Ask yourself, how could these geek lads *count* how many people are “content creators” in Second Life without entering into the world and engaging in actual eyeballing and value judgement in addition to gathering server data? What they are doing now is just merely looking at the raw feed of server statistics and telling us the millions of objects created. That means I’m in that 25 percent because I created a box at my yard sale with my t-shirt made out of “appearance mode” and put it for sale for $1. Please.

To find out how many people sell content of value above the t-shirt level, you’d have to take both objects created, and objects then SOLD or at least transferred I suppose. I’d personally prefer to track the number of objects SOLD for VALUE. Then we’d see in fact whether Enabran and Cristiano and all the rest are talking through their hats.

Will Wright said 10 percent of the people would make 100 percent of the content for the other 90 percent, and he was smart enough to consider “content” to mean not just customized user-created context from textures lifted off the Internet, but events, games, activities, theater — whatever people did to attract others to their lots. I think he probably got it about right.

I don’t know where Csven gets his figure of 25,000, when the Lindens themselves, including Cory, including in that presentation, says 20,000. We’re told that of the 4500-5000 logged on any one time, the average stay is 4 hours and the average expenditure is $1500. That seems hugely high to me, but those figures can from Lawrence Linden.