Valleywag's Clay Shirky posted a story today basically lamb basting conventional news media for perpetuating the myth that Second Life has a population of over 2 million users. While most people trip over the fact that Linden Labs counts residents and not users. It is unfortunate that given the nature of Second Life actually providing a solid population count might be a certain impossibility. However, is that an excuse for conventional media to perpetuate these statistics? Obviously Shirky doesn't think so, and I tend to agree with him. In the article he doesn't pull any punches calling out specific media outlets and articles and really pushes his point home.

Unlike conventional MMOGs, like World of Warcraft, the lack of a standard payment option means that users can come and go as they please and even without use can expect Linden Lab to keep track of their information. Maybe we should look at logins as the final determiner of the user base. Although, that is a flawed method as many users may have multiple avatars. Maybe we should only count accounts that have a credit card on file. Or, maybe only land owners should count towards the population. Then they could act as wealthy land barons who run fiefdoms for the unaccounted for masses. No matter what option we pick to count the population we never get a true count.