Second Life: A Real Digital U

Dory Devlin at Yahoo! Tech wrote a great piece today on Second Life.  If you don’t know what Second Life is, it’s not a moniker for retirement.  It’s a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents, who reside in the virtual city of Linden.   You can’t get more digital than this!

Since launched by Linden Labs in 2003, the site has exploded to the point where Linden has approx. 900,000 residents.  That’s 900,000 users that at are spending real world money (after exchanging for Linden dollars) for virtual and real world goods and services.  At the time of this writing residents spent $433, 676 in the past 24 hrs! 

Essentially, once you sign up you can do almost anything in Second Life that you can in real life and some things you can’t (like fly!).  It’s pretty cool and is having real world effects.   As Dory’s article illustrates, Congress has taken notice.  With this much money trading hands it was inevitable that the government wants a piece of the action.

Check out the article on Yahoo! and if you have time go check out Second Life.  It just might be the life you’ve always wanted!