Thomson Reuters' media group president Chris Ahearn recently tweeted that his company "stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP," the Reuters competitor that has proclaimed it is "mad as hell" at various internet fiends. AP is trying to charge people for quoting as few as five words of its content.

Ahearn has elaborated on his "alternative" in a blog post, writing that too many traditional media organizations waste manpower "recycling commodity news" and that they should instead seek to retool, including by forging a new "win-win relationship" with new media. The executive dispenses bluntly with those who would point the finger, like AP:

Blaming the new leaders... or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works... Let's stop whining and start having real conversations.

It sounds like Ahearn has started just such a "real conversation" himself. TechDirt has already blogged back. And Reuters is even authorizing bloggers to "hyperlink" and excerpt its side of things, as God and the U.S. Code intended. Imagine that.

(CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Ahearn was president of all Thomson Reuters; in fact he is president of the firm's "media group.")

(Pic: Reuters)

The notion of a metaverse has long fascinated geeks. The idea of "avatars" — three-dimensional representations of the self rendered in pixels, often fantastical or surreal in nature — wandering through a computer-generated environment has been explored in the science-fiction novels of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, among others. The Matrix trilogy introduced the idea at multiplexes from coast to coast.

And yet unreal worlds have never taken off in actual reality. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, once showed me screens at the headquarters of his company, Linden Lab, which monitored in real time the number of people logging in. They peaked at 50,000, the maximum simultaneous capacity of its servers. That's not a virtual world; that's a midsized town.

Anecdotally, many of Second Life's users are there for virtual sex. (The company has banned gambling, so there's little other reason to go there.) The PG-rated Lively, censored by Google, did not even have that; its only draw was innocuous chat, with the occasional subversive attempt by users at raciness.

No wonder that news organizations, drawn by the visual appeal of the service's 3D graphics, aren't writing stories about Second Life anymore. Reuters, at the height of the frenzy, opened up a bureau; its Second Life correspondent stopped filing copy since September, having left to write for a blog, and the wire service has not replaced him.

The most recent noise to come out of Second Life has been an uproar over price hikes. Second Life users periodically hold colorful protests in the virtual world — probably the most entertaining thing that ever happens there — over this new rule or that new rule. They are likely to become more frequent, as Linden Lab, to survive, focuses on squeezing more revenue out of its existing customers, who pay the company "taxes" on their virtual real estate and convert real money into the company's imaginary currency, Linden dollars.

Online 3D environments are not a fad; millions inhabit them for hours, sometimes days at a time. But they do so in networked videogames like World of Warcraft, where there's a clear purpose to being there — even if it's just having fun and wasting time. Second Life, Lively, and virtual worlds like them amount to glorified chat rooms, and while chatting is a fundamental human activity, it's hard for anyoen to make money on it.

Oprah invited Perry on her show, as this clip shows, and thanked him. But Perry should be thanking Oprah. This is why every geek switches from blogging about APIs to blathering about politics. None of Perry's venture-capital investments would ever have gotten him on Oprah — but his volunteer work for Obama's campaign did.

• Wagner James Au (not mentioned in the article), who as the writer of Second Life news outlet New World Notes is presumably the "fake" reporter to Reuters' "real" one
• Congress, whose possible plan to tax users of worlds like Second Life was scooped by the Reuters reporter
• Second Life prez Philip Rosedale, who has to exercise his question-dodging muscle — for example, to avoid telling CNet how far his company is from adding voice chat
• Second Life, butt of a thousand breakfast-table jokes: "How can it be a second life when the users don't have a first one?"

The Reporter Is Real, but the World He Covers Isn't [NY Times]