The World According to Jennyfur

Art and Design in Second Life: Exploring Virtual Worlds Tuesday,
Sept 15th 5 – 7 pm CBS Auditorium,
Hamilton Hall @ The University of the Arts (320 S. Broad St.)
Sponsored by The Corzo Center for the Creative Economy

Artists, designers, educators, musicians, and institutions are coming together and creating a 3-D interactive online community that transcends the boundaries of physical possibility.

The discussion by Jeff Lipsky and Richard Minsky introduces the art, marketplace, and design possibilities of Second Life and Virtual Worlds. They’ll survey a variety of applications, including new directions in the creation and marketing of art, innovative learning experiments, global outreach through virtual museums and libraries, and the uses of virtual spaces for distance learning and community development.

Jeff Lipsky is an artist who makes abstract narrative paintings and drawings. As Flithy Fluno, his Second Life avatar, he specializes in using online virtual world and social networking technologies to connect to international audiences, marketplaces, and local arts communities. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world, and he has been featured in dozens of articles, including The New York Times Magazine, Art Calendar Magazine, the Boston Globe as well as on a number of websites – Artnet, ARtinfo.com, Minskyreport.com, etc.

Richard Minsky resides in the virtual world of Second Life as avatar ArtWorld Market and is the founder of SLART, a critical review and journal of Second Life art. His study, “The Art World Market of Second Life,” was the first to examine the differences and similarities between real life and Second Life art, including questions of aesthetic, technical, legal and economics. He is also founder of the Center for Books Arts, an acclaimed center for the study and craft of book design. He is himself a well-known book designer, whose work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries in the United States and abroad.

I write on many topics some that overlap each other and others that are completely different. Rather than starting a blog for each, I have created separate feed categories for each topic category, so you can follow my social media postings without having to read about health and fitness. I may add or change feeds from time to time, but here are the main ones I use.

Social Media Feed – Postings on social media such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

Virtual Worlds & Gaming Feed – Postings about activities within Second Life, World of Warcraft and other online virtual worlds and games.

Health & Fitness Feed – Postings about my journeys through diet and exercise dealing with Weight Watchers and yoga primarily.

Philadelphia Local Feed – Postings having to do with Philadelphia or events taking place in Philadelphia

Music Feed – Postings often deal with music and new media, local music stuff and events.

I get a ton of questions on a regular basis about Facebook filters and privacy settings so I figured I’d write down some tips and best practices for you all. I have 500+ people on my friends list from all aspects of my life and very few people need to be privvy to every single thing I do, think, say or whatnot.

1. The first step in the process is creating Friends Filters. You can do this by clicking on your Friends tab at the top of the screen between Profile and Inbox. You should see an option to Create A New List.
- Click Create New List, this will open a pop-up window – Fill in the name for your list where it says Enter Name i.e. Work Filter, Family Filter etc.
- Click on the pictures of the people you want to include in this filter
- When You are done click Create List.

2. Now you have a list of people grouped together. You can now designate the filters in the Privacy Settings. Between your Name and the Logout button on the Top Navigation bar you will see Settings. If you mouse over it you get three options

2a. Account Settings gives you several options on the tab: – Settings, Networks, Mobile, Language, Payments can be ignored for now. – Notification is the big one here, you can set up how you are notified and by what for things like Sends me a message, Adds me as a friend, Posts on my Wall etc Go through this list and click on/off based on your preferences. I check this area once a month because everytime I look at my trash in gmail 90% is still facebook notifications. You can do this for every part of your profile and applications.

2b. Privacy Settings & Overview You have four options here, Profile, Search, Newsfeed/Wall & Applications.

Profile: You can customize your settings for Basic and Contact Information on this tab. This is also where having filters comes in handy. The default settings are Everyone, Only Friends, My Networks & Friends, Friends of Friends or Customize.
- Click Customize, now you customize each aspect of your profile based on what you want people to see or not see. If you select Only Friends and Except these people, you could include by name or one of the filters you created like Work Filter, Family Filter etc.

Search: this will be how people can search for your name and what they will see before they add you.
- You can select Search Visibility based on the default or customizeable features. I keep it to everyone, but if you have a crazy ex-spouse you don’t want finding you, you can type in their name and make sure that they never see you come up in any search function.
- Search result content, this will show a brief snippet of your profile to people who search for you.

Newsfeed and Wall Posts You can further customize what you see in your newsfeeds and on wallposts here. There are two tabs Actions within Facebook and Social Ads. The Social Ads one is a big one selecting Show you Pic in Ads to No One means that you won’t see Your Name loves Brand Name Detergent Become A Fan.

Applications Click the link to the applications page. You can individually change the settings on all your applications. You can also hide or block certain applications from showing in your newsfeed from the newsfeed page. Applications have the most convoluted settings and are really hard to search through. There is a drop down on the page defaulted to Recent Activity.

**If you go to your newsfeed and say you see an application that really annoys you like zombie pirate ninjas sending you drinks and monkeys. If you click the HIDE button on the right of the post you get an option to Hide the person who posted it or Hide the application. You can also hide certain people that come up in your newsfeed this way as well. If I think of more tricks I’ll post them, but those are the basics. Pay attention to the posting options Notes has the privacy setting built in, so you don’t have to worry about a default beyond Only Friends, though if one note you want to post to a select filter of friends and another note you want to post to everyone, but XYZ people you can easily do that.

Philadelphia Future Salon meeting: July 17th, 2008 6-8pm

Futuristic Cinema: Mash-Ups and Machinima!

The next meeting of the Philadelphia Future Salon will be on July 17th,
2008; we’re not meeting on the first Thursday of the month due to the
holiday.

The topic will be “Futuristic Cinema: Mash-Ups and Machinima!” Modern media
has caused us to rethink everything from business to entertainment. Youtube
has made it possible for anyone to be a star and share their dreams and
visions. Fans now have the technology in their power to find out who would
win in a fight between Star Wars and Star Trek. Major television franchises
such as CSI: New York and The Office are blending episodes with the virtual
world of Second Life. The most famous brands in the world, such as
Coca-Cola, are making short films in virtual worlds and video games (called
machinima) to enhance their advertising campaigns. Traditional businesses
are finding new ways to use these new technologies.

We will have two panelists from the area lead the discussion, with Timothy
Allen moderating.

The first panelist is Peter Decherney, a Assistant Professor of Cinema
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus
on the history of media regulation and on internet policy, specifically the
interaction between Hollywood and Washington. He is the author of Hollywood
and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia UP, 2005)
and many articles on the Hollywood film industry, on the history of media
regulation, and on fair use and academia, among other topics. In 2006, along
with two colleagues, Decherney successfully petitioned for an exemption to
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for media professors using clips for
teaching. In addition to Penn, he has taught at Yale University, Johns
Hopkins University, and Tsinghua University (Beijing). He is currently
working on a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright
law. He frequently assigns mashups as coursework.

Our other panelist is Ariella Furman, the first person in her Ukrainian
family to be born in America. She acquired her interest in filmmaking when
she was practically in diapers. She took her skillset with her to Temple
University and became a 2008 graduate with a Film Media Arts degree. Her
story began with her love for music videos. Her videos for east-coast bands
have premiered on outlets such as LCN-TV, Adrenaline Nation TV, MTV Italy,
and more recently the channel Logo, a subsidiary of MTV. She then found her
next passion, machinima, by accident, through an experimental documentary
she made for class. Since then, she has worked with Electric Sheep, Popcha,
SLAgency, and created machinima for Nestle, World Bank, IBM, and others.

Timothy Allen is a virtual worlds enthusiast, Philadelphia area tech
fanatic, and co-moderator of the Philadelphia Future Salon.

Refreshments are provided, and free cocktails will be served after the
session. We look forward to seeing you there!

Location: 1835 Market Street, 15th Floor, at the office of Buchanan,
Ingersoll & Rooney.

Please RSVP to francis.ta…@bipc.com – please email him directly, do not
reply to the entire list, as we try to keep this a very low-volume group.
Thank you!

Introduction

In my preparation to speak as a panelist at the Philadelphia Future Salon on the topic of music and new media I’ve actually had to formalize some of the pro’s and con’s of the subject matter. It has been an interesting experience to say the least. I have explored various methods of social networking and Web 2.0 applications for music promotion. I can safely say that there is no one sure fire solution or best method, but it does help to know what the pit falls are and how to avoid them and/or deal with them.

The MySpace Band Phenomena

Anyone who has ever used MySpace has gotten numerous friend requests from bands they never heard of all the over world. Some find this an annoyance and others use it as a tool to find new music. Just about every band has some sort of presence on MySpace. What remains to be seen is how difficult it can be for a smaller, independent band to maintain their MySpace page and to affect fan base growth. Setting aside the slow process of sending friend requests to endless droves of potential fans, many of MySpace’s functions are broken or just not optimal for proper use. For instance:

- A band cannot send out an email message to their fans if they have more than 2000 friends. There is, at this time, no way to segment or to send a message by location. You have thousands of people at your fingertips and no way to reach them en masse. Who wants to send 10,000 individual emails manually one at a time?

- The only way to message your “fans” is by posting a bulletin that probably no one will even notice. The new feature to subscribe to friend feeds for status and profile updates is hampered due to restrictions on the number of feeds one can have. That is not even considering the question of whether or not you fan base will use the function to see your updates.

- Bands play gigs all the time. MySpace has an event invitation and listing function. Guess what? It doesn’t work very well. Sure, they tell you that you can invite from your friends list by geographical location, but after a hundred tries you get the same error message. So, if you have the gumption, you can spend days if not weeks going through your friends list and manually sending invites to them.

- While MySpace’s privacy functions were sorely lacking, this has thrown another hindrance into the mix when bands try to send friend requests. There are only so many CAPTCHA’s that one can look at before their eyes go buggy. More and more people do not even accept friend requests from bands. The irony here is that many bands do not accept friend requests from other bands. Oh, the hypocrisy.

This is not to say that bands should steer clear of MySpace or other social networking sites. My advice would be to set realistic goals and expectations of having a presence on MySpace. Setting up shop there does not equal instant success or that you can legitimately claim a fan base of 10,000 just because you have that many friends associated with the page. MySpace should function more like an abstract or one-sheeter where you can find pertinent information on the band and see it all in one concise place.

First, you need to ask yourself a few pertinent questions. “I have 10,000 fans of my music or do I really?” How many of those fans have visited the bands MySpace page and listened to the music more than once on their first visit to the site. Once you are at the level of Snow Patrol and the likes, you probably don’t need to ask this question because your record sales and touring will be enough proof of your measure of success. People will be sending friend requests to you by the thousands, not the other way around. The next question you need to ask is How many of your bands MySpace fans will actually buy a CD, download your music from iTunes (or other site), purchase band related merchandise or attend a concert? Its hard to track vital metrics about the band’s site beyond how many times a song was played or downloaded and how many page views you have. Mind you, you could easy sway this data because every time you look at the page or refresh it, it counts as a page view.

A MySpace page should not be the bands only website. It should supplement the website. It can be beneficial to have both though it depends on what you are hoping to gain. I can’t tell you how many band pages I have looked at where the the website in the profile is listed as “you are looking at it”. While a local booker at a club or bar venue may be thrilled to look at only a MySpace page, however if you are pitching your band to a booking agent or are trying to license your music or find funding, you may not be taken seriously since for all intents and purposes anyone can make a MySpace page. The glut of flashy advertising on them is also a turn off.

It seems like every day some new social networking site is being launched that is not even taking into account how many music services are cropping up all over the place. While MySpace is the most prominent social networking tool for musicians, most other websites have or are developing some sort of music based platform for their product.

Facebook Musician Profiles:  Facebook arrived a little late in the game in 2008 to developing a specific type of profile for artists and musicians and they differ greatly from their competitors at MySpace. Most of the ones I see are either made by the artist represented, most likely by their record label or management teams. The rest are made by fans of said musician or artist. I suppose the same is true for other social networking sites.  Facebook is often lauded for its approach to preventing spam and obnoxious advertising. This makes it slightly more difficult to seek out fans for a musician profile page. The easiest way to do it is to send a message via Facebook to all your friends and attach the profile. In essence you aren’t sending a “friend request” per se, just a simple message. But, this takes a bit more thought in crafting a pitch so that potential fans will actually look at your profile rather than just deleting the message. Very few attempts at “cold calling” exist in Facebook, I have yet to receive a message for a fan profile request from anyone I did not know. If a music group uses this method of profiling, their numbers might not be as high as they are on MySpace, but you might have a more targeted audience that may just actually come out to a show or listen to the music. In addition the the profiles, you can create a group about the band, though I find that groups are often overlooked in Facebook because their are no notifications of the updates.

Twitter: for those unaware of the phenomena that is Twitter, in a nutshell it is a microblogging site where the premise is “What are you doing right now?” in 140 characters or less. This site can be used as an announcement list of sorts where you can send brief communications to your fan base.

*I never actually finished this post, there are many many music or musician specific social networking sites out there that deserve looking into more in depth.

I am participating on a new media panel coming up in a week focusing on the topic of “Music in the Era of New Media”.

Here is the event information:

Being a musician in the modern era has offered a huge wealth of tools
and opportunities, however, this can also be overwhelming. The same
thing can be said for the modern media business: how do you promote
yourselves in a vast sea of competition? Which tools are effective?
How do you separate your work from the pack? What artists and
businesses have been successful?

And, of course, the most important question: how can I get people to
listen to music, while still having an opportunity to make a living,
and maintaining the quality of my work?

We will be addressing these questions – and many more, hopefully
brought by you. Our panelists include:

John Allers: program director Radio 104.5 WRFF-FM – or better known to
us, the best local supporter of local artists, Clear Channel
Jennifer Vatza: local band manager; new media promoter, Web 2.0
socializer; virtual worlds expert
Darren Morze: local musician (Manic Mirrors) and studio engineer (Plan
B Studios) in both analog and digital
Ben Morgan: Music Director, Millcreek Tavern; Founder, Musictech
mailing list; Past associate of The Future of Music Coalition, Elektra
Records, CDnow

As usual, we will be having a fairly open discussion with the
panelists, not a lecture. We hope to see you Thursday, March 6th,
at our meeting location:

1835 Market Street
14th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103

To attend, simply drop an email to Frank Taney, our kind sponsor from
Buchanan Ingersoll, & Rooney – francis(d0t)taney(at)bipc(dot)com – if you don’t
have time to register, feel free to show up, but you may have to wait
a few minutes while the front desk contacts us.

We always gather between 5:30pm and 6:00pm EST, and start at about
6:15pm. We’ll have the discussion until about 8pm, and people who want
to join us for a cocktail afterwards at Elephant & Castle at 18th and
Market are welcome.

How much is too much when it comes to blog posts per day?

I’ve been thinking about this question as I watch my Google Reader tip on average 100 blog posts or more per day from my various blog feeds. I realize that this number is probably low compared to some of the people out there with hundreds of blog feeds. On average, I follow about thirty blogs, which if you evened it out, that would make three posts per blog per day roughly. However, about 90% of the daily blog post count comes from Tech Crunch and the newly launched Massively. I will allow for the fact that the two blog feeds feature multiple authors, but at some point in time you have to ask yourself is 20-40 blog posts per day a bit excessive? Especially, when some posts are no more than a couple of sentences or a paragraph in length.

I tune in to each of the three aforementioned blog feeds for various reasons. Tech Crunch has great articles on happenings in the music industry with special notice to new media and technology. Massively I peruse to keep abreast of whats going on in Second Life (and other Virtual Worlds) during my sustained absence from SL.

I would hate to ditch the feeds solely on the signal to noise ratio argument. I’ve found myself wondering how some of the post heavy blogs with multiple authors could move towards a blog cluster format like myblog/tech or myblog/music or myblog/secondlife to provide more accurate filtering for readers who want to stay in tune, but not be inundated in blog fodder. The best example I can think of to illustrate this point is how the Electric Sheep Company handles their company blogs. Employees have individual blogs, which you can add piecemeal or you can add the We the Sheeple feed, which seems to be an amalgamation of all the other sheep blogs into one feed.

Update: Thanks Flipper for pointing me to the Massively feeds by category. I need to check Tech Crunch to see if they do something similar.

As a co-founder and now officially retired member of the Future United Board and SLCC Organization team I started thinking about our collective successes and failures over the past three conventions. Without further ado, here are my suggestions for those of you who will continue to be involved, those who will be and those who may be considering it. They are in no particular order and are not intended to incite drama or to offend anyone.

- The first recommendation I can make is to clearly define roles and responsibilities. Board members should not be lead organizers and/or track leaders. Their responsibility should be minimal and for official proceedings only. In most non-profit settings, board members are a group of consultants who tap their respective contacts for funding for special events and other fundraising opportunities. Often, they participate in different committees. They are the decision makers and advisors, but not the doers. I would also recommend a process for hiring board members, organizers and track leaders. Define lengths of terms (Two terms (conventions) should be the maximum). It is easy to get burnt out on such an endeavor.  PS. Hire an accountant.

- The SLCC is a labor of love. Once involved you cannot “sort of” be involved or try to maintain (especially on site) other priorities. You may end up not spending any quality time with your friends or getting much sleep. Its just what you have to do. The more involved you are the more it will dominate your free time and your life. The time it takes on all parts to coordinate a growing event of this scale is monumental. The Catch-22 is that the more people who are involved the more people you have to manage and the coordination effort becomes much like herding cats.

- It is nearly impossible to be all things to all people. This may call for a segmenting and separation of “tracks” in the future. Perhaps, for instance, the educators hold their own SLCC – Education Conference and the companies have SLCC – Business Conference etc.. There may be a need to have multiple events or some sort of restructuring. Education conferences are different from Technology conferences, which may be similar and divergent at the same time to business conferences.

- One of the things I regret the most even since its inception is the problematic nature of streaming audio/video to Second Life for the “mixed-reality” portion of the in-world convention. This is one of the areas where we have failed massively though not for lack of trying. I think this year that the in world convention management and structure held its own and that Vivianne Draper and Zatzai Asturias did an amazing job with it. The number one problem will continue to be the stability, scalability and feasibility of streaming media.  Hotels and conference centers often promise you a Prius and give you a Hummer. Sure, its a vehicle, but not the same caliber and performance. Second Life has become more and more mainstream along with interactive media technologies. However, the universal understanding of the persons who staff the events management teams at hotels and conference centers do not fully understand the kind of technological demands involved with Second Life. My advice in this area would be to 1) contract with an off-site host for audio/video streaming that can handle the technological demands. 2) finding a conference location with proven technological capabilities for large scale tech events. Perhaps, the corporate headquarter or campus of a large tech company would be ideal. 3) research other high tech conferences that stream media on the internet or into virtual worlds. 4) have a back-up system in place. 5) emergency whiskey is critical and absolutely non-negotiable.

- For the time being, the SLCC is still a non-profit volunteer run organization. No one is being paid to do this. At best, you can expect some complimentary drinks or meals. The SLCC may have to become a for-profit entity like most professional event organization groups in the future.  Sitting at a registration desk for a couple hours won’t guarantee you a free pass. Even sponsors are responsible for making their own hotel and lodging plans. This is what makes it affordable for as many participants as possible. Everyone chips in a little something. As much as I wish it were owned by some company and had paid employees even though I think it would lose the community vibe. I’d also think that it would be a good idea to hire a grants researcher and writer for alternative funding opportunities. -This may afford paid employees and volunteer compensation without having to be owned by a corporate entity.

- I really wished that we did not use the word community in the title. It made sense for the time and we needed something to call the event. Second Life Community Convention sounded decent. Plus community was the theme of the first convention. It may be too far along on the non-profit processes and branding to rename it and remove the word community. Its such a vague term anymore. What community? There are a vast array of communities in Second Life. There really isn’t one singular community of residents. Perhaps, network is a better description than community. Network is very Web 2.0 New Media oriented term.

- Ditch the live music, machinima viewings and art type events as a official events coordinated by the convention events management team. This is not to say that those groups should not be involved or should be overlooked. I think they should be organized by their respective communities separately from the organizers of the convention or with as little involvement as possible. Stroker Serpentine did an amazing job organizing the masquerade ball with very minimal involvement from any of the organizers and board members. I think this should be the model for extraneous involvement from different subsets of the community.

- Where possible have signed contracts for EVERYTHING even for on-site volunteers. Conventions are hard to run when people flake out, take on too many responsibilities and then falter or flat out leave the organization abruptly. This will happen. Heck, I’m guilty of it myself. All legal contracts should be written by an attorney and not cut and pasted from boiler plate documents found on the web.

- There needs to be one person on the team whose sole responsibilities is press/media relations. This is the person who posts and comments to all SL related forums and blogs. They should handle press releases and dissemination of all pertinent information and should assemble press kits to have on hand year round.

- There needs to be more involvement from Linden Lab. It was a huge honor for the SLCC to be named the official convention of Second Life by Linden Lab per their sponsorship terms and contract this year. Keeping in theme with the convention being resident run is fine. There involvement should, however, be beyond sending the executive staff to present and filling panels with moderators. This assistance should extend to contractual negotiations, non-profit dealings, financial management and press/media releases etc.

- You are never ever ever going to please everyone. You can do your best – it may or may not be good enough. Some bridges will inevitably be burned. You have to have faith that in the end it will all come together and work out as best as possible. There will be drama. There will be technical glitches. The facilities will never deliver on the tech needed to pull off an event of this magnitude. More and more people will be clamoring for a piece of the pie and the visibility that comes with having said pie. You can do you best to accommodate, but not everyone will get exactly what they want and many of them will piss and moan up a drama storm of epic proportions. It may seem dire, but things have a way of working themselves out in the end.

- Areas of interest and topics that should have more time devoted to them: Fashion, Technology, Libsl, Open Source, OpenSim (Competitive Platforms), Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0 applications and technology, improved interface design, Second Life as a green technology, grid stability and Subcultures/Communities (Furries, Gor, BDSM etc). Less focus on big business. Its been done to death at this point. Second Life is MUCH more than just a business platform. If you want that sort of thing there are a multitude of business and marketing based conference focusing on new media and virtual worlds.

- Never lose site of what the Second Life Community Convention is about – its about the people who make Second Life what it is – The Lindens, the content creators, the companies, the educators, the furries, the vampires, the sex industry, the machinimists, the artists, the musicians, the scripters and the residents far and wide. The SLCC is about bringing those people together in the real world.

Lastly, many thanks to everyone over the years who has persevered to make the SLCC what it is today. Special thanks go out to: FlipperPA Peregrine, Randy Moss, Nethermind Bliss, Jeska Linden, Jerry Paffendorf, Nexeus Fatale, Taco Rubio and Phreak Radio, Moo Money, Buddy Sprocket, Fizik Baskerville, Jeremy Kabumpo, Crucial Armitage, LilyEliska Kralmoc, Misty Rhodes, Stroker Serpentine, Baccara Rhodes, Valadeza Anubis, Vivianne Draper, Zatzai Asturias and Hiro Pendragon and all our sponsors whomever else I have omitted by mistake.

With the SLCC a mere two weeks away I decided that now would be a good time to indulge in World of Warcraft for the first time. I’ve been on a self-imposed hiatus from Second Life since the beginning of July. I’m lucky if I remember to log in once a week these days. I’ve been suffering from severe SL burn out. My interactions are mostly off-world through instant message, Twitter, Facebook etc. I even have managed to take a break from forums. Tomorrow will be the three week mark since my last post there. I’ve actually been MUCH happier as of late. I haven’t abandoned SL altogether. I just need some time off.

Though this all comes at an odd time with the countdown to the convention ticking away. I can barely muster the remotest bit of enthusiasm for it… well with the exception of the Masquerade Ball because I have an awesomely snarky costume for it. I’m excited to see my friends and hang out with them, but for all intents and purposes I could care less about Second Life right now.

I know some of my SL friends are aware that I am in World of Warcraft now and wondering why I am not on on the same server as they are, but I joined primarily to hang out with some of my local Philly friends. For the time being, I have sought to keep my time there very separate from Second Life. I like the anonymity. I like being a clueless newb. I like the newness of it. Mind you, I’ve never been much of a gamer until now. Although, I did a two-week trial on EVE Online last May. Perhaps, one day I’ll create a character on the SL server, but for now I am enjoying myself on the server that my friends are on.

Before anyone can or should lay claim to being the first, biggest or best in anything especially with regards to Second Life and Virtual Worlds, it would be highly recommended that you do a little bit of research first. I know I am not the first person to bring this up. Every time an instance of such lazy reporting is brought to my attention I can’t help, but shake my head and wonder what people are thinking. If you want to be taken seriously versus making a big splash with an unfounded proclamation of superstar superlatives all you need is a little comparative research.

In a recent article, the Cambridge Evening News proclaims a new fangled first by stating that PA Consulting has had the world’s biggest Second Life conference, with 90 people in attendance. Otherwise the article is fairly minimal and there isn’t much information on their conference. It also does not state whether this was a real world event or an in-world gathering.

In this case, a simple Google search would reveal (among other things) that The Second Life Community Convention began in 2005 with approximately 150 people in attendance at the New York Law School and countless other people attending simultaneously within Second Life. In 2006, 500 people attended the SLCC in San Francisco and the attendance for the upcoming one in August 2007 is expected to reach 1000 participants. If I am not mistaken, the SLCC 2005 may have been one of the first mixed-reality events in Second Life.

Preceeding the inception of the Second Life Community Convention, there were many other virtual worlds and/or virtual reality related events including the Avatars conference series pioneered by Bruce Damer beginning in 1996. More recently there was the Virtual Worlds Conference in NYC and an upcoming one in San Jose. There is also the SLUK meet-up in England. There is an additional Second Life conference happening in Dusseldorf, Germany this September.

As far as Second Life in-world conferences go, in addition to simulcasts of the SLCC and the Virtual Worlds Conference, the SL Educators arranged a Best Practices in Second Life Conference in world that was attending by over a thousand people and Zatzai Asturias has held two Second Conventions in world.

How long did it take me to find those links? Maybe a half an hour. Sure, I knew what I was looking for, but doing a Google search for “Second Life Conferences” drew several pages of results. I know that its not possible to account for all the firsts and the biggests and bests in Second Life. Perhaps there should be a searchable database somewhere of registered firsts in Second Life.

Tony Walsh of Clickable Culture recently wrote on this subject in an article about IWOOT’s proclamation of being the first ever Second Life store where real life products can be purchased with Linden dollars and delivered to your home , which of course was untrue. Tony pointed out that, FlipperPA Peregrine made this possible in 2005 through then SLBoutique website where you could order software and computer parts for Linden dollars. I can personally attest to this since I am married to Flipper. This was covered in the press. Of course, IWOOT and SLBoutique’s offerings and delivery systems are different, but when you claim “first ever” it should really be the first ever. In this particular situation, the issues get resolved in the comments. I don’t think that people claim their superlatives maliciously and most of the time they are just mistakes in judgement or a failure in doing proper research.

The earliest of Second Life residents and Linden Lab employees joined Second Life in late 2002. Second Life has exploded exponentially over the past year or so and the population has grown to 8.5 million from 500,000 since August 2006. It is important for the newcomers to be aware of the fact that some of Second Life’s eldest residents have been here for almost five full years now. I am sure that there are a few firsts left that have yet to be done, but I cannot stress enough the value of research in terms of big picture thinking, growth and sustainability.