BlogHer08 – Opening session
Despite the tyranny of timezones, I managed to catch the opening session and icebreaker event at BlogHer08 – one of the world’s biggest conference events on the topic of blogging. At it has a great lineup of speakers and topics, from Security in SecondLife to business and politics in the blogosphere.
Teal and I were among the first to arrive and chatted briefly with Grace McDunnough and Quean Turead – aka Erin Kotecki Vest – who many will know from her streaming video shows.
We settled in on the quiet side of the sim – working from laptops on a wireless – to reduce lag and increase the chance of a relatively stable connection once the avatars started arriving in force.
The amphitheatre was very accessible and the two video screens for live streaming of video from the real world event in San Francisco enabled a good view – albeit a very dark one.
When Elisa Camahort accompanied by Lisa and another whose name I didn’t catch came on I zoomed into the projection screen for the opening remarks and admin stuff which mainly related to admin for the real-life event, but foreshadowed the great conference that lay ahead.
With only a few glitches in the audio-visual feed the event got underway with intros and an ice-breaker event ‘speed dating’ where people attending in real life got to talk with someone for two minutes before moving on. At that point the live feed was closed, and we held our own speed dating event in SecondLife.
And the chat text went crazy – everyone was out there putting up blog URLs and helping newbies orient themselves. I met several wonderful people – who seemed a bit startled when I said it was 3.00AM here… for them the day was just starting!
But I’ll be logging in in throughout the weekend to catch as many sessions as I can – and if you are in the SanFrancisco area and you’re not at BlogHer08 – you’re really missing something special.
Cheers
Jerry
