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Linden Labs's Second Life has attracted its fair share of PR in recent months as brands, politicians and even government departments have all claimed territory in this new and pleasant virtual land.

Even mega ad agency Leo Burnett, opened a virtual shop in SL.

Getting audience data out of Linden has proven something of a difficult proposition, but now thanks to some sleuthing from the blog Clickable Culture, we now have some.

There are 825k total "residents" of Second Life, of which:

* 113k have logged in during the last 7 days
* 150k have logged in during the last 2 weeks
* 235k have logged in during the last 30 days
* 349 have logged in during the last 60 days

Peak concurrent users, is currently hovering around 11,000 simultaneous users.

Those numbers are pretty impressive, but 113k users a week is hardly groundbreaking from a media perspective and most media planners would find it hard to justify, clearly there's more to it than just numbers.

SL has achieved "memeiness", meaning that journalist and bloggers, like us here at Influx, are very happy to write about another brand legitimizing this new virtual world. Companies aren't so interested in the audience, but the PR that their SL presence can generate. It's become a totem for being cool and being "in the know".

Linden is clearing hoping the having a SL presence is the C21st equivalent of having a web page, but it remains to be seen what impact this will have.

There are a couple of possible scenarios and several flavors in between these two.

SL becomes the new web: Lots of cool stuff starts appearing there and we are all forced to create characters, get virtual lives and spend some of our internet time wearing strange costumes.

SL implodes on itself: Too many brands and politicans invade SL forcing the purists off the territory and into a new brand-free virgin land. Since these people constituted the majority of the audience, brands quickly retreat when they realize no one is listening.