Nancy Boyd of the excellent online fandom blog posted a map of online communities. Rather interesting. It is organized around Practicals-Intellectuals on the North-South axis and around Real life-Web on the West-East axis. Second Life has its own island next to the role playing island of WoW and other MMORPGs. In the icy north is Yahoo and Windows Live behind the mountains of Web 1.0 and next to the kingdom of AOL. South of the icy north is the noob sea. Not too far away from WoW and Yahoo! Games.

This non-standard way of describing things is truly refreshing.