Fortune senior editor says Second life is not overhyped

The coverage and "hype" concerning SecondLife seems to mirror that given to blogs about a year ago, or so it seems to me. Here are two articles from CNNmoney.com:

No, Second Life is not overhyped(10 Nov 2006)
Is it a game? No. Is it a marketing opportunity? Yes, but who cares? What matters most is that it may point to the future of the Net, says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick.

A less-than-recent article also from CNNmoney.com, but one that might shed light on the economic potentials in SecondLife:

The Virtual Rockefeller (1 Dec 2005)
Anshe Chung is raking in real money in an unreal online world.
It's all virtual, of course--part of a flourishing online universe called Second Life. And if it sounds absurd, consider this: While Anshe won't talk about how much money she's making ("I'm careful not to stir animosity," she says), Philip Rosedale, the founder and CEO of Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, estimates that she's bringing in around $150,000 a year--in real, hard cash.

I found my way to those articles from, PacificRim Exchange, a blog created to "chronicle the development of the Pacific Rim Exchange project (PacRimX)":

This is a collaborative project between two school districts, one in California and one in Japan. This project will be built on a virtual island in Teen Second Life. Since this island will be “off the grid” it will only be open to exchange students from the two school districts, and their teachers that are part of the program. This blog will be your window into our world as it is built.

The blogger of PacificRim Exchange prefers to keep his/ her first life identity private and blogs under a SL identity.

In this post, he/ she also shared how the younger generation takes to virtual worlds like ducks to water, unlike the older generation (generally speaking), and I tend to agree. For the older generation (how old is 'old' is subjective but I'm talking roughly 40s and above) I suspect it's not even an issue of them being closed-minded. It's just a different way of doing things wrt virtual worlds. A cultural/ lifestyle gap even.

It's like the question, "Why do people blog?" How do you convince them that the answer is simply, "Because they can"?


Technorati Tag: second life