'Grey goo' & Web 2.0

Second Life's recent attack of the "grey goo" shows it has something in common with MySpace: the more creative freedom an online community allows its users the more trouble as well as user creativity it invites. Trouble in terms of both virtual-world security (against malicious hacks) and content controls in the context of child online safety. What happened recently in Second Life was basically a denial-of-service attack that looked like annoying golden rings spinning and flying around everywhere and slowed the game down for everybody, The Register reports. Second Life's creators Linden Labs had game life back to normal in a couple of hours, but among the "side effects" were "unreliable account balances, disappearing clothes, and shutting down in-game teleportation, which digital inhabitants use to get around quickly." The rings were "self-replicating objects" created maliciously - the downside of Second Life users' ability to have pets that reproduce and gardens that grow. Other virtual-world games, such as World of Warcraft, have had similar problems. However, a competitor of Second Life, There.com, requires its users to get approval for digital objects before they're allowed in the game. A parent's upside, possibly, is that "by instituting an approval process, the company can prevent X-rated content from entering its PG-13 world, keep out objects that may infringe on others' intellectual property and stop security threats from entering There," The Register cites There.com's CEO as saying. But it's just those controls that can cause players, including teenagers, to flock to the freer, potentially more lucrative experience of Second Life. One Lifer, "Lioncourt," told The Register that "the freedom to make his own content without an approval process has led to a part-time income of hundreds of dollars a month" (income that can come from selling virtual objects, advertising, and real estate for real money). This is the conundrum of the social Web: the safer or more controlled an environment is the less attractive it is to young people, who have unprecedented freedom on the social Web to move on to *less* controlled environments. This is why, I think, one tech educator, Wesley Fryer, recently suggested that, in working with young social networkers, the question shouldn't be "how do I control" but rather "how do I manage?"