Sometimes the bleeding edge gets a little bloody. Such was the case last night with Accelerating Change’s monthly virtual conference held inside Second Life, a commercially-run virtual world. This Future Salon meeting was only the second in what will be a continuing series, and as such it’s setting some precedents… at least within the Second Life simulation. For this meeting, two new services were being introduced/ tested/ attempted: VoIP within the Second Life world, and streaming video to the web from within the simulation.

Unfortunately there were problems and the event went into the kind of chaotic spiral one might expect with so many twitchy-finger avatars in one place. Due to those difficulties the first speaker, Clark Aldrich, was unable to properly present as the delays cut into his time (hopefully he’ll be back). It did finally get back on track in time for Dr. Julian Lombardi to give a pseudo-talk/Q&A on Croquet, the open-source cyberspace project (I owe that to both the circumstances and to people not doing their homework before asking questions easily answered by a quick review of the project website). However, Betsy Book finished off the event with a brief but interesting talk on virtual brands. I’ve been planning on writing a piece on the subject so the additional information was of particular interest (and I believe her talk will be available online in the near future).

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.