Robert Bloomfield from Metanomics reported recently in a post on Terra Nova about a panel discussion held in Second Life on the roles and merits of qualitative and quantitative methods in cultural anthropology (yeah, yeah, it's philosophy. Useless, you'd say? ). Here is a prediction they made :
Enterprising young scholars who are interested in cultural [...]

YouCity, previously known for its high-quality interactive maps of New York, announced a new "hyper local social network website based on a unique 3D virtual New York City platform".
The idea behind the concept is to help users connect and share interests with local people, thus creating underlying communities in an immersive (sic!) virtual environment. In [...]

How could Second Life be a life if there were no conferences organized in it?
Virtual Worlds-Best Practices in Education, a conference about benefits education could have from virtual worlds, is being held in Second Life these days (March 27-29). Ranging from rather philosophical and society-changing to more practical, some of the questions that participants of [...]

Is this a joke? Doesn't look like!
Entropia Universe is a virtual world, a Second-Life-like creation by the Swedish MindArk, with 800,000 registered users and 80-100,000 regular players. Just for a notice, let's say it's a little… weirder than SL, but nothing too unusual up to now.
The thing is that they really got a (real) financial [...]

A survey commissioned in Britain by Cisco , called "Urban 2020", aiming to investigate how 'connected' British are with their communities, among other results came up with a very interesting fact :
28 percent of respondents feel more a part of a virtual community than a physical one.
How long until we all do?
[ via [...]