Back to the Future Salon
by Alphaville Herald on 09/06/05 at 8:29 am
The line-up for the next SL Future Salon has been announced, and it features media empire builder Urizenus Sklar (semi-retired publisher of the Second Life Herald) and up and coming cyberlebrities Amanda Congdon, vlog anchor of Rocketboom, video blogger, and actress, and Keith Halper, CEO, Kuma Reality Games, makers of KumaWar. Date is June 30, but location is undetermined while security issues are being resolved. Regular readers will recall that His crankiness Mr. Sklar had some crabby words about the last Salon. Is it payback time?
Rumors of a romantic attachment between Ms. Congdon and Mr. Sklar, although entirely plausible, have been denied by spokespersons for both parties. But we have paparazzi following both of them anyway. Enquiring minds have the right to know!
Prokofy Neva
Jun 9th, 2005
Uri, now that you’re in with the Salonerati, could you PLEASE tell them to go to type inworld for the next salon and quit fooling around with all this sound stuff? It never works and even when it does work only some people can tune it in.
I’ve been a Crabby Appleton myself on the salon
http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/04/links_of_the_we_3.html#comments
but I’d be happy to provide a venue.
SNOOPYbrown Zamboni
Jun 11th, 2005
Psyched to have you, Uri. Welcome to the Everyonerati (a superset of the Salonerati)! You’ll find it to be one of the more free and open feted communities, somewhere between the Digerati and a genuine college degree in 2 weeks.
For real though, last month’s glitch in the Matrix aside (we were testing new and specially built VoIP conferencing software), the audio does work (download some recordings here) and is way more efficient than text for presentations. In our case Richard Bartle’s “Not Yet, you Fools!” applies less than Robin Linden’s “Sometimes I Hate Chat!”.
On Crabby Appleton-ness, here’s a paraphrase of a conversation I had just before the last Salon:
TT: Are you excited or nervous?
Me: Nervous! Trying to get this right.
TT: Well, you know what they say about pioneers.
Me: No. What do they say about pioneers?
TT: An arrow in the back.
Me: Ha
Thought that was cute.
komuso tokugawa
Jun 11th, 2005
I have to disagree. When the sound finally worked it was great…I could get up from the screen and walk around and still participate as a listener. The difference in communication bandwidth was also very noticable, going from text (with peanut gallery comments) to voice.
And how do you know exactly how many people can tune in?
Don’t be such a crabby luddite. (and I disgree with bartle’s contention that voice chat will kill games…right tool for the right job is the right mantra to have)
Urizenus
Jun 11th, 2005
I agree that it is important to try and incorporate voice into these meetings. For one thing, voice has long been important in social games (think of the in game radio stations and DJs for one, and think of the role that Skype and Ventrilo is playing with a number of second lifers). It would be odd for something called a future salon to shrink from using technologies that are widely if not universally used in the game because of technical glitches. Plus, I don’t feel like doing all that typing. I can talk MUCH faster than I type.
SNOOPYbrown Zamboni
Jun 11th, 2005
Komuso > “When the sound finally worked it was great…”
Uri > “I agree that it is important to try and incorporate voice into these meetings.”
Ah, these are the comments I was looking for earlier
Komuso > “And how do you know exactly how many people can tune in?”
No limit! That’s the great thing. You don’t even have to be in Second Life. The audio is a regular ol’ stream you can drop into your online music player, and you can pull up live video in a regular ol’ webpage. This also means people can access the audio and video from anywhere in Second Life if they tune their land to the audio stream or throw the Quicktime video up on a prim. And don’t forget that IT Conversations, currently the world’s most popular podcast network, is waiting for us to produce material for a regular Future Salon podcast series. Hopefully many tens of thousands of people will be listening to Second Life broadcasts before too long … COOL!
So we’re using Second Life as a platform to go beyond Second Life in a pretty exciting way (if I do say so myself): A hybrid futurist/creative community, radio station, and VR TV station
Still looking for regular contributors to the SLFS blog if anyone out there is interested. That will get beefed up to be like a Terra Nova, New World Notes, Clickable Culture, SL Herald, etc., but focused more on digital world innovation, entrepreneurship, forecasting, and connections with the real world.
In closing, my favorite Salon anecdote and observation so far (from the reBang blog):
“The highlight of the night, however, might have been when the video stream first aired as my mother called to say she saw the video; after which I stood up so she could see “me”. What some of us think nothing of, the majority of people in the real world find almost beyond comprehension. Not so long ago, this would have been called witchcraft.”
Prokofy Neva
Jun 12th, 2005
SNOOPY, I continue to find the voice idea intrusive — it’s been particularly intrusive because you fail to get it working each time, wasting half an hour of the meeting on it, so it becomes “about itself”. Your phrase “you don’t have to be in Second Life’ is very telling. SL is an immersive world. What you’re saying is “let me forcibly un-immerse it and hijack it to RL with some of my friends”. I may not be the only one who finds that presumptious. The voiceovers are not living and working in the world, but just imposing their voice. In that sense, I think the “Digital Cultures” meetings work better because everyone lives in the world and types so they are all “equal”. With the Salonerati, we are interacting with people not in the world. I’m all for having interaction between SL and RL but not at the expensive of keeping SL an immersive place for some, to keep it a place of equalization, where not just those with superior voice technology or RL credentials get to parachute in and voiceover, but which all are equal in their ability to type to get themselves heard.
You’re forgetting that in a meeting like this supposed to be the ne-plus-ultra of cutting edge groovay technology, you’ve actually introduced an ancient, old-world hierarchical priest-like set-up — the old Voice of God and Ancient of Days and His Chosen Prophets. Those of you with voiceover technology to speak in voice in the game get to prevail. Those of us then just coming to the meeting without the voice technology (because it’s not set up for standard use in the game — I’m not certain there’s even something I could plug in at my end to do this) then have to be passive listeners, reduced to the equivalent of catcalls in the back of the room with typing in chat. Just think about that!
As for arrows in the back, if you think pioneers have arrows in their backs, look at those who critique self-appointed pioneers, they have even more : )
Also could you post the URL to your Yahoo group? I lost the link. Thanks.