There are a couple of interesting posts over on Clickable Culture that, for me at least, dovetail nicely. The first (Link) points to an entry over on Game Tycoon (edery.org? – Link) providing a recap of Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale’s talk at the GSD&M Digital America Conference (I guess that’s an advertising get-together since GSD&M is an ad agency).

There’s really nothing new in Rosedale’s talk for those of us more involved in the Second Life simulation, but CC does a nice job of listing some user statistics culled from Rosedale’s presentation. The only thing I would really single out for attention is the line item saying “$50M US dollars worth of annual transacations (based on current data)”. I’ve been watching the daily transaction and concurrent user numbers and at the beginning of the year the transaction numbers were much higher than I expected (something like $375,000/day which is closer to $140M US dollars /year). Now it seems the daily stats are broken and stuck all day in the mid $200k’s (actually, iirc the main web page isn’t a real ticker according to previous company responses to questions regarding it; but Linden Lab may be changing that since they’ve recently been adding quite a bit of real-time functionality to their website). I’ll continue to watch it and maybe someone will – or already has – ask LL if they could explain what’s going on with the ticker.

The second item over on Clickable Culture is news (Link) that BabyPhat, the highly-successful fashion brand, has licensed it’s tradename for use in cyberspace. Okay… well… a 3D instant messenger called imstar*. It really is only a matter of time before Second Life attracts similar attention (I just hope that people listening to Lessig in Second Life last night realize that this attention could also cause some serious problems).