just to set a few things straight with CBS

August 1, 2006 at 8:32 pm (CBS News, Everquest, Second Life, SignpostMarv Martin)

There are a few things wrong with this story that CBS News ran about Second Life:

Smith can’t afford a beach house in real life. But in Second Life, the online game created by her employer, Linden Lab, she — and nearly 100,000 other subscribers who pay $10 a month — can have that and more.

  1. At the time of writing (this post, not theirs), the population of SL is 300k+. The population has been above 1/4 million for .
  2. You don’t have to have a premium account to “live” somewhere, you can rent land with a Basic account.
  3. All you get for having a premium account is the ability to own land and L$400/week.
  4. A premium account is US$9.95/month on the monthly billing, US$7.50/month on the quarterly billing, and US$6.00/month on the annual billing. Not US$10

But it doesn’t stop there. Second Life itself is being sued in the real world over virtual land deals that went bad. And in China, a man was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a friend who sold the prized sword he’d loaned him — a virtual weapon that existed only in cyberspace.

  1. It’s being sued by someone who effectively hacked the land system.
  2. The murder has nothing to do with Second Life. Everquest. Not Second Life. Yeah, way to be sensationalist. Or n00bish for implying that the murder was related to SL.

In fact, Bowen says he can’t resist.

There’s one job he’s always wanted — and before Katie Couric gets on board, he went for it. The beauty is, Bob Schieffer will never know.

“This is the CBS Evening News with Jerry Bowen,” a virtual Bowen said from a virtual anchor desk.

  1. The BBC’s Jerr(em)y Paxman already beat you to it.

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