Andrew Hoppin, NASA Ames Research Center and YearlyKos Convention/Bloggerpower.org

Excerpted from Corante with permission

Second Life's greatest utility, to me, is that it better mimics the experience of being offline in the same room together than any other online medium. The experience of interacting there is vastly more social and immersive than, say, an online blogging community. High trust relationships are built quickly. Think Meetup, except that you don't need 40 people to be in the same place on the planet to have an effective Meetup.

Second Life is also a rich medium for content creation that can be "surfaced" to the Web for broader exposure.  More than 100 people participated in an anti-war "virtual march on virtual Capital Hill" that we organized between CodePink and RootsCamp in Second Life recently, and one of our volunteers made a video of the event that went mildly viral with over 50,000 views. The cost of creating it was $0.

Clearly Second Life is not a panacea for online organizing, and there is a great deal of hype. User base growth statistics of 30% per month and >$1 Million transacted between Second Life users every day may be somewhat misleading, though the growth rate is undoubtedly torrid.

Hype or not, I do think we're seeing the early stages of a massive trend towards extensive use of immersive 3-D online environments as a primary medium for online social and professional online interaction and for interaction with data that can be represented visually. There is already great utility for me and communities I am helping to build in the context of RootsCamp, NASA, and YearlyKos in Second Life, and I believe that the utility I am experiencing today will prove to be just the tip of a very large iceberg as Second Life's technology improves, as its user base grows, and as new competing 3-D virtual worlds come online.

Read Andrew’s full article on Corante.