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It seems that Jason Stoddard's company, Centric, has offices in Second Life (as well as in the real world). Recently, a company called Winfinity (which grew out of Oversight, as featured in various of Jason's stories at Strange Horizons and Interzone) seems to have taken over Centric's Second Life region with a terraforming project called Manoa.

The Winfinity people are offering a reward of 100,000 Linden dollars (the Second Life currency) for information about the causes of the cost overruns on the Manoa Development Project.

I'm not privy to details, but I'm guessing that this is essentially an Alternate Reality Game set partly in Second Life, and tied in with Jason's forthcoming Interzone story "Far Horizon." (Also note that the "development ship El Dorado" mentioned on the Discover Manoa page shares a name with the starship that appears in Jason's SH stories "Exception" and "Revision." Given that Jason's IZ stories may not quite fit into the same timeline as his SH stories, I'm not sure it's the same starship, but I figured the connection was worth mentioning.)

For more info and links, see Jetse's blog entry and Jetse's post on the IZ forum.

I'm not on Second Life, and I don't have time to explore this. But I'm definitely intrigued by it, and I like Jason's writing and worldbuilding, and I like the idea of an interlinked set of web pages, Second Life stuff, and fiction.

Apparently solutions should be submitted via the Data Submission page between June 1 and June 30, 2007. I'm not sure what criteria they'll use to determine who gets the prize if there are multiple correct answers.