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Amsterdam is for sale on eBay.. It's one of the most popular areas in Second Life. More than that: It is, to Second Life, what Times Square is to New York, or Fisherman's Wharf is to San Francisco. It's one of the first places where newbies go, to look around and check out the scene.

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IBM launched Codestation, an area in Second Life for developers, providing training, information, as well as a code library and labyrinth where developers can learn by building robots and racing them against each other. Check out the images.

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Join InformationWeek and Dr. Dobb's Journal Tuesday morning for a kaffeeklatsch to discuss the South by Southwest conference, going on this week in Austin, Texas. SXSW is one of the leading conferences for Web 2.0 and it's where I am right now. DDJ's John Jainschigg (a/k/a John Zhaoying in Second Life) has arranged a special treat for Tuesday's discussion; if you miss it, you'll want to cut out your own brain.

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Participants at the "Web 2.0 to Web 3-D" panel at South by Southwest on Monday talked quite a lot about how Web 2.0 is participatory, but virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life are immersive. That sounds like a lot of marketing baloney unless you've actually been active in a virtual world. Sure, it's engaging to be involved in a Web 2.0 site like Twitter or Digg. But, when you're active on a virtual world, your attention is fully consumed in the experience, and the real world just falls away.

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This morning's Second Life kaffeeklatsch was stimulating and entertaining, as always. The topic for today was "Is Second Life Bad for You?" We ended up talking about people for whom Second Life is a benefit because they're housebound due to physical disability, including one woman whose cancer was quite severe, for whom Second Life had become her first life.

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I have to admit I'm not 100% looking forward to the addition of voice into Second Life. I agree that it's inevitable and will make the service easier to use. But the text-based chat currently in use in Second Life adds to its charm, and, paradoxically, makes the service seem more real.

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Jon us for our Second Life kaffeeklatsch Tuesday 7 am Second Life Time, at Notre Dame de Caffeine. The subject: Using Second Life for collaboration in SL and real life. For more on Web 2.0 collaboration tools, see this week's cover story, "Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business.".

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I've discovered that Ziggy Figaro, my alter ego in Second Life, is vain. In Second Life, I spend a good deal of time shopping, fussing over my appearance, and figuring out what to wear. In real life, I devote exactly as much effort on my appearance as I need to, and no more.

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I've had two major interviews in Second Life go badly on me, and I'm still trying to figure out why. I handled them exactly as I do my real-life interviews, and I mostly don't have these problems in RL. It's apparent that the rules are different for SL interviews -- but how? And can the needs of RL and SL be reconciled, or should I brace myself for further conflict?

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Play2train.org built a realistic simulation of a small town in Second Life, complete with detailed restaurants and a complete hospital. Then they blew the whole village up real good, as well as inflicting pestilence such as a smallpox epidemic, in order to help train emergency personnel in disaster preparedness. View a 16-minute video overview of the tabletop simulation below.

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This morning's kickoff kaffeeklatsch in Second Life was a success, with a small but high-quality group gathered to discuss doing business in-world, and drink virtual coffee (as well as a bit of absinthe). Join us Friday morning at 10 a.m. EST (7 a.m. Pacific time) when the suggested topic will be managing growth. People are signing up by the thousands -- can Second Life keep up?

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Join us in Second Life Tuesday at 7 am for the first in a regular, twice-weekly series of kaffeeklatsches to discuss the top technology news and trends of the day, co-hosted by InformationWeek and Dr. Dobb's Journal.

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I've gone and created an InformationWeek group in Second Life, so if you're "in-world" (as we happenin' Second Lifers say), join up to be informed about all the exciting things that InformationWeek is doing in Second Life.

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You wouldn't know it from all my kvetching, but I'm actually happy about making the switch from Windows to the Mac. However, if you're thinking about making the jump yourself, you should know that it's an enormous pain in the neck at first.

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Linden Lab appears to be taking steps to puncture the hype bubble surrounding its creation, Second Life, providing realistic statistics on how many people are actually using the service, and debunking claims that the Linden Dollar tokens used in SL are a kind of real currency.

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There are few things more frustrating than getting a new computer and finding out that it might need to go back to the shop right away. My six-day-old Mac runs flawlessly except for one thing: After I've been running Second Life a while, the Mac crashes hard, locks up, and throws up an error message that says it needs to be re-started.

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I admit I was skeptical, at first, about whether it made any sense to hold meetings in Second Life. Getting together a bunch of avatars to discuss real-life business issues seemed to me to be just plain silly. I would have said adding Second Life to a meeting added distractions and brought nothing useful. However, recent conversations with IBM and with an executive at a SL consulting firm have given me some things to think about with regard to the value of meeting in virtual reality.

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People watching the Super Bowl pre-game show on CBS got a look inside Second Life, in the form of a short promotion for the sitcom Two and a Half Men that was filmed inside the virtual world using a technique called "machinima."

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I've succumbed to the anonymity trend in Second Life, and got myself a second avatar for most of my future explorations. I'll keep using Ziggy Figaro when I'm in there representing InformationWeek, but most of the time I'll just use this other avatar, so I can do what I want, without having to worry about making my employers look bad.

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Second Life is hard to use. Everybody knows it. I've logged something like 20 hours on SL in the past week and a half, and I'm still a consummate klutz. SL needs to be easier to use -- but not too easy, because if it was easy, it would undercut the nature of the world and remove one of its most appealing qualities.

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Ida Keen is the most unusual person I've met in Second Life. You'll recall that the people I've met in SL include Dirjha Summers, an exotic dancer who works in a midnight city prowled by vampires and demons, along with Tateru Nino, an androgynous figure in a long robe who works in an office floating high in the clouds. Ida Keen, however, is an ordinary woman who lives, along with her husband, in an approximate reproduction of her grandmother's house on the Florida shore. She wears jeans, a sweater, and sneakers.

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Role-playing is an essential part of Second Life. But some people take it more seriously than others. Some people act as if Second Life really is a second life -- as if the person who exists in that virtual world really is a different person from the one in the real world.

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Anshe Chung just e-mailed me to correct some statements in my earlier blog post. She says she never engaged in cybersex for Linden Dollars. She compares what she did to what a geisha does: "A geisha is not paid for sex, although an individual geisha may choose to pursue sexual relationships with men she meets through her work."

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Pity me, my job is such torture. I've been spending a lot of the last week explicitly, and with the enthusiastic support of my managers and colleagues, doing an activity which gets people fired from most rational jobs. I've been messing around with computer games. Specifically, the virtual world known as Second Life.

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Second Life has produced one authentic celebrity so far: Anshe Chung, who claims a financial worth of $1 million real-life, American dollars for creating and selling virtual goods and services. I interviewed her for two hours yesterday evening in Second Life, and woke up this morning with a new appreciation of how slippery identity and reality is in Second Life.

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Today, I took off my pants in public and discovered I have no genitals. I also gave myself a new appearance in Second Life. Other than that, the day's gameplay so far has been pretty disappointing.

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John Kusters is an enthusiastic World of Warcraft player. Nonetheless, he poured cold water on one of the main theses of my article: That virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft and Second Life, are becoming mainstream. He says they're inherently solitary pursuits, and therefore appeal to solitary people, who are comfortable spending hours at a time alone in front of their computers.

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I had my first visit to Mature-rated area of Second Life. It wasn't on purpose. Message to my wife: You hear that? I didn't do it on purpose! Do I have to keep sleeping on the couch?

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This afternoon I learned to walk, and fly, and fix my hair. I picked up a beachball and put it on a table, I'm ready to leave Orientation Island and go out into the real world. Or, rather, the real, virtual world of Second Life.

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I'm now ready to make a pronouncement about Second Life, based on well under an hour of experience with it this morning: It's pretty confusing. Also, my hair looks terrible.

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Are virtual world and online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life what the Internet will look like in coming years? A few people I've been talking to recently think so, including Corey Bridges, co-founder of Multiverse Network, whom I interviewed Friday afternoon for an article on virtual worlds. A generation of young people is growing up hacking and slashing their way through virtual worlds -- that's literally true in the case of World of Warcraft -- and they're going to expect a 3-D, virtual world interface for the rest of their online interaction.

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