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Yesterday I talked about things you could do when your connection to the Net goes down. That was sparked by something I read on a friend's blog yesterday, but today I can talk about it from experience.

Just before lunch the Net suddenly began to run very slow and it stayed that way. Instead of taking my own advice from yesterday Steve and I went down to the club for lunch. We'd already done our back ups and our computers are clean so it was time to do the other thing you can do when your connection to the Net goes down.

When that happens you can always just take a break. That's something we all need to do from time to time and if you can't get online to work then you may as well get out of the house and join the rest of civilization for a while.

Last month I suggested that some of us really need to be exploring the marketing opportunities that are available in some of the virtual worlds out there. As I mentioned then, a number of major mainstream businesses are stepping into games such as Second Life and doing some marketing.

Second Life has a 'population' of over 3 million people and in the last 60 days over 1 million of them have been participating in the game. With numbers like that Second Life has become very attractive to a diverse range of mainstream businesses. Reuters - the news agency has a presence, IBM is also there along with some other big names. Sears will soon be opening an online store there and even Tourism Australia is opening an office in Second Life.

Well now Steve and I have been inside second life. We've spent a few days in there now, just wandering around and looking at what people are doing to market their ingame and real-life products. We also wanted to see if there was an opportunity to market adult sites in the game.

We didn't have to go far to find a number of different forms of advertising for adult sites. One that we saw was a huge billboard advertising an adult site. All anyone who wanted to see the site had to do was click on the billboard and the game screen would remain active while a browser window opened outside the game.

We've only just scratched the surface but there certainly are opportunities in Second Life to market our products. All you have to do is learn how to attract Second Lifers to a point where they can see your advertising and doing that can be cheaper than buying traffic from a traffic broker.

Just how targeted that traffic might be is something you would have to test for yourself but it could be more targeted than some of the traffic that the social media sites send. Some of that traffic reminds me of fleas who jump around from one place to another achieving nothing but becoming a nuisance. At least the people in second life, if they choose to step out of the game, do so because they are interested in what they expect to find at the other end of the link.

So be a little adventurous and get a second life. There are opportunities there that shouldn't be missed.

Windows Vista
Have you rushed out and bought a copy of Vista yet? I have to admit that Steve and I couldn't find a compelling reason to buy it yet. There is one installed on a demo machine down at the computer shop where we have our office and it locks up on the screensaver quite regularly.

On top of that there have been some driver issues with some of the basic peripherals that are included in that machine and no amount of searching on the Web has uncovered the drivers that are needed. But the best is yet to come, there is some serious talk about a soon to be released Service Pack for Vista - Vista has only been released for a week and they need a service pack already?

I suppose for some people it's cool to be an early adopter but when the success or failure of your business depends on your operating system then I'd rather stick with something that's got a proven track record instead of taking a leap of faith and staking my existence on something new from Microsoft.

And now I'm off to chew the leg of some hapless salesman here in town. I ordered an electrical appliance for the kitchen and paid full price so he delivered the demo model off the shop floor - and it happened to be missing a few vital pieces. There's nothing like making sure that your customers are never going to come back to do business with you ever again.

And there's an important lesson for us even here in adult online.