Second Life recently substantially cut prices for their "new" island sales. I think it's likely the decreased land sales figures could be caused by that big price drop-- and not necessarily showing less demand for virtual land. More people may be buying from Linden rather than others.

Still, not the sort of trends Linden would want people to be thinking too deeply about.

In MMOGs, the value of in-game assets inevitably declines. If you could short the WoW gold, that would be a great move. Just be ready for the Chinese New Year price fluctuation.

Shouldn't you be able to short it? If you have a good in-game and out-game reputation, would you be able to borrow gold, convert to cash, and then convert cash to gold when your debt comes due?

Yes, but for anyone with any professional skills at all, that kind of arbitrage just isn't a good time investment compared to real work. I did the math once. WoW doesn't really permit economies of scale on this sort of thing -- there are no free markets, so you have to go through uniformly shady RMT ("Real Money Trading") brokers who will be quick to freeze you out if they sense you're making a mass profit over their channels.

Do they freeze you out if you're making money for them, too? Let's say I am consistently good at predicting one-month 20% declines in the value of WoW gold. And I invest, say, $100 in gold on a 5% commission, and cash out with that same 5% commission. If I'm making them money (often), why would they give me a reason to switch to a different broker? Is $100 now really better than $10/month?

Besides what iron_ball said, in-game loans are usually unregulated and thus unreliable.

Unregulated ≠ unreliable, as anyone who has ever chosen between the Post Office and Fedex can tell you.

When your counterparty in a transaction is a $100b business, they have an interest in keeping their end of the bargain. When your counterparty is a 14 year old pimply-faced kid, he has no incentive not to pay.

It would only work with a centralized bank that insured against credit default risk.

As we see global property recession/dip in the real world, will will see this in virtual worlds like Second Life et al?

Wow, screenshots of Excel spreadsheets? I hear HTML has a <table> tag for that sort of thing.

So it makes more sense to recreate a table than grab a screenshot? I'm all for hand-coding HTML, but I'd rather grab a quick shot than type tr, td all day long.

You must be one of those folks that designs their web site in photoshop and then just uploads the image to the server.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Yeah, but those are for layouts. ;)