Mindsigh

BlogHer07 Conference Opening Session

Posted by Jerry on July 28th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology

BlogHer07_001

Originally uploaded by Aiji Ducatillon

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

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