Clay Shirky does a great job of digging in and getting into the reality of the virtual worlds. The sound you hear is the "pop" of a virtual bubble -- not to say that we won't wake tomorrow to more glowing press coverage of SL, but that we'll be able to look at in a more nuanced way.
Clay totally demolishes the press hype on SL in a very cogent way. He makes three key points:
1. Tech reporters have no institutional memory
2. Virtual Reality is conceptually simple
3. The press has a weakness for the "content is king" argument
I might quibble a bit with his last point, but the first two are spot on.
Second Life has huge potential, as does virtual worlds in general -- let's give them the chance to succeed on their own and not burdened with enormous expectations.