Pants On Fire

Live video feed in Second Life from the BlogHer '08 Conference in San Francisco. By the second day, the feed from the conference was much better and the closing session was only interrupted once. They promise to do even better next year

"But you promised, you say. You swore you were moving all this icky Second Life crap to another blog and we wouldn't have to see it anymore!"

Calm down, calm down - this isn't about SL (well, it is; but in for a penny, in for a pound). This is a report on the conference I attended which just happened to have herniated into SL. It was the BlogHer '08 conference for women bloggers. I have a blog (okay, I lie again, I've got about five ... or so ... I've lost track), I'm a woman (or perhaps I just play one in SL), SL attendance was FREE (and we know how I love that word) and I thought "what the hey!"

Panelists for the Blogging SL session and some of the attendees (note wheelchair accessibility).

In the beginning, we had some technical problems. The feed from the live conference ("live"? what's that?) in San Francisco kept cutting in and out. After the intro and keynote came the break-out sessions and there were some specially devised for SL. Over the course of two days I attended the Blogging and Second Life, Second Life and Security, and Using Second Life for Good (not Evil) sessions. Just like any other session in Real Life (tm) there is a panel that discusses their experiences and then the attendees were allowed to make comments and ask questions. In most cases, the panel operated in voice chat (except when their transmission was icky and then they did text chat). To keep things reasonably organized, the attendees used text chat. In one of the sessions, someone transcribed the voice chat for the technologically impaired. I wish someone had done that at one of the Info Island conferences when I didn't have voice chat when I was unable to hear anything. I was working directing people to the correct sessions and had hoped to be able to attend sessions, but that was verklapft. Now my system can handle voice chat. Whee!

While Lludmila is all dressed up and professional-looking, her typist is in sweatpants, unwashed hair, and probably picking her nose.

While at the conference, I mini-blogged the experience on Twitter, annoying all the people who follow my tweets, no doubt. I noticed Lexi did this all the time and it annoyed me until I saw how useful it was. Yes, I could take notes and I could probably share them, but I was able to share bites immediately with my "posse" and get comments back from some of them, one who had already tried an internet tool I mentioned in a tweet.

This is a wonderful tool that our State Library should employ so that more librarians can attend conferences and workshops. There is no driving time or distance involved, a much smaller carbon footprint, no parking, no overnight stays, no per diem. Of course it is always better to be there live, but this not only saves time and money, it's just dead cool.

I will add more info on the conference on my SL blog so that those who are interested (ha!) can read it there and the rest of y'all are off the hook.