The latest craze on internet. Learn to make money while having fun. Heard of Second Life? Apparently this virtual online world has created a lot of buzz. So much so that poster girl Anshe Chung has come out in public to announce she is worth at least US$1million in real money for her online venture. From a source, I was told that she even employed some 20 people in China to help her design some of the real estate for the online world.

The image above is taken from Sydney Morning Herald and the following post is from SMH:

There’s nothing real about Anshe Chung’s real estate portfolio, but that hasn’t stopped the virtual property magnate amassing a small fortune which she intends to turn into a much larger one.

In just 32 months, Chinese language teacher Ailin Graef has transformed an outlay of $US9.95 into virtual assets worth at least $US1 million in real money.

Graef has achieved this in a virtual world called Second Life where she is better known as Anshe Chung, the community’s foremost property magnate.

Anshe’s Second Life portfolio includes virtual property assets equivalent to 36 sq km in size. But there’s nothing real about this real estate. It’s actually a 3D simulation housed on 550 networked computers.

And, believe it or not, there are people willing to pay sums ranging from $US100 to $US1000-plus to own a plot of land in Second Life.

Taking a leaf out of the property developer’s manual, Anshe buys large blocks of “land” which she improves, subdivides, and then either rents or sells the smaller plots.

Like real property developers, it’s much better for the bottom line when there are a lot of people moving in to the neighbourhood.

And that’s exactly what’s been happening in Second Life which is experiencing a population explosion of epic proportions.

This time last year there were 70,000 members. Today there are 1.6 million participants who have downloaded the free software and created online personas called avatars through which they interact inside this 3D community.

Anshe, who appeared on the cover of the influential US magazine BusinessWeek in May, is arguably the world’s most famous avatar. Now she is also its richest.

Over the weekend, she trumpeted her arrival in this exclusive club of one with a press release titled: “Anshe Chung Becomes First Virtual World Millionaire”.

In addition to her real estate holdings, Anshe’s fortune is made up of “cash”, “shares”, several “shopping malls”, “chain stores” and “brands” - every iota of it a sequence of binary files residing in a computer’s memory.

In Second Life, the local currency known is known as Linden Dollars (named after the company that created the platform). The Linden Dollars is in effect a convertible curreny, making it possible for entrepreneurs like Anshe to turn virtual profits into real money.

At the close of trading on Friday $US1 was worth $L274.5 (Linden Dollars).

Originally from China, Ailin Graef moved to Germany with her husband, Guntram Graef, in the mid-1990s where she took up a job teaching Chinese, English, and German.

Read all about it here.