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My name is Edith Firanelli and I was born in Antarctica. I have short dark hair, which I hide under a wool tuque, and a hot, if unrealistically proportioned, body. I've got no money, no job, no home, no skills and no friends. The good news is, I can fly and teleport. The bad: I still occasionally walk into trees and buildings.

I spend my days wandering around a strange, computer-generated landscape, having disjointed, acronym-heavy chit-chat with strangers called things like Dimitry Barbosa and Beautiful Barbara. Maybe one day I will fulfill my dream and get a job as a nightclub dancer (like I said, I have no skills), but until then I will stand around like a wallflower in the suburbs of cyberspace waiting for my controller to finish checking her e-mail. It's an aimless existence, being an avatar, but someone's got to do it.

This is the story of my Second Life.

I decided to take my first virtual vacation this week after reading (along with much of the world) the story of Amy Taylor and David Pollard, a British couple from Cornwall who met in an Internet chat room and married, only to have their relationship fall apart when Taylor caught her husband's virtual character hitting on another female avatar.

What's strange about the couple is not the fact that they met and conducted much of their lives online - many people do - but that they allowed events in the virtual world to overshadow events in the real one, a state of affairs that leads one to wonder: Which world were they really living in?

In real life, for instance, Taylor and Pollard are both unemployed and seriously overweight. In their second lives, they are a svelte and stylish pair, DJ Laura Skye and nightclub owner Dave Barmy, respectively. Pollard's avatar has the added distinction of living in a renovated church and travelling by helicopter gunship.

Like many rich, powerful men, Barmy likes women. Skye once caught him in the act getting off with a prostitute. She hired a private detective - online of course - to lure her husband's avatar to stray. Barmy passed with flying colours and the romance survived. It wasn't until she caught him chatting up another woman, the dubiously named Modesty McDonnell, that Laura Skye decided that she had had enough. She left Barmy and now the real life couple are filing for divorce as well.

Are these people nuts? Weirdos? Sad basement-dwelling cyber-hermits?

Well kinda. But for better or worse, they are also the future. As Guardian technology writer Victor Keegan recently noted, "the current explosion of three-dimensional worlds will evolve into a virtual revolution on the scale of the Industrial Revolution in which people will earn, spend and play in these worlds."

According to Keegan, there are now more than 30 virtual worlds targeted at children eight to 13 years old. The most popular of these, Habbo.com, has more than 100 million registered users, making it bigger than most countries. And the Gartner group, a respected U.S. technology research company, predicts that, by 2011, 80 per cent of active Internet users will have avatars.

Which brings us back to Pollard and Taylor. In real life, the couple have done everything in their power to shut out the prying eyes of the press, refusing phone calls, e-mails and letters. But while journalists in Cornwall were getting nowhere, two enterprising reporters from the South West News agency managed to doorstep the couple online.

"Our characters started chatting and it was different," says Jo Pickering, one of the journalists who helped "control" the avatar who got the scoop. "She began to trust us. Amy's character was much more confident in the game than she was in real life."

It was with this in mind that I set up my own second life this week. I was hoping to make a fortune, live out my deepest fantasies or at the very least gain some virtual confidence of my own.

What I found, after crashing my laptop three times, was a strangely compelling dreamscape in which avatars roam aimlessly, occasionally stopping to chat, wave or hand out business cards.

On one random island, a few people were gathered around a man called Dimitry who appeared to be building a house. This was quite fascinating to watch, as it showed his prowess at "scripting" or writing software (the Second Life universe is entirely user-generated).

A woman named Barbara approached and balls began flying out of her tall black hat. She asked Dimitry to script her some software so she could remove her ball-spewing hat. Dimitry did not answer, absorbed as he was in his house-building, but a man named Michelangelo began chatting her up. They quickly exchanged some lewd sexual innuendo before Barbara determined that Michelangelo was of no use to her and she moved on. Michelangelo then turned to me. "So, Edith," he said, "where are you from?"

"Um, Antarctica?" I sputtered, before teleporting myself out of there.

So much for virtual confidence. My second life may be the way of the future, but for the time being I'll stick with the first.