visitors on your region at the same time. So it's not a good deal if you want to have a store or a club, or company offices, or a meeting venue -- any place where you expect to have more traffic, or hope to have more traffic. And the other downside is that you can only get the regions on open grids like OSGrid or Nova or your own standalone. That means that if you want to put up a store and sell stuff, your customers will be able to take it anywhere they want. By comparison, regions on closed commercial grids like InWorldz and Avination go for around $60 a month.

However, you can use these cheap regions as a place to build, or keep your warehouses, and then export your creations and upload them to Avination and InWorldz for retail sale. That way, you can have a lot of cheap land to build on, and can make as many backups of all your stuff as you want, and still be able to sell your creations in a secure, closed environment.

Almo -- No problem. Anyone who has specific questions -- or story suggestions, or columns to contribute, or new grids to add to our directory can email Hypergrid Business at editor@hypergridbusiness.com or me specifically at maria@hypergridbusiness.com

If, by "ambassador" you mean PR person, then I can recommend a couple of marketing consultants, but you'd probably be better off looking at someone already on your team who can be a spokesperson for the grid. Have them email me -- I have a few suggestions about how they can promote it, many of which won't cost you anything.

Linda -- Servers are getting cheaper all the time. Nova makes a profit with $5.95 regions of 45,000 prims each.

On the web, Blogger and Facebook are profitable even though they give away Webspace. Farmville is profitable even though it gives away virtual farms. Yes, it costs money for Farmville to run all their servers. But they make it back -- and then some -- by selling all the add-ons.

People will still be inspired to create. Maybe not to pay for their basic residential land, but to upgrade to premium land, or to buy virtual pets, or whatever else it is that they want in the worlds.

But at the end of the day, it's all a moot point because prices are falling dramatically -- and on a daily basis, it seems. As soon as land is so cheap that grids can cover the cost by selling currency, or memberships, or premium land for club owners and businesses -- then its more profitable to give away the residential plots for free, because it brings in residents who will buy the currency, the memberships, or the stuff the retailers are selling.

And that means more customers for the designers and the creators.

Linda -- When the price of land gets low enough, it makes more sense to offer it for free, and make up the difference in other ways (advertising revenues, currency sales, retail shops). Most of the consumer-focused web-based virtual worlds already offer their users free personal rooms. Google's Lively gave away land plots before Google decided it wasn't in the social game business.

What I'm saying is that it will happen. Probably soon, rather than later. And grids need to be ready for this.

Meanwhile, for content creators, this is all a good thing -- all the money people currently spend on tier, they will be spending on content, instead.

And as more people are attracted by low-cost or free land and join up, the more revenues the grids will have from the ancillary revenue streams, the more money they can invest in streamlining the infrastructure -- and drive the price even lower.

Eventually, I believe we'll have something like what we've got now with webhosting. You can have unlimited space with a hosted service (like Blogger or Facebook or whoever) but you're stuck with their limitations -- a small choice of templates, limits on visitors, no commerce, no scripts, no exports, or whatever the limits on free land will be. And if you want more control, then instead of hosting your own website (and doing whatever you want with it), you'd just host your own grid -- and you'll pay a fixed price every month, and get unlimited regions (and pay extra for traffic) or unlimited regions and unlimited traffic, but pay extra for processing. After all, storage is cheap -- pretty much all the Web hosting companies are already offering unlimited storage.

It's good for consumers. It's good for creators. I believe it will be very good for grid owners (who are smart enough to get out ahead of the trend). It will be bad for land reselers -- unless they figure out a way to add value to the land that's worth paying extra for.

I wasn't endorsing his product or service -- just saying that one of his marketing tricks seems to be appropriate to a virtual environment.