Second Life Community Convention Review

The conference was definitely a valuable experience. Tools, techniques, and mixed realities were shared and blended. We were able to meet the people, and organizations we work with virtually, and quickly share, and generate knowledge. Since Second Life is such a visual world it makes sense to see how we can visualize those relationships between sims. That will be a goal of ours at Rutgers over the next few months.

There is distinctly a gap between the issues we have now in Second Life and where Linden Labs plans Second Life to be a year from now. The new LL Media APIs will add much more interactivity from inside Second Life to the "outside" world. I can move from being able to Twitter from Second Life to being able to work collaboratively on Google Docs in Second, as one example showed from T Lindens presentation.



Lastly, two useful views of perceiving Second Life were formulated. One, Second Life is the 3D Social Browser that fits into any comprehensive social media marketing plan, and enables business and education to reach and interact with a dedicated population. A wonderful "synchronous immersive online environment." Where the results can be tracked, measured, and enhance return on investment can be shown. Second, as Beyers Sellers said about the FASB use of Second Life, they use it for their weekly meetings, and it's just a normal moment in the complex discussion of financial accounting standards.

--Rk Jinn (Rick Anderson)