Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to my third Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview.  Three is a powerful number in business (and in many other fields), so I chose to have this interview focus on the future of business and the Internet.

There has been a ton of buzz (mainly positive) about the online 3D world, Second Life.  My two favorite magazines, BusinessWeek and Wired, write about Second Life in nearly every issue.  Wired called it the "coolest destination on the Web" and they loved it so much they set up shop there.  IBM recently built a Circuit City store in Second Life, and Dell recently opened up shop there as well.  I have my own views on why Second Life is getting so much buzz.  First, the promise of the Internet and virtual reality has been science fiction worthy for a long time.  The groundbreaking book, Neuromancer by William Gibson, invented the term "cyberspace".  The insane cult-classic movie, Brazil by Terry Giliam, showed a warped glimpse into the world of virtual reality.  Neal Stephenson's book, Snow Crash, made the virtual reality Web more tangible and exciting by painting a vision of the "Metaverse", which caught on as a new term to describe many massively multiplayer online RPGs (role-playing games, like World of Warcraft), and was adopted by Second Life to describe their virtual world.  Second, the promise of the Web on viable telecommuting and having a successful business that doesn't need to be located in a specific geography (like Silicon Valley) is a very real desire for many.  And third, it is just plain cool to imagine a world that you can live in without the rules of gravity (in Second Life, you can fly), where you can be anyone (in Second Life, many choose avatars that are quite interesting to say the least), and build anything (in Second Life, all it takes are a few pixels).

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