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The community polices itself with rare intrusion from Linden Lab. Residents generally don't ask about offline lives and are happy to communicate with each other based on users' online identities. Politeness is standard; the land is split into PG and Mature areas, and adult indiscretions or language in PG regions are discouraged. People are quite willing to offer help and items to new account holders, or 'newbies' as they're called, and in general a gift economy prevails for items that creators have marked as open source. Any personal attacks, either verbal or physical, are generally met with social exclusion.

Theft is extremely rare. Residents who are caught are subject to public humiliation on a public Police Blotter on the Second Life website. Word gets around, and if someone is deemed untrustworthy, people don't do business with them. Indeed, the political nature of the system is encouraging to real-life public policy-makers, who are studying Second Life and other virtual environments for clues as to how laws in the real world are made and broken.

In general, however, what happens in Second Life stays in Second Life. Issues between residents are usually dealt with inside the virtual world with

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no need for top-down policing. As new worlds go, it's not a utopia, but it is quite an exciting experiment.

Brave new world

Second Life is testament to what can happen when a multimedia platform opens its content creation facilities and its ownership rights to the general public. User-generated content is the driving force behind the Web 2.0 world, and Second Life is a prime example of that.

At the moment, the residents are being roused by the implementation of the new voice service which, in the long run, will make the application more useful for big businesses as a distributed communication facility for meetings and training purposes. The old guard see this as a breach of their anonymity; richer media such as voice services are sure to have a profound effect on many existing relationships, which have until now been based purely on text-based communication.

Power to the people

Yet the truth is that the power of virtual worlds lies in the way in which new recruits will use them. Moves from big technology companies and media organisations, from IBM and HP to Reuters and the BBC, suggest that these new landscapes are part of our digital future.

"The standards and conventions [that] underpin the web took years to mature, and have barely begun to emerge in virtual worlds yet," explains Reynolds. "Wouldn't it be exciting to be able to jump between worlds in the same way that you don't need a different web browser to view websites on different servers?"

The signs point to a new method of consumption, offering fascinating opportunities for content creation. The future of virtual worlds will demand active participation in the production of new technologies, driving how we interact with one another in years to come.