second life is a really interesting experiment and its development is a good study in how open systems/societies evolve into requiring more order. just like in real life people scam others which burns a lot of innocents, who collectively demand action which means the creation of rules to govern that area.
so why care about second life? because we are seeing the beginning of the persistant virtual worlds which will mirror our reality out here. sci-fi books go on about it a lot (neal stephenson is a good author for this) and as our online infrastructure gets more sophisticated we'll be hooking up our lives a whole lot more. we already take advantage of access to the worlds money markets by trading, there will also be social and economic changes to take place.
many companies have seen the future and have a presence in second life, they don't know what to do with it yet but they know that it has the potential to be huge. so soon when things like myspace and youtube and shopping are all accessed through a 3d virtual world we will literally have a parallel world where large numbers of people will be spending much of their time. and these people will want some form of order as others keep pushing the boundaries and breaking things, and evolution marches on.
i find the whole thing extremely cool
a further thing to note is that massive games like world of warcraft or second life have economies that rival that of small nations so there is lots of cash around.