Manufacturers forget that time and again consumers will happily trade resolution and quality for convenience and flexibility. Hence cassette tapes over high fidelity vinyl records, MP3 over CDs, and increasingly - web downloads over DVD. Take a closer look at the Macbook Air. There's no optical drive. The prediction is that audiences will increasingly stream or download wirelessly what they want to watch. Media companies should take note. By the time the studios have finished working out who's going to win the  physical media format war, they may discover it was a Pyrrhic victory after all.   

Popularity is one thing. How to make money from it is another. Its a question I often find myself discussing with my media clients. Merchandising, made possible by mass viral awareness, might be one such avenue.

It's a sign that the virtual is becoming mainstream when the worst aspects of reality begin to manifest. In this case - a sub prime worthy credit crunch in Second Life, forcing the benevolent dictators at Linden Labs to take a stronger hand on regulating banking in the game. But as I found out yesterday, real world irritations are not just limited to finance scams.

After a long hiatus, I teleported onto a block of land I had bought on Dreamland some time ago. Dreamland is a managed sim owned by virtual real estate mogul Anshe Chung. Anshe had sold it to me personally, back in the days before she had achieved front cover of Time magazine fame and liked to joke around with her clients in her dry ironic way. Realising I had left this prime island plot empty for too long I opened my building inventory and dropped a structure in place.

My neighbors, used to an unimpeded view of the simulated sunset were not amused. A barrage of abusive in game messages quickly followed, including one from an administrator who protested that my futuristic modernist structure was a violation of 'island living' zoning regulations. In other words, not faux Moroccan. My protest that my new home was in the spirit of Brasilia's Oscar Niemeyer fell on deaf eyes. So much for playing at Howard Roark. It seems that the future of virtual living is still well and truly in the Rococo style.

I've been reading some fascinating books lately on the science of networks and complexity. In particular 'Six Degrees' by Duncan Watts, and 'Linked' by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Both Watts and Barabasi have been active in many revolutionary studies and research papers that have changed the way we think about networks and their impact on society.

Network science is of great interest to me, as in researching my own book Futuretainment i've been studying how the interconnectivity of consumers is changing the media and entertainment industries.

Barabasi's book traces the history of thinking in Networks, from the static random network graphs of Erdos and Renyi, to our understanding today of dynamic systems like the Web or Facebook. It makes for dense but interesting reading. In his words, 'Nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world'.