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China Real Time, the Wall Street Journal's blog devoted to the world's second-largest country, has developed and launched China Econtracker, a valuable tool to access and understand economic data on the country.

Dealing with the statistical bureaus of the world's second-largest economy is even less pleasant than it sounds. So the Journal has created this well-organized, graphically effective and easy-to-use site. It organizes data by month-to-month and year-over-year presentations and users can switch from one to the other.

Real-world location check-ins are going to come to Facebook in a big way soon. That means you'll be able to see what restaurants your old friends from school go out to eat at and how often, where they vacation and where they shop.

Some early adopters of location services like Foursquare and Gowalla already admit that they check in to brag about all the cool places they go. Will adding location to Facebook add a new layer of economic class psychology to the otherwise relatively egalitarian social network? If I'm the mayor of the Ritz and you're the mayor of Taco Bell, how is that going to change the Facebook experience? Does it matter? More likely, I'm checking in at fancy places and you're not checking in at all.

The world economy may still be firmly in the toilet but the economy inside the virtual world of Second Life is doing fine. Better than fine, in fact. Q1 of 2010 was a record-breaker.

In a post on the Second Life blog, Tom Hale, Chief Product Officer for SL owner Linden Lab, said user-to-user transactions in the immersive world spiked 30% over last year to $160 million, breaking all previous company records.

A new report released today by Forrester Research is calling the tech downturn of 2008 and 2009 "unofficially over."

"Coming out of a lousy 2009, 2010 is looking a lot better," said Andrew Bartels, the report's author. "We see 2010 as the first year in a multi-year growth cycle. It's not a simple rebound from a downturn."

Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available for free in text form and as an audio book), is stirring controversy and a spicy conversation around the blogosphere. The current wave of discussion started with a critical review by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. In his review, Gladwell defends journalism and goes negative on "Free." Seth Godin, who till then had stayed out of the debate, penned an instantly classic Godin post titled "Malcolm is wrong."

Mike Masnick followed on TechDirt with an insightful post in which he attributes some of Gladwell's confusion to the way that Anderson wrote the book. Masnick says that the book does not provide enough details on the mechanics and applications of Free. (I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that.) Fred Wilson joined the conversation with a sharply delivered post on Freemium and Freeconomics. He gives examples of the kinds of Free that actually work.