Who needs a Secondlife?

It’s hard to believe but there are more than 8,000,000 people worldwide “enjoying” Secondlife. Personally I wonder whether there is any correlation between this and 8,000,000 people being unhappy with their first life, or their first wife!

The online world has become a haven for marketers including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation who recently bought an island within Secondlife. Basically this means that our taxes have gone into marketing ABC to these somewhat bored, lonely and obscure individuals, and personally I think just as with Facebook this is a big bubble waiting to burst. I’m not the only one who thinks so either – The LA Times declared that “ the marketing possibilities of the virtual world are dead” and Time magazine placed Secondlife in their “5 worst websites of the year”, ironically the same year that they said Time person of the year was ‘you’.

The ABC Managing Director Mark Scott seems to be grabbing at any opportunity to ‘understand’ the changing landscape of media. A while ago I attended a GoldmanSachs speaker series where Mark told everyone how technocratic he was by using a daily weather widget and an rss feed reader. He also stood there and told a large group of youth how they were using media today, boasted about his dealings with the Prime Minister and got into a somewhat heated debate about Rupert Murdoch with the chief editor of The Daily Telegraph. Lucky for him he can hide behind the ABC’s charter!

Have a look at Darren Barefoot’s classic parody site “Get A First Life” and then “go outside, membership is free”!