I caught this on TheGridLive.com and then rolled over to New World Notes about AM Radio’s philanthropic campaign. I just went in world and made another donation staight to AM Radio. (I later met AM Radio again at the The Wall SL build covered here by Aribella Lafleur you can visit it inworld at TheWall. )

Background on The Far Away and Wheat Project

See: The Giving Fields: Real Cows Purchased with Virtual Wheat or at Not Possible IRL (In Real Life) blog for some background. Some more wheat pics at SLConceptual or more background at Ambling in Second Life or IBM’s Ian Hughes site.

Power of Pixelated Wheat

As it goes around late September of this year, avatar and content creator, AM Radio, set out some plots of wheat for sale on the land where his own virtual wheat field in Second Life sits, known as The Far Away. His goal was to raise enough in the campaign to buy a cow through the Heifer International Project. I remember it well as I attended a live concert and went on to pick up some of the “virtual wheat”, several plots actually, and they are really neat and well made. Note- if you rez them you might want to link them together or they come up one strand at a time.

The fact that Second Lifers are a pretty giving bunch doesn’t surprise me. I have been doing my own “arm-chair” (non-scientific) studies and at least among the avatars I speak to frequently (most over a year in world) answer product B when I give them the following scenario. Out of a approximately 100 queries Product B has won every time.

The 50 Linden Micro Transaction Question: A or B?

Scenario: If you are given a choice between Product A for 10 Lindens and Product B for 50 Lindens, and all things about the product are equal (prims, creator, size, permissions, color, etc) except that Product B will share 50% of the take with a charity you support and it is priced at 50 Lindens instead of 10- which would you choose?

Get some Wheat or Consider Micro lending via kiva.org

According to New World Notes the campaign is still live, visit the The Far Away and make a donation.

I just heard back from AM Radio, creator of The Far Away wheat field, and the campaign to sell plots of that field to raise enough US$ to buy three cows for people in the developing world. With $1405 raised thus far, he’s just $95 (about L$25,000) short of that goal. If you’re looking to spread some holiday warmth, why not travel to The Far Away, and make a purchase? “[T]he vendor is still on the wheat field,” AM tells me. “You can now buy a boat, and a flyable plane will be ready soon.”

It Adds Up

Some might say that raising only a few hundred dollars isn’t that big of a deal. However, when you consider the products are micro-priced on a platform that has a historical problem scaling up it is astounding how much it can really add up. Nor does it take much to add-up to an amount that can make a difference in some countries.

For example, if you aren’t into Second Life that is just fine- consider Kiva which I found via John Hunter’s Curious Cat blog after he left a comment on my own blog during a science fiction back and forth. You can learn more about my experience with Micro Lending here and it doesn’t take much to make a difference so take a moment and get involved- even on a micro scale it does matter.

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