Wade Roush's Library tagged chrisanderson →  View Popular

Why did I turn on Second Life, after not only paying to build a Wired HQ in-world, but also doing a book signing and interview (shown) there, and even being nominated for a National Magazine Award for our "travel guide" to SL?

Well, partly it was the whole "there's nobody there" problem, which is of course just anecdotal. Like everyone else, I had fun exploring the concept and marveling at all the creativity. Then I got bored, and I started marveling at something else: all the empty corporate edifices. By day I'd speak at marketing conferences that usually had someone pitching SL services, complete with staged demonstrations (the "inhabitants" invariably paid employees). By night I'd go back to the same places, which had reverted to ghost towns once the demonstration was over. I couldn't understand why companies kept throwing money at in-world presences. Were they seeing something I wasn't?

But like I said, that was just anecdotal. So I asked a real reporter, Frank Rose, to figure out what was really going on. He came back with this sobering piece, which we headlined "Lonely Planet"