As I write, my meat is earthbound in Tanzania, at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Global 2007 conference, but my avatar, Xan Hazlitt--pictured above--freely roams the virtual world of Second Life.

Like many technologists my age, I first encountered the idea of virtual worlds in William Gibson's 1984 classic of "cyberpunk" science fiction, Neuromancer. I was at boarding school in England, and it was an exeat weekend(that is, vacation). The British boys had gone home to their families, and the foreign students were marooned in the school's houses. But I was neither homesick nor lonely, because on the previous day the school's bookshop had delivered a brand-new, hardbound copy of Gibson's novel.