Wall Street Journal Notices Business Uses of Second Life -- SL on "Slope of Enlightenment"?

Today's Wall Street Journal has a front page feature story on enterprise uses of Second Life -- subscription only, but you can read the first part and participate in the reader comment section. The Journal is by far the most influential paper among the business community (which largely explains why it's the only major publication able to successfully charge subscriptions for its online site), so it's a striking story to see featured so prominently. It's among several recent pieces which suggest Second Life is moving past the "Trough of Disillusionment" and onto the "Slope of Enlightenment" in Gartner's famous hype cycle analysis. (That's when a once over-hyped technology is recognized for its practical uses beyond the first flush of over-enthusiasm.) To truly enter that stage, however, will require Second Life's user base growing beyond its extremely diverse but relatively small hardcore user base.

As Adric Antfarm points out to me in email, the WSJ reader comments on the article run fairly negative and full of suspicion. It's easy to imagines them as people "sitting pretty in the Upper West Side", in Philip Linden's colorful phrase, growing irritated and slowly fearful that this virtual world thing is not going away -- and that they may soon need to become a part of it.

Update, 12:30pm: This link seems to show the whole article. (Thanks to readers "PM" and Rocky Constantine.)

Comments

[PM]

Good to see some positive press.

I canceled my subscription to The Journal when Murdoch bought it a few years ago. Is the WSJ as credible as it used to be or has it become more like Murdoch’s Fox News? Any current Journal readers around here to testify. Is the Journal still worth subscribing to?

[PM]

Here is the article link (no charge):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125064110693841789.html

[PM]

Looks like that article link gets cropped; however if you google a WSJ article title (in this case I searched “WSJ A Second Chance for Second Life”, and the top google result takes you to the full article. So you can read it free that way.

Sorry for the triple posts.

[Rocky Constantine]

Here is another way to read the full text of the article - http://digg.com/d311Hhx
I am a user of digg and got this url from one of my digg friends who posted this. Hope it works for you.

[Manx]

they sit a lot prettier on the upper east side than the west. still, not a lot of IPs to track from that side of the island.

[Hamlet Au]

Yeah, good point. I actually had the NYC party for my SL book *in* the Upper West Side:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/04/the-mixed-succe.html