The NY Times has a piece about people creating their dream house in Second Life to compensate for the crappy one they have in their First Life. Followed by a fascinating invitation to readers to share why they use online Social Networks. What about you, why are you on MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, Vimeo…?

(Is making your friends jealous with your pictures of the Daft Punk show in Coney Island a good reason enough?)

We mentioned the 2 first Sony Bravia campaigns in the previous Trendwatch keynotes, mainly to talk about the buzz that they managed to create before even airing the commercials. There was the balls one, and then the paint one, both gorgeous and moving. Well, it seems that they’re doing it again right here, in NY, spreading bright rabbits made out of Play-Doh in the streets. They’re already using a wide array of web 2.0 tools to document the making-of the ad and have the blogosphere spread the word, just like i’m doing right now. There is obviously a website with RSS feed, someone from Sony UK is twitting live on-set about the whole preparation and shooting, and you can follow their flickr photostream. Anyone knows where the set location is?

A new service has been lauched that merges Rome’s Colliseum and a Virtual Casino of sorts in the form of videogames - Tournament.com. This new UK-based service places FPS (First Person Shooter) players - such as Counter Strike or Half Life 2, playing against each other, being rewarded based on how much they bet on their skills. All of this, of course, after paying an entrance fee of $10 and the due share to the company itself. With a secure anti-cheating software and a limiting $25 accumulated winnings (at least in the beta version), Tournament.com tries to apply a principle that has been tried by other websites before but have miserably failed. But, after the sucess of World of Warcraft, where players pay $15 a month to play getting nothing but the game experience itself in return, it is possible that this system works… if it bypasses the idea of being considered a gambling website!

Check Yahoo! Games for an article with more information.