Linden Lab announced its economic statistics today with bold, beautiful bar graphs. Among the highlights:

- Land mass BIGGER!!!!
- User hours LONGER!!!!
- LINDEX Volume FLUSHER!!!!
- Businesses PERFORM BETTER!!!!

And YES!!! All this can be yours!!!! Just mail in the coupon today, because not only will you enjoy a BIGGER, LONGER, FLUSHER, BETTER PERFORMING Second Life, but it comes at a LOWER LAND COST with none of those NOTICEABLE, TELL-TALE SIGNS OF GAMBLING or other dysfunctions!!!!

OK, but seriously – I needed to check for a second to see if I was in one of those oxygen-free skyboxes up at 4,000 Meters or whatever. I do believe we’ve just witnessed 36 HOURS of good news from the Lab (with a few footnotes thrown in, of course).

First, Mitch Kapor’s keynote, which other than the unfortunate allusion to the fact that the early residents were pesky basement dwellers with nothing to lose, was actually a well-crafted piece of rhetoric promising us all that this land we’ve staked claim to is now coveted by the more practical folks who know how to, well, I don’t know what they know how to do – just be more practical I guess.

On its heels, an announcement with IBM that it had achieved teleport between openSim and Second Life. The announcement received a surprisingly large amount of play in the mainstream media, including the Washington Post which carried a techCrunch piece on the topic.

And now, it posts fairly significant news on the economy. We’ll need time to digest the data, and cross-tabulate it to the assessments of New World Notes on users and RightAsRain on transactions.

It’s enough to make me feel giddy. 36 hours of good news and only one real service interruption on the Grid for nearly a week. OK, sure….not the same as lag-free. Not the same as 80,000 concurrency. But I feel like I’m watching a well-orchestrated media relations campaign – no pea green backdrops, no teleprompters or choppy hands…..it’s almost like watching Steve Jobs launch a new button on the iPhone.

OK. Well. Almost. I’ve also got some scar tissue to deal with, and other fresh wounds, but I’m going to bask in this feeling of living in a spinny little bubble for a moment, it doesn’t come along that often.