What is it about pirates? There’s Talk Like A Pirate Day (we missed it; mark your calendar for next year: September 19), there’s tons of pirate radio to be found, a dead man’s chest of pirate jokes here and Pirate Bay is the world’s largest bittorrent tracker. Oh, yeah, and there’s that Jack Sparrow guy.

Seems like there’s no lack of eyepatched and parrot-bedecked booty to be found online. The latest bit of piracy to cross my screen plunders the Miller Light Man Laws concept. If you’re feeling arrrrrrticulate, why not shiver a few timbers and contribute to “the arrrrtimate list of rules for being a pirate” over at Pirate Laws which, appropriately, is a hook to separate you from your dubloons over here.

“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”
—Thomas Paine

I’ve been meaning to get this off my chest for a while.

Attention all photographers: Get off those ladders! Those images of people looking up, their heads all in exaggerated perspective? They suck! That’s the worst visual cliche of the last 10 years! And all you art directors and designers? Throw those images in the trash! Right now! Enough is enough!

There. I feel better.

Tucked about halfway down in this story about Reuters opening a virtual news bureau in Second Life is this interesting paragraph about the number of mainstream companies staking their territories in the online virtual world:

“Car maker Toyota, music label Sony BMG, computer maker Sun Microsystems, and technology news company Cnet are among the companies taking part in Second Life. Adidas and American Apparel sell clothes and accessories for people to dress their avatars. Starwood Hotels has built a virtual version of “aloft,” a new hotel chain it plans to open in the real world in 2008.”

Linden Labs (the creators of Second Life) needs to be very careful as they move forward with these sorts of relationships. Part of the appeal of an alternate reality like Second Life is that it belongs to the people, not the advertisers. When Second Life starts to look too much like real life, will Second Lifers start to look for their third (advertising-free) life?

Companies that get involved in Second Life need to be careful, too. It’s not about slapping advertising onto virtual walls, it’s about a completely different type of customer-company dynamic. And if those companies don’t have someone managing their relationship with Second Life who understands exactly what that means, they could very well be blowing it before they even get started.

OCTOBER 19 UPDATE: The New York Times published an article today about this exact issue.

John. C. Dvorak has a good column over at MarketWatch that crunches some of the numbers in the Google-YouTube deal and looks at some of the longer-term potential benefits and risks.