The world may not exist but it can make money appear in your bank account

Since learning about Computer Mediate Communication styles in class I decided to do a little bit of research into their backgrounds. I searched second life and was amazed all the results that came up both from the site and 3rd parties. I even found a blog, which I found really funny that someone is blogging about the application intended for communication itself.

One article I found interesting was a piece on second life from business week. There was an interview conducted for the magazine through second life, which I found interesting because of how it relates to my major. The author of the article interviewed a Chinese teacher from Germany who owns a firm that creates homes for people to buy with the currency, Linden dollars, and has even started a real world company with real world employees. I was astounded to read that her company is worth 250,000 American dollars. Yes you read correctly, she makes money from people buying digitally created homes on digitally created land in an “imaginary” world, and has made a living from it. You may be asking yourself the same thing I thought…why? The article gives very closely related internet entrepreneurial sites formally thought of as crazy.

Ebay is quite possibly one of the world’s largest mediums to buy and sell items and goods. Myspace and Facebook are two of the most popular ways of CMC and even the most frequently visited sites on the internet. World of Warcraft has become somewhat of a cult. Even Google, a search engine, is eating up smaller useful sites to add to their electronic empire. Crazy right? Well they made people crazy rich with just a little ingenuity, some cyber elbow grease and an original idea. The world is evolving into a keyboard and a computer monitor, and those who jumped on board have made a living from it. People called Columbus crazy when he said the world wasn’t flat and they called Copernicus crazy when he stated that the earth revolves around the sun. Is it really so different? Now Ebay is worth millions of dollars and Google is one of the highest publicly traded stocks. My point is that though you may not relate to the social aspect of the applications, it doesn’t mean there aren’t other parts of it that may interest you. I know I could use the benefits from owning my own company worth a quarter of a million dollars, it would probably make retiring a bit easier and, oh I don’t know, sooner. And they do what, digitally create goods for second life. Sure beats back breaking labor and long hours for minimun wage. I think before you refer to something as crazy, look at other stuff that was considered crazy. Those who do not learn history are doomed to not monetarily benefit from the future.