As almost all of you know, it was the Science Online conference in London yesterday. For some reason, I thought it was in September until I saw Richard Grant sitting in the reception area at Nature. This is the type of thing that never happened to me before Baby Hap came along.
Anyway. I obviously hadn’t registered, but was aware that I could go along in Second Life. I was full of confidence about this, as I am one of those rare people for whom the whole Second Life thing has gone quite swimmingly. You can imagine my horror, when I spent the first few hours on Friday night trying to work out why our internet crashed every time I entered Second Life. After much googling and scrolling through JIRA pages, I came across this one suggesting that I disable Voice/Chat.
This worked!
I then fiddled about with my appearance. Going with an avatar that is something close to reality means that when you have put on weight and aged a bit you might feel a moral obligation to transfer these changes to your on-line persona.
Ms Pizzicato attended the conference on Saturday…
… while I listened to the talks and encouraged Hap to play with her new laptop.
It was good to be part of and follow the event in real-time, but if you have the discipline to put aside the “amount of time” in your own time, you would probably get more out of reading and contributing on the various blogs and friendfeed/twitter threads than I did on Second Life.
Here are some links:
the mind wobbles has excellent blog summaries of the talks
There is some discussion on friendfeed.
Apparently there is more on twitter, but I have trouble following conversations on twitter generally…
Nice to see you on Friday, Bronwen. And thanks for the pics at Flickr. They blew my tiny mind.
Thanks Richard. Simly.
Whatever the disadvs of attending talks in second life is, it is definitely cool!
Yes, great to get a flavour of the conference from the other side.
I missed the whole thing, but have to agree that SL is definitely cool. Well, apart from the griefers and porn…