This news feels humongous:

IBM said Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

The project is in testing and will go live within several weeks. It marks a new focus by Second Life’s parent company, Linden Lab, on providing software and services to corporate customers who want to use the virtual world for collaboration and teleconferencing.

IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas hosted behind IBM’s corporate firewall.

This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

IBM has long been one of the corporations most engaged with Second Life, a popular virtual world with several hundred thousand regular users as well as its own currency and economy.

Hmmm… I wonder why a giant international company would want to invest in a privately-controlled currency and economy?