Jo Yardley (Another Rod Humble Interview) caught an interview with Rod in the SF Chronicle: Will Second Life have a second life?
I think this interview is well worth the time to read. Rod reveals some interesting bits of information about Second LifeTM. Like most of the 400,000 new monthly subscribers are not coming from advertising. Also the best selling items in both The SIMS and SL is hair. Lots of work has been done to reduce lag and more work on reducing lag will be done this year. The makeup of employees has changed with most now being designer engineers that can express creativity in code. The employee headcount is still about 200. A next generation virtual world is coming in a few years. 36 million people have tried SL and left. Rod plans to get them back.
Rod seems to have good free market ideas for SL.
Jo has also published an article on how the media is being lazy and miss representing Second Life. See: The problem with the media. I’ve commented on that one, I think she will approve the comment. It was still in moderation last I looked.