As the network has become a medium that facilitates business and social interaction as well as a significant purveyor of identity, it was inevitable that the virtual and real planets are blurring into one, mashed-up if you will, brave new world. It is not exactly an insight to conclude that actions on the Internet have real consequences just like on any other medium, but recent developments are bringing the spotlight back on the collision of the two worlds.

The problems that Ginko Financial is facing on Second Life mean that a considerable amount of real money is at risk. The crisis must also have prompted Linden Labs to post this entry on the Second Life blog. One wonders why an explicit warning about money for nothing = pie in the sky is necessary at all, given that Second Lifers, avatars not withstanding, are all human beings in at least peripheral touch with real life shenanigans. A comment on that entry implies that Second Life is fairly casual about preserving the in-world money that users own. That is astonishing, but then, I haven't spent much time on the site (having decided that I'll give my first life a second chance), and don't know much about the economy there.

The Wired Threat Level blog has a vote going on spin jobs at the Wikipedia, after Virgil Griffith unveiled his Wikiscanner tool. The tool allows listing of anonymous edits at the Wikipedia for a range of IP addresses. Since the tool went online, people are having a field day correlating organizational IP addresses with edits to pages related to those organizations. I hesitate to make automatic conclusions on formal organizational involvement in such attempts at spin. Again, it is not news that some employees will attempt to tailor information about their employers, but the Wikiscanner makes identifying such goings-on far easier. Next stop : a tool that somehow identifies ex-employees editing information about their ex-employers.

These events and actions are, of course, commented on extensively. Surprisingly some commentators still think that the medium in use here being the Internet is in itself news, that virtual implies virtue and/or no influence on the "real".

Tags : Second Life Wikipedia