Further to the short mention I gave to Second Life (SL) the other day, Sara Lloyd, Pan's new Head of Digital Publishing, felt inspired to email me this guest entry on her impressions of the SL revolution….

“Second Life is (IMHO) one of the most fascinating, inspiring – and somewhat terrifying – social, cultural and technological phenomenons of Web 2.0. If people ask me where it’s at right now, this is one of the first examples I give.

Second Life is a virtual world. Membership is free. ‘Subscription models suck’, as Cory Ondrejka, head of Linden Labs, creators of SL, commented when he visited us the other day. Instead, the payment model is based on buying ‘property’ or ‘land’ in the world, on which you can build… whatever you like. It is explicitly NOT a game. Second Life has 350,000+ users, a number that is rising at about 15% per month. Of these users, about two thirds are actually ‘building stuff’ on a regular basis. i.e. the proportion of active - or engaged - users to users who just pass through, is *very* high. Only about 0.1% of Wikipedia users actually write stuff. And it’s a lot more complicated to build something in SL than it is to post a Wikipedia entry. SL users are seriously committed. And some of them are making a pretty serious living entirely through this virtual world. (See article from Business Week)  SL has its own currency, Linden dollars, which are exchangeable in the real world for real currency. Hundreds of thousands of ‘real life’ dollars of business are conducted through SL every week. Perhaps more interestingly, the profile of users is not as geeky as you would think: the user base is around 50/50 male to female in terms of hours of use; the average age is 33; older users and women tend to continue to use Second Life – perhaps because they are able to get more out of it; the majority of users do not apparently consider themselves to be ‘game players.’

SL is inspiring because its creators, like so many other successful Web 2.0 businesses, developed a space where people could do interesting stuff, provided the tools for them to do it, then just waited to see what cool things happened and responded to developments. It is also a little frightening because of this. No one, including its creators, really knows what the full potential (or even full repercussions) of SL might be. But hey, it sounds like a great place to conduct some edgy experiments for individuals or businesses with the creativity and willingness to invest (time and money) in it.

For publishers, some of the thought-provoking things that are already happening on SL are: virtual book signings (authors like Cory Doctorow have done this in SL); the development of virtual libraries; the use of virtual communities to test real life business concepts or products before ‘real life’ launch; the presence of publishing companies such as John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing – which has set up an office in the virtual world; the fact that the BBC have broadcast SL versions of their shows; the idea that students can now do a university course entirely virtually through one of the sixteen or so US universities running virtual classes…. I could go on. Check it out for yourself.

A few blog entries ago I posted a comment in response to some pertinent remarks that Peter Collingridge made about what dinosaurs publishers can be when it comes to web site development: “Some very basic things need to be addressed in order to move general publishing businesses from Web 1.0 companies to Web 2.0 companies and beyond. First of all, we need to educate our own staff to be more ‘e’-savvy, effect cultural and process change internally and change our thinking about some of the qualities we look for when hiring new staff; then we need to get the basic ‘building blocks’ right – develop a digital platform for delivery of our e-content, work out how to budget and resource for new ‘strategic’ web developments which do not deliver traditional cash flows, develop leaner, swifter decision-making processes…and that’s all before we do anything creative or ‘blue sky’ with our content or services”, and I wondered aloud, “How on earth do we move away from some of the bricks and mortar, historically-inherited constraints that prevent us moving fast enough for the pace required in this new digital age?” SL is one of those web developments that make these concerns sound like massive understatements. Whilst we are still at the stage of wondering whether we should hire some more web developers maybe we should really be wondering how many ‘avatar reps’ we need on SL..."

N.B. For more info, Timo Hannay, NPG's Web Publishing Director, has also blogged his notes of Cory Ondrejka's talk on Monday here.