Is the media falling in love with Second Life again?

After years of terrible, silly, shallow, badly researched or simply made up articles with screenshots from 1979, recently there have been a few rather positive and well written stories in the media about Second Life.

It seems that the virtual reality renaissance, set in motion by Oculus Rift, is bringing Second Life back into the spotlight and quite rightly so.

Because no matter what you think about our 13 year old online world, it is still there, it is still doing well and unlike any other VR related thing out there, it has a huge amount of experience, an amazing track record and its own economy.

It was a matter of time before (good) journalists would realise the importance of Second Life, or at least how interesting its story is today.

A few days an online magazine called ‘Good’ had a pretty decent article about us and today ‘Business Insider Australia’ published a wonderful story with the rather good and eye catching title;

‘This company was 13 years early to virtual reality — and it’s getting ready to try again’

Love that title, because SL was early, perhaps even ahead of its time.

The story has an ok screenshot, that at least is up to day (although not very exciting).

Because the audience is people who want to read about business, they get straight to the point and in my experience, that is very good when the story is about Second Life.

Throw some facts and figures at the reader and they will be impressed and perhaps stop thinking about all the pervy stuff they read about in the other articles.

Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab is quoted in the article and as I mentioned before, Ebbe knows what to say and how to sell our virtual world to outsiders and once more he does a wonderful job of it.

The story goes into the past and future of Second Life and well, it just sounds good.

Which is why the next version of Second Life has a few clear priorities, Altberg says: Make it easier for people to find cool, relevant stuff.

Make it possible for more people to attend and experience that cool stuff (Duran Duran did a free concert in Second Life once, but only 50 people could fit in the room for technical reasons).

Make it possible for people to make money in new ways from their stuff (like letting people who run virtual classrooms rent out the technology to other universities). If the company can do that with this next version, Altberg says, then Second Life’s prosperity will continue well into the new reign of virtual reality.

And what can I say, I am easily pleased, so I was quite excited when my 1920s Berlin Project was mentioned.

My already massive ego likes being stroked but to be blunt, I do think that at least the theme of my sim is a good one to show outsiders with that Second Life is about more than shopping, chatting and hanky panky.

Although of course all those things also happen in our sim… ssshhhh don’t tell anyone.

In short, an article worth reading (and you can read it by clicking here), but also positive about our virtual world.

Let’s hope more journalists start to realise that Second Life is actually a very interesting topic, again.