Second Life: Shirky pokes more holes in sloppy press coverage

Clay Shirky tells BoingBoing,

Earlier this month, I wrote something about the
uncritical reception Linden Labs was getting
for its Total Residents
figure. Turns out even I was not skeptical enough, and I put up a second
piece digging a bit deeper.

The term Residents is even more inflated than I first thought, as
something like 20% of the most recent million Residents have never been
counted logging in.

The press reaction to Second Life was also more
credulous than I knew. Linden is guilty of promoting a misleading figure,
but the reporters covering Second Life are guilty of converting that figure
into an outright falsehood:

Like a push-up bra, Linden's trick is as effective as it is because the
press really, really wants to believe…

  • "It has a population of a million." — Richard Siklos, New York Times
  • "In the Internet-based virtual world known as Second Life, for
    instance, more than 1 million citizens have created representations of
    themselves known as avatars…" — Michael Yessis, USA TODAY

  • "Since it started about three years ago, the population of Second Life
    has grown to 1.2 million users." — Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN

  • "So far, it's signed up 1.3 million members." — David Kirkpatrick,
    Fortune


    Professional journalists wrote those sentences. They work for newspapers and
    magazines that employ (or used to employ) fact-checkers. Yet here they are,
    supplementing Linden's meager PR budget by telling their readers that
    Residents measures something it actually doesn't.

  • Link to Clay's coverage at Valleywag, and read also "Give Me Laser Guns" — brilliant: Link.