As soon as MySpace.com and YouTube.com made the passage from viral upstarts to new-media establishment, the hunt for the next big thing went into hyper-drive.
It took tech writers and bloggers about seven minutes to crown an aspirant to the Online Hottie Throne -- Second Life (second life.com), the online virtual-world video game.
Second Life, which you no doubt soon will be seeing in magazine stories, business analyses and cultural critiques, is a role-playing video game in which players create alternative-reality characters ("avatars") for themselves.
Then they go about living lives in a 3-D digital world that allows them to create, do, build or be anything they can imagine. They can construct mansions and furnish them, have relationships, sit in a coffeehouse and complain about their real lives -- all are part of the experience.
There also is Second Life currency, which people earn in an allowance, augment by taking jobs and trade in the open market for U.S. currency.
Web die-hards complain that Second Life is a watered-down version of the established virtual game World of Warcraft -- to which cultural savants respond: The tiny difference of not being in a Tolkien-inspired realm of orcs and jousting is probably what will make SL, shall we say, welcoming to a broader community.
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