Posted by jerry on July 28th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology
I attended the opening session of the BlogHer07 conference last night. The conference – one of largest blogging conferences to date – was also streamed live into virtual world SecondLife at “Hyperstring Island-2”.
The opening panel comprised Vint Falken, TheDiva Rockin, Koz Farino and was moderated by Queen Tureaud and video-logged byRobyn Tippins.
The live conference being held in Chicago, USA has around 750 registrants, and there were about 60 in-world at the main site, but it was also streamed into two other sites as well as video-streamed into SLCN.tv
You can get the schedule of events here
Here is the audience at the opening session in SecondLife
First impressions
This is pioneering use of the technology – so stability issues were to be expected. It took a while to set up for the opening session and the change of sound streaming channel actually decreased the quality of the sound – but I think this was so that all panel participants could use their conference mics to talk.
I ended up taking the sound output from the headphones channel on the computer and running it through an external amplifier and into external speakers – and the sound levels were good then for the remainder of the session.
The panel were introduced by the moderator, Robyn Tippins and each talked a bit about how they viewed their own experience of blogging. This was a good session, as it emerged that Koz Farina is podcasting pioneer, and the inventor of blogHUD – so there was some good discussion of real-time versus asynchronous communication with blogs versus pods.
Then there was an ice-breaker session in both real life (RL) and SecondLife (SL) For those of us in SL we had to find out various kinds of information about our fellow attendees, by checking out the avatars’ profiles and by instant messaging others to ask whenther they met this or that criteria – like did they speak more than one language, were European based, blogged about their family and so on. It was a fun – if chaotic session – in the midst of all this activity the strain on the servers showed and several people’s computers crashed so there were avatars appearing and disappearing all over the place!
Despite the timezone problem – it was well past midnight in Australia by the time we finished up – the discussion certainly made me think about the potential for this form of social software and where it might lead in the future. I suspect increasingly that SecondLife is the equivalent of perhaps Mosaic – to use a worldwide web analogy. This very early days, but it shows the potential for a real 3D web with real-time interaction and enormous creative power.
You can see more images from the SL part of the conference here
I met a couple of other musicians and other interesting people at the conference session, and look forward to more sessions tonight 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
2 Comments »
Posted by jerry on July 27th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
Blogger Alja Sulcic pointed me to a wonderful video outlining the merits of the creative commons form of licensing – that is where you elect to share your work freely, while retaining some rights to show that you created it, but are happy to allow others to make non-commercial use/remix/recycling of your work. Enjoy!
Sharon has also found some good stuff on copyright. Here’s one she found explaining copyright with a simple drawing 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on Creative Commons – copyright for collaboration
Posted by jerry on July 22nd, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Music, New media, Technology
One of the aspects of virtual world SecondLife is the social interaction it enables between people from different real locations. I was curious as to how live music performances worked, and, having joined several live music social groups I quickly found a live performance in progress and teleported to a club lounge, where I found about 15 avatars dancing or standing around, and one with a guitar on stage animated to play the guitar, while the sound was streamed live into the sim.
The lone singer-guitarist seemed bemused that the host had vanished offline (perhaps their computer had crashed) and one of the audience indicated that they had a club and everyone could transfer there.
The new club “Sound Factory” was well set up with a dance floor, and several avatars were already dancing before the music had begun to stream.
Conversations were broadcast across the screen and when the sound came through the performer, Mr Jonze, spoke in response to several of the comments being broadcast. He interacted with the small crowd and conversed between songs, as though there was a small gathering in his lounge-room.
I asked the crowd if there were any tutorials on sound streaming, and got a rather abrupt response from the club owner, Politically Beck to say “it’s so easy even a caveman could do it”. Perhaps its not etiquette to ask tech questions of a probably knowledgeable crowd in a social setting, but I found that a bit unhelpful.
Nonetheless the music was good and the sound quality was surprisingly good lending a good club/restaurant atmosphere to the scene. It differed substantially from any Real life (RL) situation in that you could dance, converse and interact with the performer to a far greater extent than you could in RL. I had a good dance and conversation with Marieke CLoetens and laughed at the antics of Peet the monkey 🙂
And with it being evening in Australia, the performer Mr Jonze had just been up for an hour in the US and others were there in the room from the UK and from NZ – quite a mix that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.
I learnt a lot about the social side of SL, and look forward to checking out a couple more of the music venues.
Cheers
Jerry
2 Comments »
Posted by jerry on July 21st, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
Broken Toys blog has an excellent discussion/analysis of SecondLife – one of the best I’ve read that provides a balanced and informative insight into the virtual world phenomenon. The writer takes as a starting point the notion of SL as a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, as a useful analogy with which to unpack SL.
Some key insights:
- It’s about community – so the top players in the game are women
- Levels are climbed by social interaction and participating in social groups
- Blokes, if you’re in it for the laggy sex and violence, you’re in the wrong place and you’ve missed the point
- Fashion favours the feminine – the range of blokes gear is limited and largely unimaginative
- As a mutli-level game you gain experience points (XP) by, well, gaining experience – newbies with default avatars and free clothing and bad hair mark out the newcomer – and experienced users will often (a) shun newbies; (b) prey on newbies (c) help them. The emphasis seems to be on (a) and (b).
- Searches have been skewed by dubious practices, like ‘camping’ (exploiting newbies with the promise of cash for camping) which adds artificially to the popularity count and moves a site up the search ranking, while paying sub-cent values to the campers.
- Avatars are sexualised – almost to the point of caricature – most female avatars (avs) have exaggerated breasts and hips, while male avs have six-pack abs and huge shoulder to hip ratio, and invariably with perfect skin and youthful appearance – it is actually quite difficult (need XP) to find more realistic shapes and skins.
So blokes, if you are after violence, go to Warcraft, and if you are after porn, check your email spam box. But if you are after a space in which people can share a sense of community and imagine and create, then SL has a whole world to offer.
For me the attraction is meeting people from different parts of the (real) world, and the possibility of finding a different venue for sharing my music performances.
Thanks to Metaverse Territories for pointing to the Broken Toys post.
Cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on What is SecondLife?
Posted by jerry on July 21st, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
My bank did one of its regular mail-outs to advertise its life insurance scheme. As anyone will tell you, if you put text in front of me I’ll read it, so Sharon was startled when I burst out laughing reading an insurance form…
I had gone through all the disclaimers and looked at the form fields, and there it was:
Signature of Principal Life Insured…. followed by
Signature of Second Life Insured ….!!!?? What??
But my avatar can’t write! and does this mean I can insure both my Real Life (RL) as well as my Second Life (SL)? And is my av covered for griefing attacks?
It’s really worth reading spam sometimes 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on Life assurance and virtual worlds
