I can see that it's been successful for companies to tie together a virtual world with a tangible object, but it still makes me a bit uneasy. Case in point; Webkinz, as he describes above, is quite the phenomenon this year (it's the Beanie Babies of 90s), but I hadn't heard of it and I have two little ones.

We were gifted two of them - an elephant and a pig. My son, who just turned two, could care less about the virtual world for his elephant but my daughter loved it for about 10 minutes. She was able to adopt her pig, name her and then proceed to play some games with her pig avatar.

It left me uneasy because while some of this was free, there was some monetization scheming going on for "premium" features and really, for my 4-year-old she wasn't interested. I can imagine there's a market for this, but it's not something I'll ever fully understand or accept I suppose - not for kids.