Cory Ondrejka from Second Life is speaking about what he things is one of the most interesting aspects of Second Life: the departure from the usual pain vs. participation graph. Even though making things in Second Life isn't easy, there's an unusually high participation rate. People who use spaces like Second Life tend to look at them as real space. These are garnering a lot of the attention that people spend.

The economic scale of Second Life is impressive: over the last 30 days, 240,000 distinct items were bought an sold. The conventional wisdom is that user created content wouldn't be high quality, but that's not the case.

Cory talks about users protesting taxes by lighting stuff they'd made on fire. That obviously affected user acquisition.

Second life has 90,000 hours of usage per day. If you do the back of the envelop calculation to figure the cost of developing all the things people in the space make, it's about $400 million/year.

UC Davis created a virtual hallucination simulator so Second Life residents could see what it's like to be schizophrenic.

Second Life demographic data shows it's gender balanced and older than people who play games. There are hundreds of classes on Second Life about how to use Second Life. Amateur to amateur teaching happens all the time. There's great opportunity to apprentice and learn from experts.