You know your work is becoming a mainstream phenomenon when The Economist covers it. Second Life is written up here as part of a “Survey of New Media”. (The survey is a compilation of articles and audio interviews that touch on blogs, wikis, new media. Good stuff.) Here’s an excerpt from the article:

One user, Anshe Chung, pays Linden Lab the equivalent of about $200,000 a year to buy land in Second Life. Ms Chung turns a profit by developing this land into residential communities (such as “Hangzhou”, “Gotland”, “Emerald Island” and so on) and charging avatars rent. “It’s the purest way of profiting from creativity,” says Mr Rosedale.

After my first foray into Second Life I’ve stayed away — it looks too addictive to me. The dynamics are increasingly fascinating, though. This is a real economy and culture in the making. Any one looking for a Ph.D. thesis topic in economics or anthropology should be teaming up with Second Life to get access to their data.

I’m interested in how people discover things: web pages, music, places to eat, other people to hang out with, so on and so forth. Here are two items in that vein that I recently stumbled upon:

1. Discovering music: I signed up a while back with Last.fm, and played around with it for a bit. It’s interesting, but somehow left me a little flat. Last.fm uses collaborative filtering to recommend music that people with similar tastes enjoy. It’s a Black Box approach: assume you will never satisfactorily model the human brain and instead, just map human behavior and draw inferences from that. Where it fails for me is that there isn’t enough randomness; song sequences are too similar. Subsequently I’ve heard a lot about Pandora, which takes a totally different approach and tries to model the “genetics” of music. So… the new thing is a mashup of the two services. I just signed up.

2. Discovering people: If you are considering or have tried online dating, take a look at TeamDating. They enable group dates. Seems smart to me… there’s safety, fun, and serendipty in numbers.

3. Meta: I found out about the Pandora/Last.fm mashup from TechCrunch, and TeamDating via Springwise. If you are into business innovation and haven’t seen Springwise, check it out. They seek out and write about innovative new businesses almost every day.

The Globe and Mail published a short piece on Tuesday about lessons learned in bootstrapping Waterloo’s successful entrepreneurial community.

…Mr. Siim surrounded himself with … Tech brains from the computer-mad University of Waterloo and business smarts from Wilfrid Laurier University … Unlike many Waterloo startups, Sandvine’s network intelligence products are not the direct result of research undertaken at the University of Waterloo. But Mr. Siim is convinced that the university, along with WLU and Conestoga College, lie at the heart of why people build companies here. He is a serial entrepreneur who has been in on the start of three companies, and will be involved in more. The educational institutions are like anchor tenants in a shopping mall of creativity, he says — they are magnets for new ideas and new ventures.

Read the article here.