When Cory Ondrejka announced last month that he was leaving Linden Lab, the San Francisco company that runs Second Life, there was widespread surprise, as well as speculation about what might have prompted his departure. As the former chief technology officer of Linden Lab, he is credited with playing a huge role in developing Second Life, a virtual environment that has become popular with educators and researchers. During his seven-year tenure at Linden Lab he wrote much of the original code for Second Life and designed the Linden Scripting Language. In a letter to Linden Lab employees, Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of the company, said he and Mr. Ondrejka had irreconcilable differences about how Second Life should be run.
Since that message, Mr. Ondrejka announced on his blog that he will be spending the spring as a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he will be teaching graduate students about online communities. He said he also will be “consulting, writing, and speaking about the economic and technological impact of virtual worlds.”—Andrea L. Foster
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