On January 3, I told you about a bit of marketing subterfuge from Linden Labs, the company behind the online virtual world SecondLife. LindenLabs, it seems, has been dupping reporters into overstating the size of SecondLife's audience. Well, they finally gave me the real number--though they didn't exactly mean to . . .

So, this week, I gave them the run-around back. I told them that if the company ever wanted to release the real size of the overall audience, we'd love to hear it, but in the meantime, we'd also be interested in the amount of time the average user spends on the service. Yesterday, they kindly supplied the amount of time the average user spends on the service--which we can quickly translate into the real size of the overall audience.

If the number of current users is 20,000 on average, that means that the total number of user hours per week is 3,360,000 (20,000 times 168, the number of total hours in a week). Divide that by 10 (the amount of time the average user spends on the service--just supplied by Linden Labs), and we know the true size of the audience: 336,000. That's less than half of what's being reported across the Web.