internet life

The knock on popular virtual world Second Life has been that it's a little slow, and not entirely easy to use. Sure, it has roughly 13 million registered citizens, but only a few hundred thousand are actual devotees who spend a fair amount of time in the alternate universe.

Spending a little too much time on the Web? Now there are a few movements afoot to encourage the tech-obsessed to take vacations from connectivity. Here's Ariel Meadow Stallings, a blogger and Microsoft part-timer, on realizing that she'd become a little too hooked:

"I love technology. I'm not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube . . . I'd try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you're drunk."