But there's a more disturbing aspect as well: allegations of simulated child molestation and real child pornography in Second Life. That has fired up the debate about the level and nature of sex in Second Life, prompting today's lead story on the Second Life sex climate. InformationWeek's Mitch Wagner has spent lots of time in the virtual world and is in a unique position to analyze the impact sex could have on its future. He interviewed everyone from participants in the SL sex trade to Philip Rosedale, CEO of SL's operator, Linden Lab.

Rosedale mostly defends the activity as a healthy sign that the community is thriving. I don't necessarily agree with that, but read our report and judge for yourself.

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It's been awhile since we've talked of browser wars, but a new round could be upon us. I spoke at Interop with Web traffic monitoring firm Gomez's CTO, Imad Mouline, who noted increasing need among his customers for insights into how new apps and services will perform across browsers.

That's consistent with our internal experiences; when we launch new Web features, we're now testing across two versions of IE (7 with Vista, 6 with everything else) plus Firefox and even Opera. Things were simpler six and 12 months ago.

What do you think: Are the browser wars back? Are your development efforts complicated by the bifurcation of IE? What management issues go along with a proliferation of browsers? Share your thoughts at my blog entry.

Tom Smith
tasmith@cmp.com
www.informationweek.com

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As with every medium since cave paintings, sex is a big part of Second Life. The virtual world is a haven where people can fulfill their sexual fantasies. But it also has a dark side.

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