With a number of news stories lately about kids under 13 on Facebook (violating the social network's Terms of Service), you'd think there weren't any other social networking sites that were geared for kids or where kids wanted to be. But clearly that's hardly the case, and many social networks, gaming sites and virtual worlds are aimed at the under-13 set: Club Penguin, Whyville and Webkinz, to name just a few. (Here's a list of eight social media sites just for kids.)

Security and Safety

Allowing children under age 13 to participate in online communities often raises questions about security and safety, and many parents fear predators and cyberbullies. Kid-oriented websites have a number of measures to prevent these dangers for their members, including logging chats and flagging questionable content and suspicious accounts.

But there may be other problems with these sites too, including the intense commercialization of many of them. Often virtual worlds (for children as for adults) encourage not just game-play but consumption, and kids need to buy virtual goods (sometimes with real money) in order to dress their avatars and decorate their virtual homes. Purchasing in-game items often gives users more status, and that's a lesson in itself that parents may or may not wish to have imparted to their kids.

Learning Opportunities

Virtual worlds are often dismissed as merely games, and most do not claim to be educational websites. But there are plenty of informal learning opportunities for kids in these environments, particularly as these are often their first experiences with online communities. Participating in a virtual world can help kids learn how to communicate and behave online.

They can also be utilized to help bridge online and offline ethics. One virtual world, MiniMonos, for example, has an environmental theme and tries to make sustainability lessons clear to its users. If you don't keep up with the recycling around your avatar's treehouse, there are in-world consequences. The virtual world also ties this to the real world, rewarding users for various environmental actions they take in their own communities.

Here's a list of five virtual world sites that can unlock all kinds of adventures, curated by a teacher who's tested many of these sites in his classes.

Liberating for Kids

It's this connection to community -- again, on- and offline -- that may be one of the greatest benefits of virtual worlds. Despite fears about predators, virtual worlds do offer kids a place to experiment and expand socially. Virtual worlds give children an opportunity to participate in a large social environment, with people from all over the world, often unsupervised by their parents. That may sound scary to parents, but for kids, it can be very liberating.

As always, parents should make sure they know where and what their kids are doing online. The best virtual worlds offer reporting features for parents and keep in contact with them should any problems arise. They also allow parents to enter alongside their children.

Although virtual worlds may be a relatively new phenomenon, the fact that kids under 13 are embracing them suggests that we're only beginning to see the potential of these online communities.

Audrey Watters is an education technology writer, rabble-rouser, and folklorist. She writes for MindShift, O'Reilly Radar, Hack Education, and ReadWriteWeb.

This post originally appeared on KQED's MindShift, which explores the future of learning, covering cultural and tech trends and innovations in education. Follow MindShift on Twitter @mindshiftKQED and on Facebook.

A pipeline for new formats

How can we at newspaper websites experiment with new media without upsetting the community or -- possibly even more -- our colleagues? Virtual environments are not yet universally accepted as useful for newspaper communities, so the question of how to introduce community and colleagues to these spaces is especially pertinent.

To avoid too much controversy or possible embarrassing failures, I use my personal blog, MixedRealities, to test ideas before bringing them to the Mediafin newspaper sites. My blog deals with the intersection of virtual worlds, business and philosophy and is not linked with the newspaper sites.

If experiments on that blog work out well, I often introduce them on the newspaper site's financial blog. If things really succeed, we can promote them more heavily on the site and in the print newspaper.

Second Life Experiments

A blog often fosters community. Even a small personal blog can attract people with similar interests, who can leave comments or contact the author via Twitter, Facebook or email.

A month ago, I decided to invite people interested in business, philosophy and virtual worlds to a series of informal, small-scale, salon-like meetings in the virtual world Second Life.

A friend and I built a virtual headquarters, where avatars can meet at a small square featuring a steam-punk coffee apparatus and also a cinema.

During those first meetings in Second Life, we watched short videos featuring, for instance, Clay Shirky speaking about Twitter, Facebook and cell phones. We discussed the video, and I posted about the meetings on my blog.

It is crucial to see virtual environments as being part of vast online social networks. I started a Facebook group to promote my "virtual salon," and I send my invites out to other Second Life communities that share similar interests like Metanomics.

Social Change in Iran

Now something interesting happened. At the time, the political crisis in Iran was escalating. Although one might think that politics would spill over into the virtual world, the political scene in Second Life remained very quiet. I contacted some well-connected people to find out why and whether anything was happening behind the scenes, but without much result.

So I decided to organize my bi-weekly meeting about social media and social change around the Iran situation. More than 20 avatars showed up. They provided me with lots of information about not only Iran activism in Second Life, but also about the more general scene of political activism in Second Life.

The lesson I learned is applicable outside of Second Life, too. Journalists are often too dependent on press conferences organized by organizations, institutions and companies.

There is an alternative: Rather than waiting for a press conference, convene a meeting where you invite experts relevant for your beat. Do this on a regular basis. Think of it almost as a reverse press conference. If it is too impractical to do this at a physical location, telepresence techniques could provide a solution. Not very long ago telepresence technology such as videoconferencing was very expensive, but these days there are many cheap or even free alternatives. Second Life is just one of many possibilities.

Experiments in Metaplace

Recently I organized my bi-weekly meeting in another virtual world: Metaplace. For people used to "real 3D" environments such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, Metaplace is a bit of a disappointment, because it is not 3D -- but it is pretty immersive, so let's say that it is 2.5D.

Metaplace has some interesting features that set it apart from most other virtual worlds. It is browser-based, meaning that your community members don't have to download anything to participate. You can either provide a straightforward web address for your world or you can embed your world into your blog.

The result is that entering Metaplace gives the impression of just visiting another website rather than opening a new application. Indeed, it is as easy as surfing the web (though it does require registration). But visitors are pleasantly surprised when they find that it's still a real immersive environment.

For example, MixedRealities' Metaplace space can be reached on http://www.metaplace.com/mixedrealities, or you can find it embedded in a blog post.

Both Second Life and Metaplace make it possible to integrate video, images and text. Metaplace seems to be easier for accomplishing this -- after all, it is situated on the web. Metaplace is much younger than Second Life and the platform is developing fast, although some very interesting features, such as the combination of voice communication (for panel members) and text backchat (for the audience), are still lacking.

One could consider Metaplace a graphical chat room with the possibility of easy integration of websites, videos, images and whiteboards.

What's in my world

I constructed my "world" in Metaplace as a blogroll or a library that resembled a virtual garden. In the main conference area people can access my blog, other blogs and my FriendFeed, as well as a video about the history of blogging and another video featuring Howard Rheingold explaining what he's learning from his journalism students.

And nearby are a series of videos about business models and virtual communities, the subject of the last meeting. Further down the garden path, people find small collections about new media literacies and about the Obama administration and social media/virtual worlds.

But why put those videos and sites in Metaplace when I could just as easily make a list and throw that on my blog? I think there are some good reasons:

• The social aspect. As in a library, people discover sites and videos together with other people and they can have a synchronous conversation about what they see.

• This is especially evident immediately before and after meetings. There is a kind of "virtual water cooler" phenomenon. Some people arrive early, wander around and start browsing the available resources. Others hang around afterward to chat and discover the mini-libraries.

• The fact that the objects are perceived as objects in a garden makes those experiences different from the classic reading experience. I think that people tend to remember better what they experience by walking around in a 2.5D or 3D environment than what they read on a screen or in print.

Because Metaplace is part of the web and so easy to access (something crucial for big newspaper communities), I am considering my virtual "garden office" there more and more to be a part of my blog. I will give my Metaplace world a permanent embedded place on my blog, so people will have easy access to a graphical chat room/library, which can later be linked with other such worlds which share the same interests.

Next steps

The logical next step is to try out Metaplace on our financial blog for the newspaper. There are some issues to be dealt with. For now, my (rather cheap) subscription allows only a concurrency of 50 avatars, which is too low; our weekly text chat sessions on the financial blog get about 300-350 participants.

I think it is feasible to have a world allowing higher peak concurrency, but it would be nice to have that offering in a simple commercial package. All being said, Metaplace is still young and founder Raph Koster and his team work incredibly hard and fast at improving the site. Often it is just a matter of suggesting changes and indeed, things get changed!

I'd love to hear your take on "reverse press briefings" in physical, web and virtual locations and on using virtual environments such as Metaplace in blogs! Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

The sun shines brightly as I stroll along the curving pier above the water, looking out toward a beautiful island with trees swaying in the wind. There's a looming ampitheater festooned with signs for Thomson Reuters, and a series of concrete buildings that appear ready to hold important meetings. I stride in confidently through the doorway...

You might think I was describing a trip to visit Reuters in the UK, but really, I was strolling through the virtual world of Second Life (SL), visiting the Thomson Reuters island, now largely vacant. The island symbolizes the efforts of media companies not only to cover life in the virtual world of Second Life, but also to live there and set up virtual offices. Reuters made waves by setting up a bureau in SL, with reporters Adam Pasick and Eric Krangel covering stories about the virtual currency and the startup businesses springing up in-world.

But last October, Reuters closed its bureau, and let its specialized blog lapse. CNET and Wired also developed land in Second Life and both have largely abandoned their efforts (though CNET Japan still has an outpost). CNET's Daniel Terdiman, who helped shepherd CNET's presence in SL, still writes about virtual worlds on his blog, Geek Gestalt, but hasn't written specifically about SLfor a year. CNN, however, came later to SL, in late 2007 with its iReport presence, which recently was beefed up to an island where SL users report on their own world as citizen journalists.

How did the media go wrong in coverage -- and participation -- in SSL, and what went right? It was a typical hype-and-backlash scenario, as I detailed in a previous post on MediaShift. Some journalists simply tired of SL, as so many people tried it and then bailed because of its steep learning curve and high technological requirements. But the journalists that have been more enmeshed within the world have been rewarded with plenty of cultural and sociological (and yes, business) stories.

"Unless you consider coverage of any kind as constituting breathlessness, I'm not sure the overall coverage was too breathless [back in 2006]," said Rob Hof, Silicon Valley bureau chief of BusinessWeek, who penned a major cover story about SL. "It was just voluminous for awhile there, probably a little too positive at the outset and then, for some good reasons, more negative later...As you know, this kind of cycle is endemic to journalism, for better or worse: Build 'em up, tear 'em down."

John Lester leads customer market development for education and health care for Linden Lab, which runs Second Life. I met him in-world and had an instant-messaging chat with his alter-ego, Pathfinder Linden, about how the media has covered SL over the years. My SL name was Lynx Wickentower:

Lynx: Did media miss the bigger story of Second Life?

Pathfinder: That seems to be a typical pattern for the human species, yes? We did it with all the previous mediums. We'll do it again in the future. We always misunderstand new mediums, initially treating them like pre-existing ones (e.g., treating the web like print media; treating television like radio). But then we learn new ways of seeing the tools and new ways to leverage them.

About-Face from Wired, Reuters

What's especially striking is how some previous boosters of Second Life have turned against the virtual world. I was a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" back in 2006 with Reuters' SL bureau chief Adam Pasick. On the show, Pasick was almost like a representative for Linden, explaining SL to the public in great detail. "Just about every business you can find in the real world is now in Second Life," he said on the show. The Reuters island still includes basic instructions for moving around SL, and the wire service basically picked a favorite by choosing to have a bureau in SL and not simply having a correspondent covering all virtual worlds.

Now, Pasick told me via email that Second Life will now be covered within the existing technology beat by Reuters.

"We were primarily interested in Second Life as a business/commerce/finance phenomenon, covering it like we would any small but fast-growing economy in the real world," Pasick said. "The bureau is now closed. Essentially the story we were there to cover has moved on. Second Life continues to be an interesting and popular virtual world, albeit one that is growing much more slowly than during its heyday. Our technology team continues to cover Second Life and Linden Lab, and we still have our island in Second Life, which we may use for corporate functions at the Thomson Reuters level."

The other Reuters reporter who covered SL, Eric Krangel, had an even stronger change of heart. In February 2008, Krangel participated in a virtual talk show about media companies in-world, and had this to say about SL and Reuters' participation:

Part of the reason I'm here personally is because I find Second Life absolutely fascinating. And I think no one anticipated, and it's not just my interest, but also Reuters' interest, is how complex of a creation Second Life has become...Reuters reaches out to the 1.2 million people who are in Second Life every 60 days. It is a tremendous amount of press that Reuters is getting. A lot of knowledge of people who are understanding what Reuters is, what Reuters does, who perhaps wouldn't otherwise have that. So really, I mean I think they're extending their brand in a way on a very little expenditure that I think perhaps other organizations might follow suit.

Once Reuters killed its SL bureau, Krangel joined Silicon Alley Insider and was quick to criticize SL's shortcomings:

It's hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my 'beat,' I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

As for Reuters' coverage of SL, they did better than most journalists who did drive-by stories with a day or two of research in-world. The bureau lived for more than two years. Still, James Wagner Au, who writes the excellent New World Notes blog about SL said they could have done better.

"Their writers, Adam Pasick and Eric Krangel, are fine journalists, and did some great external business-oriented reports, but at the same time, I don't think they were ever passionately engaged in the medium or Second Life's community on an experiential level," Au told me. "Consequently, their reporting very much had a distanced, 'outside looking in' flavor that caused them to often miss the big picture, in my opinion."

Wired magazine followed a similar pattern, creating an island in SL and running a special travel guide in the magazine that was nominated for a National Magazine Award. But less than two years later, the magazine's editor, Chris Anderson, said he was giving up on Second Life on his Long Tail blog:

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?

When I recently contacted Anderson for this story, his response was terse: "I don't really follow SL so I can't comment...I thought SL was fascinating and was glad to have participated, not least for the learning." One SL resident, going by the name of Bettina Tizzy, was non-plussed by Wired's efforts in Second Life, and explained on her blog how Wired's pullout from the world had a domino effect for businesses:

Therein lies the problem that not only Wired magazine, but pretty much every single Real Life corporation that I know of (except Pocky!) has experienced to date as they fiddle around with their Titans-in-pixelated-cubicles (and we'll give you a free baseball cap and T-shirt, too!) approach. Not surprisingly, nine months after their launch in Second Life, Chris Anderson, Wired's editor-in-chief, and his minions were slamming the metaverse, and jumping ship. And like a house of cards, Real World corporations began to flee, one after another.

What Went Right

While Reuters thinks that the story has moved on from Second Life, CNN and many others beg to differ. The broadcaster now has an even larger presence in SL. Rather than send in a reporter as a corresponent in-world, CNN relies on SL residents to report their own news as citizen journalists for its iReport site.

CNN.com senior producer Lila King said that Second Life iReporters have posted 376 stories since it launched a year ago, but that relatively small number did lead to a number of stories on written by CNN.com producers (including this one about relationships in-world). King said that SL has been more than just a story-generating tool for CNN's iReport team; it's also helped them learn to nurture an online community.

"We've started to see a new benefit of being in Second Life: it gives us a place to polish our skills in community building," King said. "Newsrooms everywhere, ours included, are trying to learn how to foster meaningful, two-way conversations with their audiences. When we hold our virtual news meetings every Tuesday afternoon (2 pm Second Life Time/5 pm ET) with the Second Life iReport community, that's exactly what we're doing: listening and interacting in real-time, offering feedback and courting new ideas along the way."

Au points out that the media still is covering Second Life, and that there have been "more than several dozen articles on it this year," including less sensationalistic stories that look at the important cultural happenings in-world.

"Prominent media reports still happen, though...they're generally less hyperbolic, less about one-off marketing campaigns, and much less 'OMFG this is the next generation of the Internet!'" he said. "Instead there's more focus on the world's creative ecology that's happening right now."

Public media outlet WGBH in Boston produced a live classical concert in Second Life last May, with pianist Jeremy Denk performing in the real-world radio studios, which went on-air and also was attended in a virtual space online. Mike Janssen, who writes for the classical radio blog, Scanning the Dial, said that WGBH got a good reaction from the 70 people who attended the event in-world, but wasn't sure how to quantify the success of the experiment.

"I'm trying to make the argument that it's really the quality of the experience that, in the long run, is maybe more beneficial than the fact that 100,000 people saw a program," WGBH producer Gary Mott told Janssen. "The usual metrics that we measure audience by didn't seem to apply here."

Perhaps not, but WGBH received a $12,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to try out the live in-world performance. Mott told me in a recent email exchange that WGBH's SL experiment was in limbo at the moment, and that they didn't receive more funding from the CPB though they are hoping to find a partner in Linden or an educational institution in Boston. One great product of the experiment is a report Mott wrote (PDF file) about his lessons learned in SL

Janssen, for one, thinks that it might be a tough sell in public broadcasting.

"I think it makes sense for broadcasters to be experimenting on all platforms to some extent," he told me. "But realistically, and with money as tight as it is these days, they have to make serious choices and should avoid spreading themselves too thin. SL has a 'wow' factor to it, but at the moment probably isn't a top priority."

One thing that has survived the hype is the virtual economy of Second Life and other online worlds and gaming environments, where people sell virtual goods with game-based money that can be converted to real money. BusinessWeek's Hof believes that's a story that has staying power.

"The notion of virtual economies is already becoming a solid business model for many game companies, and even social networks like Facebook -- by some accounts up to $2 billion in revenues -- so that seems like a trend that has some legs, and it's one you can credit Second Life with proving as much as anyone," Hof said. "And of course, the idea of user-generated content is huge today on a number of fronts, though Second Life is just one example of that."

Education and Collaboration

While the effusive media coverage might be long-gone, Second Life is evolving into a practical platform for some educational and business purposes. Joe Essid writes the SL Beat blog for the Richmond Time-Dispatch, and he also is director of the University of Richmond's Writing Center. Essid told me that now that Second Life has matured (it was first launched in 2003), it has found some practical uses but they aren't as sensational as virtual sex and nude avatars.

"SL and other virtual worlds are making gradual progress toward regular usage by higher education and business customers," Essid said via email. "Stability and the quality of 'life' in SL have improved, though not without a great deal of controversy over fees and policies from Linden Lab. But day-to-day use of the Internet is not 'sexy' stuff: it's just how we do work. And to me that's fine, since SL is another tool for teaching, albeit one that inspires some amazing creativity and can be a lot of fun to use."

Essid tipped me off to an in-world meeting of librarians and educators who were sharing tips for using SL in education. I could see how such a discussion -- this one was just people texting as in a live chat forum -- could be productive, as I made connections through private instant messaging to particular participants as the discussion continued. I could view people's profiles and see who they were in the real world.

Lawrence Mullen, a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is taking his students into Second Life so they can experiment in-world.

"There are a number of virtual magazines in SL -- they come and go -- but there are many new projects always starting," he told me. "And maybe it's good that the large media corporations aren't getting into SL -- thus giving others a chance to redefine what journalism is or should be. I designed a course that explores the virtual world more from a sociological/anthropological perspective than a journalistic way. Students design their avatars, learn how to use them, them I give them missions to explore aspects of the media used in the virtual world, but also religion, various communities, building, relationships, advertising, and more."

In the current economic recession, with businesses rethinking the way they spend money marketing online, including in virtual worlds, Linden hopes that Second Life can be seen as a place businesses can save money with virtual teleconferences.

"Virtual worlds are particularly poised to save a lot of money [for businesses] around new modes of collaboration and meetings," Linden's Lester told me. "Nobody has budgets to fly around in planes and stay in hotels anymore. I think businesses, given the current economic climate, are eagerly seeking better ways to collaborate at a distance and manage a global presence in a more cost effective way. SL is more than a teleconferencing medium. It has synchronous collaboration opportunities. Lots more emotional bandwidth, too."

What do you think? Did media companies turn their backs too soon on Second Life? Are there still important stories happening there? Where do you go for media coverage of SL? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Second Life hype cycle image by MUVEDesign's Gary Hayes via Flickr.

But a little more than a year later, in July 2007, Wired magazine turned its largely positive spin on SL on its head, with a negative piece called Lonely Planet that said marketers were "wasting millions on a deserted Second Life." The media helped build up SL into an overhyped phenomenon, only to turn on its creation and start a massive backlash of bad press, including a recent piece in Forbes that detailed how the hype had outstripped reality in SL.

The hype-and-backlash cycle is eerily reminiscent of the dot-com boom media coverage, where breathless hype turned to "we-shoulda-known" platitudes after the bust. With SL, many reporters often didn't spend enough time in-world to understand its nuances, leading them to instead replicate other journalists' assessments of the virtual space. But recently, coverage of SL has shifted, with CBS doing a more balanced piece on handicapped people in SL. Plus, CNN took a more open approach by extending its citizen journalism operation, I-Report, into Second Life so residents themselves could do the reporting.

Joel Greenberg is vice president of marketing innovation at Electric Sheep Company, which creates in-world experiences for corporate clients. He told me it's about time journalists took a more balanced view of what's happening in SL.

"It seems like a lot of reporters were reading a lot of other reporters," Greenberg said. "So when it's really positive, everything's positive. And when we're in the down cycle, it gets negative. In general, the frustration that people in the SL community have had, especially with the Wired article ["Lonely Planet"], everyone says that when they talked to the reporter they said all these positive things and they didn't get in the story...The Wired article in particular was the harbinger of all this stuff. It definitely affected our conversations with clients."

That article was specifically commissioned by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, the man who invented The Long Tail meme. While Wired had run largely positive stories on Second Life over the past few years -- including a travel guide that was nominated for a National Magazine Award -- they seemed to go from hype to backlash in an instant with "Lonely Planet."

In an email exchange, Anderson told me that Wired simply was looking at Second Life from two different vantage points.

"The two big stories we did do in the mag were on very different aspects of SL," he said. "The first (travel guide) was from the consumer side, and we continue to be big fans of that. The second, on SL as a marketing vehicle, was on the corporate/marketing side, and we're skeptical of that. Additionally, I've blogged about my own experience in using SL for marketing purposes [for Wired], and the sobering lessons learned (partly due to mistakes on our part, but partly reflecting structural problems with SL as a marketing vehicle). We're bullish on SL as a consumer experience and bearish on it as a marketing vehicle. "

So why couldn't Wired be a little more skeptical during the hype phase and a little more upbeat during the backlash?

"Because we're not perfect?" Anderson responded. "I wish I could tell you that every story we run touches on every possible angle, anticipating every possible reader question and eventualities past and present...but sadly we're in the same business you are, trying to do the best we can in telling a story as we understand it at whatever point in time we happen to be writing."

The Challenges of Covering a Virtual World

The problem for many reporters covering Second Life-- myself included -- is the steep learning curve and technical requirements necessary to enter the world and explore it. Daniel Terdiman, who has written about SL for Wired News and most recently as a CNET reporter, says that SL's biggest weakness is the difficulty that newbies have when they first check out the world.

"What happened was that it was really sexy to see Fortune 500 companies going into what most people see as a game," Terdiman said. "But I don't think there was a lot of depth to the coverage. I don't think anyone bothered to ask the question, 'Why are they doing it?' 'How are they doing it?' and 'Are they doing it properly?'...Second Life is very hard to use, and it's very hard to find things to do there. It takes more work than most people who are writing on deadline have time to do. The problem with Second Life is that it's extremely difficult to use, which is why so many people sign up, try it, and never come back."

Once Terdiman got beyond the initial learning curve, he said reporting on SL was much like reporting in the real world. He gets leads from wandering through the world, hearing from developers and following scuttlebutt on blogs. Terdiman said one of the main differences between virtual world reporting and the real world is that people with avatars tend to blow off interview times -- but they do like getting the publicity in real-world media.

Freelance journalist Wagner James Au has been writing about SL since 2003 on his New World Notes blog. For the first few years, he was paid by SL's owner, Linden Labs, to write about it on contract, but says they only killed one story in that period because it involved nudity. Au told me he finds original stories by spending time within the virtual world, and he's covered the gamut, from social studies to the entrance of marketers to architecture and art installations.

"Most of my best stories are from wandering around and meeting people," Au said. "The story you think is going to happen [often] becomes a different story entirely. I was interviewing this guy and he was talking about his SL real estate business. And then I noticed that his profile had him in full Marine uniform. He told me he had his kneecap blown off by a mine in Afghanistan...so he made ends meet by being a virtual real estate guy."

Au lauds CBS for its story on people with disabilities using Second Life, and he estimates that 10% of residents are handicapped either physically or mentally in the real world and use Second Life as a way to experience movement or social interactions that they can't have in their real lives. Another story line he's been following is the way regular SL residents have outdone the real-world professionals who come in thinking they can dominate the virtual world without learning the ropes.

"What excites me is kids in the middle of nowhere who are making amazing art and they would have no other outlet for this creativity," Au said. "One of SL's best fashion designers lives on a farm in Georgia, and that's exciting to me. When the corporations come in, they're not that serious about it or they're arrogant and think, 'The professionals are here.' And they don't engage with the community, and when I look at their traffic, I can see that the community is ignoring them too. Shortly after Nissan came in to give away cars, I noticed that a kid in the Midwest had a site that was four times as popular against this giant car corporation."

CNN Lets Residents Report

While Reuters made waves by setting up a news bureau with two correspondents in Second Life, CNN decided to take a different tack. The cable news giant decided to extend its citizen journalism I-Report efforts into Second Life with a special hub, ampitheater and tools for residents to submit news stories and screen-grab "photos." Rather than put traditional CNN reporters in-world, they've had a few I-Report producers spend time in Second Life, including weekly meetings with residents at their amphitheater.

"Those meetings are evolving, but we usually show a presentation, show off the I-Reports from the last week, explain what could be better," CNN.com senior producer Lila King told me. "The second time we had a pretty lively Q&A that was focused on helping them [file reports], and we talked about photography because we're asking people to share their 'pictures' which are essentially screen grabs. We shared what we knew from CNN photographers and their tips on composition and lighting and translated that to the world of Second Life."

As dozens of I-Reports from residents start to pour in, the CNN.com team goes through them just as they do with real-world citizen journalism reports. They filter out inappropriate material, commercial pitches and check on the veracity of questionable reports -- by teleporting directly to the scene. Each I-Report comes with exact coordinates in-world so producers can check on events easily. That's something King wishes was possible with real-world I-Reports, which are often trickier to track down.

CNN's experimental approach shows a willingness to work within the SL community rather than simply give a tourist's point of view, as most reporters do. CNN consciously didn't want to set up a building in Second Life that would sit empty -- a common problem with most corporate efforts in SL. So far, the producers are happy that every time they have visited the amphitheater there have been residents there, discussing the news, even outside of the weekly meetings.

So far, the SL I-Reports on the special CNN blog are basically screen grabs and three- or four-sentence captions rather than full-blown reporting. But that might change as the weekly meetings continue and the resident citizen journos get their feet wet.

The bottom line is that news organizations and even bloggers aren't sure what the business model is for doing journalism in virtual worlds. Au says he spends about 60% of his time on the New World Notes blog but supplements his income with writing for GigaOm -- as well as an upcoming Second Life book (something Terdiman has already done). Nick Wilson, who runs the Metaversed blog about virtual world business, decided to do less reporting and beef up his productions of in-world events, which has been a more lucrative business.

No matter the business model, reporters and bloggers who want to tell the story of virtual worlds, including Second Life, will hopefully continue to get past the hype-and-backlash cycle and take the world seriously as a social phenomenon that has business and marketing potential -- even if it's not yet fully realized.

What do you think about the media coverage of Second Life? Who do you trust to give you the best reporting in-world, and what do you think is missing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

From time to time, I'll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. I've already covered blogs, social networking, widgets and various other topics. This week I'll look at the growing phenomenon of virtual worlds.

Background and History

Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional spaces where you can interact with other people, collect items and build structures, and communicate via a virtual representative of yourself called an avatar. These worlds have been influenced by various science fiction writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, along with the movie, "The Matrix."

Virtual worlds differ from massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) because they don't offer battles against monsters or have an overriding mission for players. For example, a resident of the virtual world Second Life might spend time in that space accumulating virtual land, rather than striving to complete quests or conquer levels as one would in many popular MMOGs such as World of Warcraft.

The origin of virtual worlds goes back to early games such as Maze War, which was developed in the early '70s at NASA. The game included eyeballs as avatars, there were maps showing the levels, and it was one of the first games played on networked computers, and eventually over a precursor to the Internet.

In 1986, LucasFilm Games developed Habitat, a more two-dimensional environment that included humanoid avatars, and people could access the game through online service Quantum Link on their Commodore 64 computers. Developers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, who maintain a blog about their experience with Habitat, say they let Habitat residents generally set their own rules governing the world -- as long as they couldn't hack into the system. In a research paper about their lessons from Habitat, the developers wrote:

At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the details of the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, are of relatively peripheral concern.

With the rise of the web in the mid-'90s, virtual worlds started booming, with many startups hoping that these 3D views would become the standard way to browse the web. The Active Worlds platform allowed people to join for free or pay a monthly fee for premium features. The Palace was a more chat-oriented world that became popular in entertainment circles, with the band Korn eventually opening its own themed Palace. Most early virtual worlds faded because the hardware and bandwidth requirements were too stringent, and they never established hardcore user bases as dot-com funding dried up at the turn of the millennium.

The Rise (and Hype) of Second Life

While other worlds were withering, Linden Labs was developing a new world called Second Life, first launched in 2003. It languished for a few years until 2006, when Second Life grabbed the attention of the media and marketers who saw it as a new way of communicating and selling online. BusinessWeek ran a cover story called My Virtual Life, breathlessly explaining that "big advertisers are taking notice." And Wired Magazine ran a special travel guide to Second Life, while Reuters assigned a full-time reporter, dubbed "Adam Reuters," to cover news in the world (now there are two).

In Second Life, you can create your own objects and buildings in the world, and you own the intellectual property of what you build Plus, "Linden dollars" are a currency you can trade with real dollars; real-world businesses sell customized stores, avatar wear and just about any kind of "bling" you could want in the virtual world. Universities offer distance learning courses through Second Life, and bands play live shows and chat with fans in special in-world venues. Linden says it has registered nearly 10 million avatars for Second Life.

The buzz around Second Life led many people to explore virtual worlds for the first time, but many ended up disappointed. Even though computer hardware and bandwidth have improved since the '90s virtual worlds, Second Life still requires high-end systems and a lot of practice to master the interface. The number of registered Second Life avatars is misleading: Many people simply try it out and give up, while others have multiple avatars. A more representative number for regular uers is the number who have logged in during the past seven days, which was 338,068 as of October 7.

That lower number also presents a problem for the crush of marketers such as Coca-Cola and Adidas who have set up virtual spaces in Second Life, only to have them largely vacant. After Wired magazine hyped Second Life with its travel guide, the magazine then did an about-face and ran an article titled, How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life. Many marketers spent the money -- in the tens of thousands of dollars -- to build a virtual island as an experiment but then got little payoff. Residents are dispersed throughout the virtual world so it's difficult to get their attention en masse, plus there's a limit to the number of people who can congregate in one place without crashing Linden's servers.

(For a detailed argument on Wired's story and the problem of empty spaces in Second Life, check out this blog post by Wired editor Chris Anderson and the ensuing debate in the comments.)

Media's Love Affair with Virtual Worlds

Despite the problems with Second Life, media companies are still fascinated with virtual worlds. MTV has created a slew of its own virtual worlds based on the content of its original shows such as "Laguna Beach" and "The Real World," while Nickelodeon has its teen world, Nicktropolis.

Media companies are smarting after letting independent Internet companies such as Google and Facebook get ahead of them with web search and social networking, so they are loathe to fall behind again with virtual worlds. Even if today's Second Life doesn't satisfy the mass market, dozens of other virtual worlds will spring up tailored to each personal taste along the Long Tail of niche content online.

Here's a sampling of recent deals, launches and buyouts in the virtual worlds space:

> CBS will let viewers of its "CSI: New York" TV show go into Second Life using a special, more simple interface to track a mystery. CBS owns a stake of Second Life developer Electric Sheep Co.

> BBC launched its own kids world called "Adventure Rock" which will be free of charge and advertisement-free.

> Turner made a deal with virtual world builder Kaneva to help create worlds based on Turner's entertainment properties.

> Disney bought kid space Club Penguin in a $700 million deal.

> In 2005, Viacom bought Neopets.com for $160 million, a virtual world for people with Neopets virtual pets.

Terminology

Here is a rundown of basic terms in Second Life and other virtual worlds:

avatar: The digital representation of yourself that travels through virtual worlds and is often customizable.

griefer: Person who plays pranks, attacks people or defaces Second Life.

lag: The problem with online gaming and virtual worlds where the scene takes time to refresh due to bandwidth and technical issues.

region: A 256 meter by 256 meter space within Second Life that marks off territory.

SLURL: A web address that will take you from the web into a Second Life location.

teleport: A quick way to go from one place to another within Second Life without having to fly or travel there manually.

virtual currency: The money used in virtual worlds, sometimes exchangeable for real-world money as with Linden dollars.

[Thanks to the Puritan's Guide to Second Life's Must Know Second Life Vocabulary post for many of these terms.]

Resources

To learn more about virtual worlds -- or to visit them -- check out the following list of worlds as well as blog posts and articles about the phenomenon.

Partial List of Virtual Worlds

Active Worlds

Club Penguin

Disney Toontown

Gaia Online

Habbo

HiPiHi [in Chinese]

Kaneva

MTV's Virtual Worlds

Multiverse

Nicktropolis

Planet Cazmo

Second Life

There

Whyville

Blog Posts and Articles

Big Media Gets a Second Life at BusinessWeek

A Brief History of Virtual Worlds at CNET

CNET Interviewer Assaulted by Flying Wang at the Register

History of Virtual Worlds at Avatar Planet

Sex, drugs and virtual worlds at CNNMoney's Media Biz blog

A Story Too Good to Check at Valleywag

Virtual world entry in Wikipedia

A Virtual World But Real Money by the New York Times

Virtual World Marketing: Lots of Companies, Few Visitors at GigaOm

What do you think about virtual worlds? Should media companies be spending time and money covering in-world happenings? Which virtual worlds do you enjoy? Let us know if we're missing any vital stories or worlds in our lists above by using the comments below.

Photo of Second Life avatars by Andromega Volare via Flickr.

Additional research for this story was provided by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo.

The same scene seemed to play in "repeat" mode all day, as one exec after another begged off knowing just what the teens want, grumbling that they were known as the "teen" around the office but, ahem, they are years removed from actual teendom. So instead of pretending to know what's hip and cool and how to run their online communities, they actually defer to the teens themselves -- on their staff, in the communities -- to decide how to run the sites and what content will work there.

During a rare run of company presentations late in the morning (most panels had very little in the way of PowerPoints), the president of eCrush made this candid admission: "I wish I was 17 but I'm not. They are! I'm not steering the bus, they are!" The strategy has worked well for the site, which helps teens find out if their secret crushes also have crushes on them. The site, along with a sister site with the improbable title of eSpinTheBottle, were recently sold to Hearst New Media, showing that even the bigger fish online are learning to play nice with communities and give participants more control and input.

One of the biggest shockers of the day was on the panel titled "Old School to New School" filled with folks from traditional media companies trying to teach their colleagues new media tricks. Dixie Feldman, editorial director for MTV's teen-focused cable channel The N, said she wanted people to come to them for content, and also to remix and share their content elsewhere -- a free-flowing idea that flies in the face of parent company Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube.

"We're definitely not threatened with people using our content," Feldman said. "We take provocative scenes of shows they love, and let them make new mashups. We let them post them on MySpace, YouTube, and we provide shows for free download on iTunes."

Feldman explained that they even let fans put in their own audio comment track for remixed video, what they call "vommenting," and then let them post it online at other sites. I asked if this represented a change for Viacom, allowing people to post clips on YouTube. Feldman backed down a bit, saying these were her own views on the matter, and that she couldn't speak for the parent company.

"If you want my opinion, I think our content should be everywhere," she said. "I want it on YouTube. But that's a complicated question. I can't answer whether content should be there or not, and I can't really speak for the company."

While Viacom has been strict about having YouTube take down video content from shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," I found about 8,000+ search results for Degrassi on YouTube recently, including many clips from The N's TV show of the same name. Of course these shows pale in comparison to the popularity of shows on MTV or Comedy Central, but it's still a big departure from the hard line Viacom has set around sharing content at YouTube.

But back to my original point: The companies that are succeeding with online communities for teens are giving control over to their users to some extent. And in the case of Linden Lab's Teen Second Life virtual world, they even give teens (as well as adults) the intellectual property rights of what they build in the worlds. Claudia L'Amoreaux, community developer at Second Life, noted that they did absolutely no marketing or outreach to teens beyond having a group of them do beta testing and tell friends.

"We don't bring teens onto our site; they bring themselves," she said on a panel called "The New School." "It started with a small group of teens...and it's slowly grown. It's amazing to see what they are doing. The teens are quite entrepreneurial. They own islands, and are developing their own housing and malls and clothing. They are the most advanced scripters in Second Life. A young teenage woman from the UK created a way to enter into Second Life through the web, which blew us all away. She was the first to do it....[Plus adults are now] teaming up with teens to co-develop parts of the islands."

Teen Marketing That Works

Along with the theme of giving up more control to teens in social networks and online communities, the other repeated refrain was doing marketing in these realms that were relevant and fit in with the sites' experience and feel. And in some cases, the marketing message would morph into customized "widgets," mini-applications that people could load onto their social networking profile pages, blogs or computer desktops.

Melanie Strong, Nike's brand manager for the build-a-shoe site Nike iD, talked about how the big shoe maker wanted to change their marketing ways from a TV focus to one of on-demand, giving consumers more control of their experience.

"We have a long way to go online," Strong said. "We have to think about how we can create experiences online around customization, and really put consumers in charge."

Rather than try to build their own social network, she said Nike would simply build tools, like a "build your own shoe" widget that users could post on any other site.

Craig Sherman, CEO of teen virtual world Gaia Online. said they were very careful about inviting the right companies into the community to interact with residents -- and that strategy paid off when they did the right promotions.

"We [wanted] sponsors that made the world better," he said. "The Nancy Drew character came on the site, asked people to go on a quest, watch the movie trailer [for the Nancy Drew movie], follow clues, pass a quiz, and then get a sleuth kit to use in the world. In the first two weeks we ran this promotion, we became the highest referral site on the Net to the Nancy Drew movie site. For Toyota's Scion, we let people 'buy' virtual cars and then customize them -- just like the Scion theme of self-expression. There were 27,000 cars bought in the first hour."

Not only do companies have to market differently in teen-oriented worlds, but traditional media companies are also learning to converge online and offline marketing staffs. Diane Naughton, vice president of marketing for book publishing giant HarperCollins' Children's Books department, noted that change at her 190-year-old company, now owned by News Corp. and marketed on Fox Interactive Media's MySpace juggernaut.

"The biggest change for us as an old media outfit was changing the way we market," she said. "We used to just have an online division, but now our traditional marketers are doing both [online and offline marketing], it's converged and it's not just the online marketing group doing that work."

Traffic Over Profits?

As with any technology-related conference happening in 2007 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the trade booths were filled with various Internet startups with funky names such as Gorilla Soapbox and DayZLoop. And I had serious flashbacks to the dot-com boom era when startup execs trotted out growth numbers for downloads, user numbers and visits, with only vague talk of business models related to advertising or perhaps paid content through mobile carriers.

HarperCollins' Naughton was one who brought up the bugaboo of actually making money from all these hip, cool online ventures for teens.

"We have a lot of content, but how are we monetizing it?" she asked. "At the end of the day, our CEO says again and again, 'How are we making money with it?' Are we becoming an e-commerce company? How does that change our relationship with stores like Barnes & Noble? Monetization is the biggest issue for us to move forward with in a structured way."

Even though there was a bit of built-in scorn for old media companies on their panel vs. the new media companies on the "New School" panel, it is the old-schoolers that are actually profitable while new-schoolers have a two-word business model pasted on their foreheads: "Buy me." When I asked the "New School" panelists if any of them were profitable, Photobucket CEO Alex Welch said "in some months we make money." And they are the star of the social networking apps realm being a photo-sharing site that was recently bought for $300 million by MySpace.

But I was surprised by the response from Linden Lab's L'Amoreaux, who said that Second Life was now profitable, following years of losing money. Of course just how profitable it is remains to be seen. Fast-talking CEO of RockYou Lance Tokuda was a fountain of statistics, noting how popular his widgets had become on the now-open Facebook platform. He talked about scenarios of how RockYou would charge other companies to boost downloads of their own widgets. But that idea of "pay me to get your widgets where mine are" doesn't quite have the ring of helping teens find the content they want.

The other problem during the dot-com era was all the startups using borrowed venture money to buy up ads on the other startup sites, a chain that broke down when the money stopped flowing and the advertising business busted. On many panels, the talk turned to free online applications for teens supported by advertising. On the "Totally Mobile" panel, Jed Stremel, director of mobile for Facebook, said he liked the free ad-supported model over mobile content that teens pay for through their carrier (which is billed to mom and pop).

Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, noted that his map-based social networking app for mobile phones was successful, despite a $2.99/month price tag, meaning that paid content works with some cell content. Loopt today announced a deal with Sprint to offer a mapping service where friends can find each other on maps on some smartphones with GPS capabilities. But in response to Stremel's point about making services free, Altman mentioned that Loopt would be announcing more business models beyond the pay one. Mixing up revenue streams is perhaps the best way to get past the inevitable boom-and-bust cycles of advertising and the drop in cost for cell data plans.

Pluses & Minuses

Overall, for a first stab at a conference, Mashup 2007 was pretty decent, and attracted a good combination of academics, marketers, researchers, journalists, startup execs and various others. There was the obvious problem of a bunch of old farts in button-down shirts (guilty as charged) trying to look like they were hip and with the teen generation. Having old folks talk about teens all day is like having retirees talk about their favorite gangsta rap artists -- it just sounds wrong. And bringing in the cliched "teen panel" doesn't quite cut it.

"Authenticity starts with us, and 'cool' isn't a stag you can hunt down and drag home," wrote Angela Natividad about Mashup 2007 on the AdRants blog today. "It's like love (or lust?) -- you feel it. You know it when you see it. And baby, look around. We are not it."

So how to solve that problem? Perhaps there should be a teen on every panel, a kind of BS detector for when the grown-ups get out of line and start pontificating.

There were some other nice touches at the conference. Karl Carter of Inner City Enterprises had the audience text message him with questions for the "Social Change" panel, and there were various "user-generated" discussion roundtables during lunch. It was a rare time at a conference where I felt like I got more out of a lunch discussion on widgets than I did from many of the panels. My only nitpick was that I didn't know to sign up for the lunches ahead of time.

And my final nit was the usual appearance of representatives from conference sponsors on panels. That practice seems to be falling out of favor at some of the "unconferences" coming into vogue, and it would have been nice to see that here as well. I'm not complaining about the quality of those panelists as much as knocking the appearance that companies could simply buy their way onto panels.

If you attended the Mashup 2007 conference, use the comments below to share your thoughts on it. What worked for you, and what didn't? What big takeaways did you learn from it and how could it be improved? I'll update this post with any important thoughts or responses, even if they come from other blogs.

All photos are by MediaShift associate editor Jennifer Woodard Maderazo. You can see her full stream of photos from the conference on Flickr here.

UPDATE: Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse was the organizer of the conference. She reacted on her blog to my criticism of having sponsors on panels:

I was as transparent as possible about this in the [blog] posts leading up to the event, i.e. that we did include speaking as part of one of the sponsorship levels. For future events, we plan to only include sponsored case studies and clearly label them as such. Any speaker on a panel, who happens to also be a sponsor, will have been invited to speak first. The two tracks will be kept separate.

I think that's a good idea, as you get an echo chamber effect having speakers who are also sponsors bombarding attendees in such an overarching way. And if you're going to do a conference about being authentic and doing advertising online in new collaborative ways, it makes sense to extend that to the conference itself.

While no one stepped up to give an exact age, many parents defended these virtual worlds as being extensions of their kids' real world relationships. Rather than meet new, possibly scary, strangers online, the kids were generally using the virtual worlds as a way to communicate with their friends from school.

Online marketer Todd Copilevitz says his seven-year-old daughter has been hooked on Club Penguin and Webkinz:

As a marketer, and parent of an active participant in both kids sites mentioned, I can tell you Second Life isn't even in the same league. Kids on these sites can spend hours exploring, collecting and buying the pieces necessary to build their worlds. There are very real lessons in how they learn the relative costs of creating a 'home.' I'm hesitant to suggest Second Life has any redeeming educational value...

My daughter is now scheming ways to afford her next Webkinz, #17 if I'm not mistaken. Each has an online counterpart, that has friends, a home, a mortgage and rich world of imagination. Suddenly her world of imagination is being juiced by the online experience. That's something the PowerRangers never managed to deliver.

Jim Bower, the CEO of virtual world Whyville (which has been around since 1999), pointed out the difference between adult virtual worlds and those for kids:

It turns out that there is a significant difference between the way adults use Second Life and other social networking sites, and the way that kids use Whyville -- Whyville isn't their second life, it is their first life. What I mean by that...is that while adults generally seek anonymity on the Internet, so they can pretend to be 19-year-old females, kids' social use of the Internet is deeply connected to their real social worlds. Our data suggests, for example, that better than 60% of the conversations and interactions that Whyvillians have on Whyville is with their real world school friends. Another 20% is with distant relatives (including parents serving in the military, for example)....

The adult concern that kids are using social networking sites to do the weird/separate from the real world things that adults do, is not, in fact, what kids are doing. Whyville is their first life. It will be interesting to see, as they grow up, if they start engaging in second life activities -- but, they may not.

Other parents seconded what Bower said. Writer Lisa Romeo said her 9-year-old son had more fun in virtual worlds when he knew other people there from his everyday life. "Then they talk about it later (or concurrently) on the phone, or at school the next day," she said.

Dealing with Rejection

One of the better sources for unbiased information on media for kids is Common Sense Media, which reviews many of these virtual worlds. In its review of Club Penguin, the reviewers say there is a problem when young kids try to be friends with other penguins who reject them.

"For example, instead of using words to negotiate friendships, it's very easy in this virtual world to get a mean face icon in response to 'Wanna be friends?'" the review says. "Then the mean penguin is gone and the hurt, friendless penguin is left alone wondering what he did wrong. You can also throw snowballs at random penguins for no apparent reason."

While many of the kid and parent reviews of Club Penguin on Common Sense Media are positive, there was one parent who noted the complications inherent in virtual worlds for kids:

My daughter was almost in tears when trying to make a friend who would reject her or suddenly disapear. Another negative point is the fact that the site endorses materialism, rewarding game playing with money to buy 'stuff' for your penguin. And you can get better 'stuff' if you pay for a membership. In my opinion this type of site in all its innocence is just a precursor for MySpace. For now, my daughter can find other things to do, outside preferably, and enjoy her childhood. Why rush things? Club Penguin, you're cute and seemingly well intentioned but no thanks!

Another adult reviewer cautioned that the gameplay in Club Penguin could be very addictive. Kathryn Casebeer, who helps convert websites into 3D virtual worlds, noted that kids need time limits to make sure they don't get addicted. "I think it's a matter of setting limits on time spent in a virtual world -- by hour, daily, weekly, and monthly," she said. "My online friend who is 15 is not allowed to go into a virtual world during the week when school is in session. So, common sense and adult supervision solves that."

So perhaps the winning combination for kids in virtual worlds is for parents to moderate their usage, make sure they have real-world friends in the worlds, and play along and monitor what they're doing. Educating parents and kids about virtual worlds will go a long way to mitigating problems.

What do you think? Do your kids play in virtual worlds, and what lessons can you share from their experiences? What dangers do you see in these worlds, and what values can kids learn there? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: Finally, we hear a counter-view on virtual worlds for kids. Adam Engst, who publishes the TidBits newsletter about Macintosh computers (obviously not a Luddite), thinks kids need more time learning in the real world before jumping into virtual worlds. Here's what he says in the comments:

No, my 8-year-old doesn't play in a virtual electronic world. He plays in a real world, populated with grass and trees and sticks and stones and ponds -- all the raw materials for a child to create his own imaginary worlds that intersect neatly with the real world of physical objects, living creatures, and other people. Frankly, I think it's rather distressing that parents would be encouraging children to avoid the real world well before they understand how to navigate it -- you can't possibly understand a simulacrum before you understand reality. And more to the point, how can we expect children ever to understand and appreciate reality properly when they've been trained from a young age that fantastical virtual worlds with entirely artificial rules are an acceptable substitute?

I'm not sure that parents are actually "encouraging children to avoid the real world" and hopefully they are trying to moderate and mix usage of virtual and real world play activities. The key is balance, and parents need to get kids (and themselves) out of the house when they can.

"Now that Reuters has a correspondent actually reporting on stories from Second Life regularly, is this now becoming a real world?" she wondered. "How can you tell the difference anymore?"

It's a good question. Second Life (SL) isn't really a game. It's a virtual world created by Linden Lab where you "walk" or even "fly" around a 3D graphical environment, interacting with avatars -- computer representations of actual people who are also in the world. It doesn't cost anything to join the action, but if you want land or posessions, you need to pay real money for them. And if you build up property or can create a cool line of clothes, you can make a business out of it that pays you real money converted from the game's "Linden dollars."

More and more real-life companies are spending time and money trying to figure out how to promote their products in Second Life. The virtual world recently logged its 1 millionth registered "resident," though that pales in comparison to the 6.5 million players of the most popular online game of all time, World of Warcraft. But media companies are clamoring to write about Second Life and its culture bleeding into the real world, while simultaneously setting up a virtual presence there to promote their writers or publications.

I have received a growing number of emails from random friends who have heard about Second Life but wonder "Who has time for all this?" Obviously, these media companies are making time for it:

> Wired Magazine recently ran a Travel Guide to SL in its magazine, and announced it was opening up virtual offices in the world where it would host events and lectures with writers and editors.

> CNET built an in-game replica of its own headquarters building in Second Life, and plans to conduct interviews there and host events as well.

> The Reuters wire service has gone the furthest by creating an in-game presence in Second Life on its own island, along with a special SL website on Reuters with charts on the Linden/U.S. dollar exchange rate and real dollars spent in SL each day (nearly $600,000 today). Plus, Reuters reporter Adam Pasick has been assigned to head Reuters' virtual bureau in Second Life under the avatar name of Adam Reuters. You just can't buy this kind of hipster quotient, or can you?

> BusinessWeek, rather than set up its own virtual building or bureau in Second Life, chose the easier route of just hyping the entry of media companies into the game, with little criticism or thoughtful reporting. In fact, the photo essay accompanying the story online might as well be a series of ads for the companies that have set up shop in SL.

Reality Check for SL

While I haven't checked out Second Life first-hand yet, I have played many of the percursors to it such as Ultima Online and AlphaWorld in the mid-'90s. The problem with marketing products in these virtual worlds is that everyone is spread out over large plots of virtual land and don't experience everything in the same way at the same time -- as they do watching a TV show or even visiting a website.

While the 1 million figure for residents of Second Life has been trumpeted in the media, keep in mind that this is the total number of people who have registered for the game in its history. Many of those folks probably checked it out, got frustrated with long lag times or lack of quests, and left forever. More useful numbers are the dynamic ones posted on the Second Life site, which this afternoon read: 12,354 residents logged in now; 459,062 residents logged in over the last 60 days.

Just because CNET puts up a building to host events doesn't mean people will attend those events, and that it will garner any modicum of attention there. And the Register recently questioned a close relationship between CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman and Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale.

[UPDATE: Terdiman tells me that the Register article was biased against him, and that the Register writer "hates Second Life." While the Register complained that Terdiman had listed Rosedale as a reference on his resume, Terdiman says he put Rosedale there because "he could speak to my reporting skills." See more on Terdiman's response to me in the UPDATE below.]

A recent "appearance" in Second Life by singer Ben Folds resulted in just 25 avatar onlookers, according to The Age.

"Obviously an effort like this isn't about record sales [by Ben Folds], but it's also clearly not about offering Second Life residents a valuable experience," wrote blogger Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture. "Like the handful of similar events preceding it, this one could only be leveraged for its external media buzz potential. The Age and other mainstream publications don't know enough to identify events like this as anything but a major-label snow-job (that's what we have bloggers for)."

Walsh has been checking out SL since its inception, and rang an early alarm against the hype last April, noting the small active user base and the technical glitches caused by user hacks of the system. But now that the media coverage is in overdrive, even Walsh has been unable to ignore Second Life, writing about the virtual world in six blog posts over the past week.

Despite the problems and excessive hype, Second Life and the other massively multiplayer virtual worlds do represent a strange and wonderful phenomenon worth writing about for journalists: people living in an alternate reality -- literally creating their alternate reality -- that affects their "First Life" either through virtual relationships or by running real businesses. Hopefully, more journalists will be able to tell the story of these cultural shifts without becoming the pawns (and customers) of the game's creator.

What do you think? Do you play Second Life regularly and what motivates you to spend time there? What do you think about Reuters having a correspondent in the game, and the media companies' push to open up virtual presences in SL? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: In an email to me, CNET's Daniel Terdiman, who has been writing about Second Life, explained that he didn't see a conflict of interest for media companies writing about the virtual world and also setting up shop there:

The money that CNET and Wired and Reuters (though I can't speak for them, because I don't know the specifics, but I am making an educated guess), spent setting up presences in Second Life didn't go to Linden Lab. That's not how Second Life works. At least in the case of CNET, our investment went entirely to a third-party contractor, and Linden Lab got none of it. That's the point. When I pitched the idea of a CNET presence in Second Life to my bosses, I made the explicit point that the money would not go to Linden Lab because I knew that if it did, there would be a direct conflict of interest.

And just to be clear, I don't even pay for the account I use for my CNET activities in Second Life. It's a free account, since I don't own any Second Life land. So as far as the CNET/Linden Lab relationship goes, not one penny has changed hands.

That might be true, however the fact that media organizations such as Wired, CNET and Reuters have made a concerted marketing push into the game seems like a validation of the game as a business platform. Would Adam Reuters ever write a piece explaining why Second Life will never really gain critical mass, and tell people not to visit the world, when he is now living his professional life there? I still believe that the journalists and media companies here are treading a thin line between being objective observers and touters of SL. Why couldn't Reuters just assign Pasick to cover online worlds or online gaming in general and not specifically Second Life?