The debate rages. Clay Shirky, Wagner James Au and others going backwards and forwards about what all the numbers mean. Signups, active residents, paying accounts, free accounts, verified accounts, unverified accounts and alts.

And why all the big running around with numbers like one million? Two million? Are those arbitrary and essentially meaningless milestones, or do they actually have some particular meaning?

Yes. To both. That's not as confusing as it might seem, if you think it through a little ...

Firstly, any given resident is a contributor, a non-contributor or a drain, regardless of their account type and verification status. Our own Hamlet Au is an unverified, as you can see from his profile. Of course, that's a bit of an artifact of how he came to be, as many folks know, but there are many people around Second Life who contribute in one form or another but are on free and unverified accounts.

Being a paid account doesn't make you a contributor. Your own behavior may render you a net-loss to Second Life. This time last year, people paid to grief. Griefers signed up with paid, verified accounts, and launched goo attacks, orbited people and used cage-guns with wholesale abandon. Most griefers don't mind being banned, even if they paid for the account. If anything, it's like a standing ovation.

So, what is any given resident worth to Second Life as a whole? There's no way to tell without getting to know them. Without knowing the value of one, we can't estimate the value of one million.

There's another kind of value there though. One million is a magic number. So is two million. In fact any sufficiently large number is indistinguishable from magic, to mangle a phrase of Arthur C Clarke's.

You see, knowing that one resident has no estimable value, and not knowing how many are alts, you might be inclined to think that that a hundred thousand or a million or two million are vapid and meaningless numbers. And they are. To you, and to me, but not to the rest of the world, because they're given force and currency by the mainstream media.

Once they've acquired that value, those big numbers mean something to us. They mean that people believe them, and all the consequent effects that those beliefs have. It all becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. People believe the prophecy and they work at making it come true.

So, a hundred thousand, one million, two million. Those numbers mean something to us, but not because they have intrinsic, direct meaning. They have meaning because they're filtered through the media, disseminated out into the world, believed by people, who then act based on that belief, and that is where the meaning lies.

Clay and Wagner are both getting it right, more or less. They're quibbling about the details and each lean towards one pole of the has-meaning/no-meaning spectrum, but really the reality is that there's plenty of meaning here, because the Big Media's minting that meaning for us.

Thanks, Big Media. *mwah* We love you guys! It also makes a nice change from pouring sex, disasters and gambling into Second Life column inches. We know how much you resent not writing about that stuff.