Second Life: Your World. Your Imagination.

I bought an island yesterday. It is about 16 acres in size, sort of rhombus-shaped, with a lagoon in the middle. I'm not exactly sure where it is, but that's OK since I can move it later on if I need to.

If you don't know what I am talking about, visit SecondLife.com and download their application. This thing is the latest online fad and is growing like a weed (from about 200k members this past Spring to over 2 million today), and like a weed it may well die once the seasons change. Somehow, however, I think this might just have legs.

The way this virtual world has been created is much more true to the "parallel digital universe" (my own term) described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash from 1993. It has an economy, the design and function of objects and places are controlled by the users, and there actually seems to be stuff going on there that does not involve cybersex and porn. (gasp!)

Perhaps this is the next manifestation of a mainstream web? The way this works is that you can just visit SecondLife's world (insiders just call it "SL" not to be confused with "RL" in which we are all actually breathing air right now), you can build up your own little piece of it on somebody else's "island," or you can actually have an island of your own built just for you on which you can pretty much do as you please. This sounds very geeky and gamey - but replace the words "visit," "little piece of it," and "island" with "surf," "website," and "web server" and you start to understand that what this really is just a 3D version of the mainstream Internet! It is worth noting that at its outset, a huge amount of the bandwidth consumed by the Web was also driven by sex and porn-related activity.

So I bought an island. It is for my company, and we're planning at least one interesting experiment with it, but I am being very cautious about whether or not it really will mean anything in the future.

Those of you who read this (Alex) can really load up on your social currency in advance of holiday parties to come by getting this set up now and dropping mention of it in discrete circles. Sure, they'll think you are a big geek, but at our ages (and since we're all pretty much married now), let's face facts - we are big geeks.

See you in Second Life!

- Chime Bellman