Tomorrow I'll be attending the Metaverse conference in Silicon Valley. Attending me will be my 12-year-old son. I'm thinking a lot about virtual worlds and the kinds of impacts they'll have on my son's life. For instance, right now I'm typing to you from a Southwest Airlines jet traveling between Seattle, Washington to Oakland, California and I'm reading "Synthetic Worlds" by Edward Castronova. Just a little light reading about the virtual economies (he's an economist and the book illuminates the new virtual worlds for newbies) and how they will impact what I'll do with my career. For instance, I can see building a job just out of tending an island in Second Life and hosting memeorable experiences there. If blogging can go from nothing to 145 million hits a month at Microsoft in less than three years, why can't a Second Life experience do the same?

But, anyway, this leads into another discussion I had with Linden Labs recently at the Maker Faire.When my son and I first got to Maker Faire we met Beth Goza. She was quite excited by having Second Life be the cover story in BusinessWeek that week. The whole company was abuzz, it was good news after having to fight through financial tough times. Boy, does that bring back memories of when I worked at UserLand and ran the books there. It's not easy getting a company off the ground.

Anyway, Beth, who is their community ambassador, pulled me and Patrick aside and said something like "we can't let you let Patrick play Second Life."I knew this conversation was coming because I knew the rules and I was explicitly breaking them.

First, what are the rules? No one under 18 in the regular Second Life. There's a "Teen" version of Second Life that's a separate world and only 13 to 17-year-olds are allowed in there. No adults. No one under 13.

I was letting Patrick run around Second Life. The adult version. He's only 12. Turns out they aren't even going to let him come into the Teen version of Second Life until he's 13.

Now, why do these rules exist? Lawyers, for one. They are afraid of getting sued by some parent who finds out there's, shock, sex, gambling, and violence in Second Life. There are areas of Second Life that would earn an X-rating if they were films.

And, in the kids area they want to make sure that there isn't predatory behavior going on.

Both rules are understandable, right?

I understand them. My son understands them. We knew we were breaking the rules. Eric Rice told us so. That's how virtual culture gets communicated. Because I was seen as influential (I was quoted in the BusinessWeek article, and had talked about our experiences on popular technology shows like TWiT) so Beth told me that people inside Second Life weren't happy that I was publicly breaking the rules.

My son and I were outlaws and we must be stopped. Heheh.

The thing is, I don't necessarily buy into the rules of society, or the rules of Linden Labs. If I don't mind my son getting into a Poker game, or seeing a virtual sex act, isn't that my right as a parent to let my son experience those things?

No. Our puritanical society has set up rules and regulations about such things. If you enter a Las Vegas casino you aren't allowed to let your kids sit down and play backjack. At least not until they are 21.

In Second Life the same rules and regulations exist.

End result? I decided not to fight cause I want to remain in Second Life. My son no longer has my password to Second Life.

I do think the rules suck, though. This is a virtual world. Why do we need to live with first-world rules?

Oh, and Patrick and I will be interviewed tomorrow by John Swords who records the Second Cast.

Nick Bradbury brings up a bunch of great issues now that Microsoft is looking to get more into the advertising business.

Trust. Privacy. Ugliness. Appropriateness. Context.

I'm with Nick. The idea of pasting advertising on everything is vile. Vile. Hmm. Evil. Vile. Evil. Vile. Live. Anagram time!

Sorry, I got sidetracked there. Heheh.

But Nick is right. Microsoft can destroy value by doing advertising people hate.

Funny, I just sat next to a guy in the Seattle Airport. He delivers RVs for a living. He told me he threw out his TV cause he was sick of getting interrupted by advertising.

He told me he loves the Web because most of the time advertising is constrained and doesn't interrupt him.

We'd do well to listen to both him and Nick.

One thing in our corner? We have great user testing and feedback labs. Executives and engineers alike can even watch people as they try out our products and services and listen to what they say.

If anything Google taught us there's a way to do advertising that adds value to everyone involved. I hope it's a lesson we continue taking to heart. The Windows Live Mail team gets it. Who's next?

Hey, Doc, I think it's bizarre everytime I hear you and Steve Gillmor on Sirius too!

But what really blew my mind is when John Dvorak was on CNBC the other day mouthing off about Microsoft. They ended the interview by wondering if anyone from Microsoft was listening. Yes, there was. Yes, there was. Heheh.

Note to Phil Windley, I've been seeing nice things about your conference all over the blogs the past couple of days. When Kim Cameron says it was a "superevent" you know you really did a great job.

Update: sorry for messing this up, the conference was co-produced by Phil and Kaliya Hamlin, aka the Identity Woman.

Whew, they just sent around the latest stats from our employee blogs at http://blogs.technet.com and http://blogs.msdn.com and those two sites combined had about 157 million hits. Now, keep in mind that doesn't mean visitors, but, still, if you told me three years ago that our blog sites would be getting hit that hard within three years I would have looked at you like you were doing crack.

By the way, we should thank the folks over at Telligent who make the excellent Community Server, which runs those blogs.

The Maine Tourism advertising agency that was suing Lance Dutson has backed down.

Excellent, now I can attend Pop!Tech.

I love the theme for Pop!Tech this year: Dangerous Ideas.

This case proves it's dangerous for companies to take on bloggers.

I love this URL: http://www.microsoft.com/rss/

It's a directory of RSS feeds here at Microsoft.

To celebrate James O'Neill wrote an RSS aggregator in just 90 lines of code. That's cool James, but post your code!

Darren Barefoot notes "I guess Microsoft doesn't want my money."

This pisses me off.

If I were Bill Gates I'd issue a memo that said "any team that ships without Firefox support automatically gets 3.0s for all members."

"Huh?" I'm sure there are more than a few people who don't agree with me. After all, if you live in Atlanta, you are supposed to drink Coca Cola products, right? If you live in Redmond, you're supposed to only care about Microsoft's stuff, right?

That idea and belief must be washed from our corporate culture. It's going to be a hard thing to beat. But beat it is VERY important.

Why? Because a high percentage of influentials are Firefox users.

In other words, if you want the most passionate people in society to use your stuff, you must support Firefox.

I was talking with Scott Isaacs about this today (he's the guy who is building the framework that runs Windows Live). He totally believes in supporting Firefox.

He's fighting for this too. I think it's time to say it publicly.

I won't link (or say anything nice) to any Windows Live service that doesn't support Firefox.

And, note, that doesn't mean I don't think IE 7 rocks.