Fortune Magazine's David Kirkpatrick, in an article for CNN Money, announces that real estate brokerage firm Coldwell Banker has entered SL, but unlike many other RL companies is doing something a little different than merely being a presence. Coldwell is selling and renting its own tracts of land in SL, in the sims Ranchero, Crowfoot, Elboya, Gorbash and Scurfield.

The company will have agents on hand to help answer questions and attend to sales. I think it's great that these employees, some of whom went to school for quite a while to learn their trade, are now having to embrace this new paradigm of having to create and drive their avatars as a part of their daily job. Imagine the conversation at home after a long day at the office: "Hi honey, man am I tired ... the office was totally laggy today and we got griefed again. Damn those grey goo attacks! Why didn't they warn us of this in Real Estate 101?"

Whose law governs Second Life? Whose law governs your avatar, and your content? These seem like fairly tough questions. You'll see them debated again and again across the forums, and message-boards and blogs of virtual worlds, present and past.

Fortunately, as questions go, these are relatively easy to answer, primarily because they have already been answered. For other virtual worlds gone by and for the web. People have been asking and answering this question for two decades. And for the most part, the answers agree.

As reported on the popular New Zealand news site Stuff, Harcourts -- the real-estate and propery management network -- has opened a virtual office in Second Life where Second Lifers can discuss ... err real Real Estate (that is real-world property) with the avatars of virtual real-estate agents.

It's certainly an interesting twist on the usual unreal-estate formula in Second Life. Stuff says that while Harcourts does not deal in Second Life property at this time, they may choose to do so in future. We made several attempts to contact Harcourts for an interview over the last week, but they have not yet responded.

People are starting to draw inevitable comparisons between Second Life and Weblo, based on the fact that both of them involve user-created content and market-driven virtual property sales. I'm not convinced that the comparisons have any particular validity.

Weblo's a combination between blogshares, domain parking, Orkut and multi-level marketing. Real Estate ... Err ... Unreal Estate in Weblo looks like this. A country. A region. A public building or house. They're web-pages like that. You buy one for a US dollar, maybe attach a forum, photo gallery or some advertising to generate a little cash and generally try to promote the hell out of your location.

In a multi-level sense, you're above people within your geographical coverage. They sell their Unreal Estate to someone else, and you get a cut. Now, here's were it gets like the real world, and Second Life. What's your property worth? Well, whether it's dirt or data, it's worth whatever someone will pay for it. Ultimately all matters of property value are matters of perception. Unless your dirt has diamonds in it, it doesn't retain it's value if I haul it from one place to another. Neither does your data.