We have a new paper covering, among other things, Second Life and its future,
written with colleagues at Yale University (see below), in addition to many
recently added resources at http://healthcybermap.org/sl.htm including a new
presentation on data visualization in 3-D virtual worlds, a recent BMJ article
entitled 'Surgeons have held conferences in Second Life', information about the
emerging 'MPEG-V for Virtual Worlds' ISO standard and the Metaverse1 Consortium,
SLurl of the Veterans Health Administration in SL (part of the U.S. Department
of Veterans Affairs), the latest news about, and fashions in, hands-free 3-D
navigation (like CamSpace and 3DV Systems), news about how the mirror world of
Google Earth is rapidly becoming a 3-D virtual world (see, for example, how Walt
Disney World Resort has been faithfully recreated in true 3-D in Google Earth),
and many more items...

The paper:
Web GIS in practice VI: a demo "playlist" of geo-mashups for public health
neogeographers
Maged N Kamel Boulos, Matthew Scotch, Kei-Hoi Cheung, David Burden
International Journal of Health Geographics 2008, 7:38 (18 July 2008)
http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/7/1/38
http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/pdf/1476-072x-7-38.pdf
Abstract:
'Mashup' was originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks
to create a new piece of music. The term now refers to Web sites or services
that weave data from different sources into a new data source or service. Using
a musical metaphor that builds on the origin of the word 'mashup', this paper
presents a demonstration "playlist" of four geo-mashup vignettes that make use
of a range of Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and 3-D Internet methods, with
outputs/end-user interfaces spanning the flat Web (two-dimensional -- 2-D maps),
a three-dimensional -- 3-D mirror world (Google Earth) and a 3-D virtual world
(Second Life (R)). The four geo-mashup "songs" in this "playlist" are: 'Web 2.0
and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for infectious disease surveillance',
'Web 2.0 and GIS for molecular epidemiology', 'Semantic Web for GIS mashup', and
'From Yahoo! Pipes to 3-D, avatar-inhabited geo-mashups'. It is hoped that this
showcase of examples and ideas, and the pointers we are providing to the many
online tools that are freely available today for creating, sharing and reusing
geo-mashups with minimal or no coding, will ultimately spark the imagination of
many public health practitioners and stimulate them to start exploring the use
of these methods and tools in their day-to-day practice. The paper also
discusses how today's Web is rapidly evolving into a much more intensely
immersive, mixed-reality and ubiquitous socio-experiential Metaverse that is
heavily interconnected through various kinds of user-created mashups.