That could very well be a Newspaper headline in SecondLife in the future.

So what is second life? Well here is an excerpt from the SecondLife website.

“Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabitedby a total of 1,305,952 people from around the globe”

SO why would anyone want a Secondlife. Well when I first asked myself this,the answer I gave myself , was to live out an alternate reality. Say, what If I wanted to be a pro wrestler or even worse a drug peddler, Secondlife would certainly afford me that virtual opportunity. Considering that fact , although I have never been a Gamer, it made sense that this alternate Universe made drew a lot of Gamers especially of the role playing kind. The Secondlife platform has enjoyed much success and achieved such a high level of adoption that its currency the Linden dollar has a real world value that surpasses a few real currencies (250 Linden is now 1 USD). Now I don’t understand economics but how this is at all possible, I think would be worth studying.

Along the way, I heard that corporations and other real world organization also started jumping onto the SecondLife bandwagon. This makes sense: If a million people inhabited this alternate world. They obviously represented a captive market. Importantly, although the inhabitants included everyone from knights on horses to wizards and pimps, it was quite likely that everyone wanted a Real-world computer or an Ipod!
Also a Secondlife billboard or Superbowl probably would not cost millions. There is also value we are told in having people “interact” with your products and provide feedback , although how this is better than a well designed website I don’t know. Some corporations like IBM are also exploring using Secondlife as a virtual meeting place. Now I have never spent any time on internet chat-rooms, but watching this screencast from John Udell at InfoWorld convinced me that the whole idea of a “meeting” on SecondLife in its present state required a different kind of attention span not to mention keyboard savvy!.

Regardless, I had almost decided on signing on and getting a secondlife avatar when I read on The Nascent blog that Nature magazine too has set up its outpost on SecondLife called SecondNature. All of a sudden I realized, that I could finally someday hope to live that fantasy of having a cover paper in SecondNature or even better maybe one day actually receive a SecondNobel prize. Now that is an avatar I would pay many a Linden Dollar for, not to mention give-up my prospective career as a pro-wrestler.