Embassy In Second Life... Is This Getting Out Of Hand?

CNet's doing interviews in Second Life.
Reuters has a news bureau in Second Life.
Now Sweden has announced that they are planning to establish an Embassy in Second Life.

Why?

The first two resulted in good (though often unpredictable) press for both companies, but does Sweden need this kind of press? It will be interesting to see if they pursue this as well as how they plan to leverage the expense to benefit their citizens in this virtual world.

Davidreport.com provides an interview that provides insight into these questions. You can find that interview here.

From that interview:

Our mission is to increase the knowledge about and interest in Sweden around the world. To do that we need to constantly find new ways to communicate with our target groups and to reach them, where they are most likely to be open to our message. Our aim is to find and inspire a selective group of people which is hard to reach through more traditional channels. Second Life is one of many channels to use and explore.

Kicking It Off With Something Familiar - Taxes!

With all the talk about virtual worlds, virtual culture, virtual economies and their effects on the 'real' world I suppose we all saw this coming. Particularly when so many of the goings-on began to be externalized by the likes of Second Life and their realtime tally of USD$ spent in the last 24 hours, not to mention Reuters' exposure of a Second Life Linden Dollar / USD exchange rate graph.

With all of this being touted in the media these days Congress has finally taken notice. Recently it was announced that they would begin looking into such virtual economies and evaluating how they and their users should be considered from a taxation perspective.

As stated in the Washington Post:

The increasing size and public profile of virtual economies, the largest of which have millions of users and gross domestic products that rival those of small countries, have made them increasingly difficult for lawmakers and regulators to ignore.

Why do I have a feeling that this will get messy?