Does anyone actually use Second Life any more? I'd hoped it had dissolved in it's own festering venture capitalist juices by now.

Just feel lucky that you didn't have to sit through a Butler group presnetation on Virtualisation that extended to the virtual company, which of course would have training, meeting rooms and products in Sadville.

Cubicle farm call centres, minimum wage in Linden bucks

My job was outsourced to Sadville and all I got was this lousy virtual t-shirt.

why don't they just pick up the cell phone sitting beside them???

So they're going into 2nd life, buying a moby then phoning people in the real world to say what, "I'M IN SECOND LIFE, NO IT'S RUBBISH!"

Well, technically you're right, Curtis. But I suspect it's just a stunt to make headlines. You've just read and commented on it on The Register too, and only the elder gods know how many other publications carried the "news". At the end of it, you had the name "NEC" go through your brains, if nothing else.

Still, that's the rather straightforward kind of PR. Almost marketing kind. It tells you who it's about and what they do (among other things.) I can respect that. Sorta.

What annoys me more is the kind of PR which doesn't obviously sell you anything, but aims to distort your perception of reality and let you jump to their conclusion.

One obvious examples are the "beer is good for you", "chocolate is good for you", etc, pseudo-science that gets laughed at on The Register as "ha ha, look at what those silly scientists blow their budgets on." In reality almost inevitably the only budget they blew was that of the PR agency which sponsored that. E.g., IIRC the chocolate one was sponsored by Mars. And it wasn't as much "scientists" as a whole category, but the few shills who'll sign their name on anything for 30 silvers.

Second Life itself is the result of a PR coup. Almost noone gave a damn about it, until the PR shills ran whole months worth of stories about people who made millions of real dollars on Second Life. That got the attention of a lot of people almost overnight.

(And the stories about rampant cybersex, well, I'll wager those got the attention of a whole other segment.)

... we can be sure of the imminent demise of 2nd life for sure. In mobile terms, NEC have been singly successful at snatching failure from the hands of success each and every time. Expect more of the same.

NEC? Nothing to see here, move along.

Lets wait for ~may 1st we get html on prim and it would change things a bit if handled properly by lindens. Build in SIP voice conferencing + html might change your view about SL and might make you to have one "3DWeb Page" on that "strange" world of GRID same as you did 15 y ago on 2d web.

To define properly right use of 3d is not easy task any non engineer manage to do it by design... it seems evolutionary way seems more appropriate... and thats whats SL is doing: it lets users define whats good and whats not... 99% will be rubish rest will define the future.