Fortune writer responds to critic, who responds back

Last week, Talking Biz News posted an item about Clay Shirky, a New York University professor who specializes in Internet technology, criticizing a number of business journalists for their fawning coverage of Linden Lab and the number of visitors/users to its web sites.

One of the reporters he slammed was David Kirkpatrick from Fortune. On Tuesday, Kirkpatrick responded on the magazine’s web site.

Kirkpatrick wrote, “To give him the minimal due he deserves, he’s correct in noting that my use of ‘members’ was inaccurate. In fact, the ‘residents’ number merely reports how many people have tried to sign up for an avatar they can use in the world of Second Life. As I said in my initial column, the system is very difficult to use. In fact the majority of registrants, it would seem, either give up immediately or else very infrequently return. While millions may have registered, only 15-20,000 are in the world at any given time. Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale said in November that three months after registration, about 10% of registrants still log in at least weekly, a figure that has remained consistent even as the service grows.

“However, the growth of the resident figure remains astonishing. On January 1 it surpassed 2.3 million, an increase of one million – or 77% – since my piece less than two months ago. Shirky is entitled to think that is not noteworthy, but it is.”

Later, Kirkpatrick added, “Incidentally, the company publishes enough data there and elsewhere on its website to render Shirky’s complaints completely illogical. Linden Lab now routinely reports more data than any other social networking or commercial community site I know of. His umbrage might be more usefully directed at companies like MySpace, which claims something like 135 million user accounts. How many of those are in use? Would MySpace reveal as much data as Linden Lab does?”

Read more here. Also note that Shirky has responded to Kirkpatrick’s story with a comment on the Fortune site.