Venturebeat, GigaOM, and many other sites are covering a press release from Raph Koster’s startup, Metaplace. In summary, Metaplace announced $6.7M in Series B funding, and has moved on to a new phase of beta testing.

My personal favorite article was the SoCal Tech interview with Raph.

If you think about virtual worlds right now, there’s a lot of hype around kids worlds and entertainment, much like there was a lot of hype around Second Life in the past. So the technology has been around for a very long time. But, it hasn’t yet cracked the mass market code. That’s what we’re about. I believe that when you marry the web and technology out of the game industry, you can empower people to really exploit the potential that virtual worlds have to bring people together and socialize.

(Disclaimer: As mentioned previously, I am currently employed by Metaplace. This blog, however, does not reflect their opinions, yada yada, etc.)