In case you missed it, the Second Life backlash is in full swing, with no less formidable a figure than NYU professor Clay Shirky attacking the mainstream media for accepting Linden Labs' figures for how many people have signed up with the virtual world. Clay argues that the business press has become "a zombie army of unpaid flacks" by simply parroting the claims that Second Life now has about 2 million registered users. He specifically singles out BusinessWeek, the New York Times, USA Today, and these pieces by The Browser's colleagues at Fortune and CNNMoney. Clay has also mixed it up with Business 2.0's Erick Schonfeld here.

Clay's fundamental argument is that the press has done a grave disservice by failing to distinguish between SL's registered users, and the number of people who are actually active residents, which is clearly much lower. Moreover, he attacks the fact-checking process for failing to pick up on this discrepancy, and predicts that the press will either ignore his critique, or shift their coverage without ever pointing out their own shortcoming. He challenges the media to inquire about actual users, and then says "I realize I might as well be asking Business Week to send me a pony for my birthday."

Before The Browser responds, one quick correction to Clay's post: the vast majority of publications he refers to do not, as it happens, employ fact-checkers. Fortune does not, CNNMoney does not, and no daily newspaper we are aware of does or ever has. Whether they should or not is a matter for another day.

But look: basically, Clay's right. You cannot write a comprehensive article on SL without pointing out this discrepancy. It's hardly unique to SL; back in the days when The New York Times was first ramping up its Web site, for which you had to register, I used to have a joke: the Times claims to have 8 million registered users, and I'm seven of them. I'd simply forgotten my password often enough that I'd just signed up with a different log-in, and no one at the Times ever asked me to get rid of the older log-ins.

In the case of SL, anyone who's tried to sign up can tell you in a second why lots of people clearly don't come back. The registration process is intimidating, and the site simply will not work if you are, like us, behind a corporate firewall.

Do the numbers really matter? That is, isn't the SL phenomenon valid even if the real number is 500,000 active users or even 100,000? Clay set a trap on this point, predicting a wave of stories that would try to argue that the numbers are immaterial. So we'll sidestep that, and ask what you think.