I’m a big fan of The Colbert Report. Maybe it’s because of the style of humor that Stephen uses to poke fun at pundits, the media, and the establishment in general. Or maybe it’s because he supports the Ontario Hockey League, albeit rooting for an American team. Anyway, I don’t feel to bad borrowing a line from Colbert¬† “Who is talking about me now…”

Actually, in this case it’s really about “In what language are they talking…”, in my daily surfing of the web. Which means my spare time between midnight and one AM. I came across the following Russian blog post. Now, I don’t read Russian, but I can use Altavista’s Babel Fish to pretend that I can as well as the next guy. The article appears to be about the growing spending by Fortune 500 and Global companies to bring their brands and products into Second Life. Correct me if I’m wrong of course. In one particularly amusing translation mistake, I assume, they mention our clients Scion are selling their virtual cars for 300 dollars. I hope that’s a translation mistake, as the actual cost is L$300 or about one US dollar.

Now why does some random blog posting about Second Life in Russian matter? Because, according to Linden Lab’s latest numbers Russian subscribers make up¬† 0.11% of the resident population or about 4000 people. This is for a product that is only available in English and, let’s face it, has a fairly difficult user interface. So despite rather daunting odds, it appears to be confirmed that Second Life has indeed gone global. So that really leaves only one question in my mind: Why are the 400 residents from Barbados, surrounded by beautiful sand beaches, beach front bars, sail boats and yachts, diving getaways, and etc.., logging in?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Chris' Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.