A post on Read/WriteWeb about  Virtual Worlds Poised to Become Valuable Work Tools that sites a Forrester  report  "…makes the big claim that "within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today"

Here's the Document Summary:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and more business-focused offerings are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools. Major companies and public-sector organizations — such as BP, IBM, Intel, and the US Army — are investing heavily in virtual world technologies. But it's still early, pioneering days. You've practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools — setup can be arduous, navigating in a 3-D environment takes practice, and processing and bandwidth requirements remain high. But within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today. Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds. Use them to try to replicate the experience of working physically alongside others; allow people to work with and share digital 3-D models of physical or theoretical objects; and make remote training and counseling more realistic by incorporating nonverbal communication into same-time, different-place interactions.

Until last week I worked closely with IBM's Virtual Business Center and I pulled metrics that combined Virtual World data (via Code4Software's V-Tracker) with Web Analytics data (SurfAid/Coremetrics) along with Survey data from an online poll and Siebel - opportunity identification of potential leads. 

Without giving away any details ….. in my opinion (and I said that openly) IBM did a lot of things wrong with the Business Center - and yet, in spite of all they did or failed to do, they still generated a MUCH, MUCH HIGHER OPPORTUNITY per Avatar Visitor than a visitor to IBM.com.  (of course, virtual worlds get a fraction of the traffic a normal website gets  so the real problem is "volume" - you can't get enough Avatars in world and to visit,  yet).

I'll even go farther and state that each avatar who visited the business center in Second Life  was worth five times more, at least, than an equivalent visitor to the IBM.com website!

Corporations aren't stupid - there are people of vision that see the potential of virtual worlds - and eventually Main Stream Media will come around, again, later in 2008 or in 2009.