On April 10th at 9 p.m. eastern time, I (or I should say, my avatar) attended the virtual launch of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott at the rabble.ca treehouse in the virtual online world Second Life. Your avatar is the computer-generated image of yourself that you pilot around Second Life using the arrow keys on your computer. (Wikipedia says that, in Hindu philosophy, an avatar most commonly refers to the bodily manifestation of a higher, or Supreme, Being, God, on planet Earth.)

Tapscott believes that the contemporary explosion in social media is not just another bubble, but rather a paradigmatic shift that will alter the economy and society as a whole, in a way akin to the effect of the industrial revolution.