Business media increasingly critical of Second Life

I posted a lengthy entry on my Computerworld blog today about the growing media backlash against Second Life ("The business press turns on Second Life, and boosters fight back").

Eight months ago media criticism was relatively rare -- myself, Valleywag, and a few others questioned the hype and were attacked for doing so. Now, even those outlets which were once only too happy to indulge in corporate marketing fantasies are starting to see that Second Life is not all that it's cracked up to be. For instance, BusinessWeek has pulled a nearly complete 180 on the virtual world. Gone are articles that suggest riches and amazing opportunities for corporate America. Now the magazine offers more a sober assessment of the virtual world: "Companies thinking twice about the popular virtual world are finding more security and flexibility in alternatives," warns this article.

However, the negative press doesn't mean virtual worlds are doomed. Far from it -- more people are joining them every day, and there have been several successful educational experiments in them, as described in my recent Terra Nova interviews with Rebecca Nesson and Aaron Walsh. And, as I reported in my Computerworld blog, Linden Lab Chair Mitch Kapor offered a very interesting comparison with the PC's technology adoption curve during his keynote presentation at an MIT/IBM conference that I attended last Friday. If we are indeed at the tail end of the early adopter stage of the technology adoption curve, businesses may indeed discover new opportunities in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

There were a few other issues that Kapor brought up at the conference, and I hope to describe them on I Lamont later this week.