Congress held a hearing yesterday on the potential influence of Second Life and other virtual worlds, complete with a screen that showed avatars following the event from that increasingly popular alternate reality.

A few lawmakers showed off their own avatars, including Rep. Ed Markey, pictured here, and experts talked about the benefits of these virtual world—nonprofits, for example, are using them as a way to raise funds and fight for their causes.

Ever wonder if sexual predators might make use of social networking sites like MySpace? Well the answer is a big, enormous, resounding, Yes. The site, which pulls in 60 million unique users each month, and has 180 million profiles, announced just a few months ago that it had kicked 7,000 sex offenders out of the community. But yesterday the company revealed that they have actually knocked out 29,000 convicted sex offenders using the system—a number that authorities say will continue to grow. This isn’t the first scary news of this sort for the site. In an article covering the MySpace news, the Boston Herald reports that on Monday, a Virginia man pleaded guilty to kidnapping a 14-year-old girl he met through the site. But now a coalition of several state attorneys general is leading the charge to keep MySpace safe, and possibly require kids to get verifiable permission from their parents before they register on the site. Yeah, that seems like a pretty good idea.—Gregory Mone