Big business analysts looking more kindly on Second Life once again.

It seems like only yesterday, but I guess it was about 6 months ago, that a lot of big business analysts were saying, in rather more business like language, "OMG what's all the fuss about Second Life?" This isn't from the point of view of the casual player, this was stories such as "a responsible IT manager should block access to Second Life because it is a risk to your data security" and "No one can make a decent return on investment in Second Life."

Over the last few days I've started to see, directly or indirectly, articles changing this advice:

1. Erica Driver asks does it matter if Second Life appears empty in places for the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog;

2. Peter Abrahams, for IT Director, suggests that Second Life is now too important not to be accessible - and whilst he concentrates on disabled accesshe has the underlying assumption that businesses are increasingly using Second Life productively and this will continue to increase in importance;

3. Pham Neutra in his Otherland Blog points out an article from Gartner saying that by 2010, 20% of tier 1 global retailers will have a marketing presence in virtual worlds and online games. That's in 2 years time remember!

We are starting to see more and more people working out how to use Second Life - and as Pham comments in his blog, they are starting to learn how to define useful metrics for success in this brave new world.