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'.

I just got back from a quick trip to Tokyo. I love going to Japan. In some ways it feels like the last truly alien place on the planet. The outside world is reflected, but always through a distinctly local filter. That applies equally to innovation as it does to food.

Joi Ito put it well. In an interview with Tim O'Reilly at the Tokyo Web2.0 conference, he observed that big web ideas were typically absorbed into Japan, digested, and then transformed into a mobile context. Its more than just flashy handsets. I saw much greater use of high tech devices and mobile TV services on subways in Seoul than i did in Tokyo. But there is an undeniable mobile internet ecosystem in Japan that you really don't see anywhere else in the world.

Anyway, enough geek talk. For the true sybarites out there - you might enjoy my latest video on the Modelux network.