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Second what? Second Life is a virtual 3-D world on the Internet. Think of it as the marriage of online video game technology and social networking tools, like MySpace and Facebook, with e-commerce potential. It is not really a game and isn’t intended for children.

Public accounting’s presence in Second Life is called CPA Island. CPA Island may be a way to attract the next generation of young professionals to careers in public accounting.

Videos more easily capture the look and feel of Second Life. YouTube (www.youtube.com) has a good introductory overview video of Second Life (search “Second Life Text100”) as well as a video that illustrates its communication, education and collaboration possibilities (search “Second Life Ohio University”).

Barack Obama’s change.org website is accepting requests for ideas and projects to be implemented during his term. Knowing that he’s all for technological innovation, and that several successful experiments with e-democracy were done inside Second Life®, let’s try to push for even more. Andabata Mandelbrot is proposing that we vote to create an international metaverse - the Internet equivalent of virtual worlds. To get this implemented, we need 400 votes! And the deadline is… today at midnight, so we need to hurry… Voting is simple, you just need to create an account on the change.org account and vote (you can even log in with your Facebook or MySpace account) by clicking on the icon. If you’re willing to promote this idea, you can, of course, do more — add widgets, push it to your social network, and so on. With a surprisingly open-minded approach, voting is not limited to US residents, but it’s totally open to international voters too. The change is for America, but its impact will be global. A nice touch!

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.

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 Linden at the educational meeting in SL 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.

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."

The Massively crew has spent a little more time hammering away at Google's new virtual artifice, Lively. By now, you've probably seen all sorts of news reports calling it a rival and competitor to Linden Lab's virtual world, Second Life. Technically, that's what we call bollocks

Describing Lively as a rival to Second Life is like calling a conference center a rival to a library. They're just not servicing the same needs, and the comparison is fundamentally nonsensical. Lively is tightly focused, and fails to intrude on the bulk of virtual worlds space.

Movement is accomplished by double-clicking on a spot to teleport your avatar there, or clicking and dragging the avatar with the left mouse button to walk your avatar. Don't try to drag your avatar past the border of the camera view without repositioning your camera first, or you will get unsettling jumps and find your avatar in strange places.

The basic lessons here seem to be: The regulations governing DMCA notices are heavily in favor of the issuer. That's a matter of US law, and if that bothers you, you should speak with your United States federal representative. Act quickly, if a DMCA notice is filed against you and you wish to contest it. You have no time to dither. If someone files a notice against you, you have only two days to have a complete, correct and satisfactory counter-notification faxed to Linden Lab. Someone may file a DMCA notice against you with complete anonymity as far as you're concerned. While they have to give an identity to Linden Lab, that information is never available to you, unless they chose to pursue additional legal actions above and beyond DMCA notices. Once a DMCA notice has been filed, your identity is held hostage to whatever content has been nominated in the notice. You must divulge your identity to the person who filed the notice, via Linden Lab, in order to have your content returned to you. If your content should be returned to you by Linden Lab, the odds are that not all of it will be returned, and that some of it will be returned in an unusable form, or in a state that requires additional time and cost from you to restore it to original condition. The people utilizing the CopyrightAgent Linden account apparently need some training (or retraining) in the mechanics of the Second Life permissions system. While the Lab may be exempt from liability, it seems improper to carelessly damage or destroy a user's content in the act of restoring it.

That means less revenue from subscriptions and virtual land ownership (since you need a Premium account to own land.)

Perhaps the real economy has shifted, as Philip famously predicted, to a service economy - one built on helping folks solve problems, not on furnishing their beach houses. Meanwhile, the brands, which struggle to make SENSE of Facebook - how do you make money on random pokes, afterall, continues to struggle with Second Life as well - how do brands, which prefer to communicate in 30-second snippets and maybe a viral thing here or there, make money in environments where the users are deeply engaged? Throw up a billboard on GTA maybe, throw some free skins around in Second Life (see Evian), but struggle to crack the question of how a 30 second brand makes an impression in a 296 million minute world.