Second Life Future Salon: Maturing the Salons: Increasing Blog/Salon Integration and Depth

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Last Thursday's Future Salon was streamed live in audio and video on www.secondlife.com (screenshot above taken just before the end...what the heck were we talking about? ;-). This was our third event and the first to "sell out" (we maxed out the number of simultaneous avatars we could have in our location, which I think was set at 50). Along the way I've gotten great feedback about what works well, what to drop, and how to navigate it all towards becoming a more valuable creative foresight resource.

Looking back at the topics we've covered so far, I see that we really are beginning to paint a big picture of the future of the internet, digital media, interactive simulation technologies, and their feedback with real world systems, with some incredible people having showed up on our stage and in our audience. General themes covered so far include (most of which can be found in the archive, more coming soon):

•User-created 3D spaces and prototyping as an accelerant for overall digital world innovation (Jim Purbrick)
•Philanthropic applications of virtual worlds and the challenges of extending real world organizations into public virtual spaces, with the American Cancer Society as an ongoing case study (Randal Moss)
•Educational simulations and interactive learning (Clark Aldrich)
•The post-browser internet as envisioned by the Croquet Project (Julian Lombardi)
•Creating and branding businesses in virtual worlds (Betsy Book)
•Reality video gaming and episodic interactive entertainment and advertising (Keith Halper)
•Video blogging and the first-person experience of DIY online video culture, (Amanda Congdon)
•Virtual world journalism, reporting on the highs and lows of online world formation (Peter Ludlow)

That's an exciting and valuable list of topics we've explored, with many, many connections between them. One of the greatest challenges in curating the salon events and blog is aiming the focus of it all, and in that light I've devised a new structure for this blog and how it will integrate with the salons. It's pretty simple, but well worth announcing, breaking down like this:

I'll line up each set of speakers as early in the month as possible, and for the rest of the month posts here will explore each of their general areas almost exclusively (so, for example, if we had a speaker who does 3D printing, you'd see a lot of posts in that area). This will turn salon presentations into culminations of month-long investigations, hopefully leaving behind very unique and useful public trails of posts, comments, audio, transcripts, and follow-ups, and creating more of an incentive to be active in the community.

Speakers for the July salon are just now being invited, and I will announce them here as soon as I can. From then on we'll explore their areas until the big show (AKA the salon itself). This should take the events and blog to the next level by adding more structure to the content and deepening the learning and creative discussions around our themes. If interested, consider joining our Yahoo! group to stay up on announcements and discussion.

Whether you just surfed in or have been following us since April, thanks for reading, and many thanks to those who've come out and/or presented at the first three events. Please let me know if you have further suggestions for improving the experience and the usefullness of the Second Life Future Salons. We are, like so much else, a work in progress :-) !!!

Second Life Future Salon

Exploring the metaverse with monthly meetings in Second Life

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Maturing the Salons: Increasing Blog/Salon Integration and Depth

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