metaversed

Metaversed.com's First Friday Tech Expo is today! Don't forget to set your alarms and join us on Metaversed Island for Second Life's monthly uber-geek-fest... More details on Tynan's earlier writeup, but suffice to say, it's going to be a record breaking Second Life technology meet this month, with a decidedly streamed theme to it.

And speaking of streams, this will be the first event Metaversed produces with our new video partners, SLCN.tv, so if you can't make it, check out their archives, or YouTube channel or just wait for us to post it here after the live gig.

For more info, press details and help, contact Tynan Clary inworld, or email her real life persona Susan Reynolds at susan@metaversed.com

See you there!

With the news that Sun's Project Darkstar officially goes open source today (i believe you've been able to download and play for a while now) it occured to me that we should setup project metaversed. All we need, is a kindly benefactor to sponsor a server or two + bandwidth etc and we could work at installing darkstar, maybe Multiverse and Croquet and Ogoglio and start having some fun... erm, i mean.. evaluating these platforms live, in the open, for all to come see and experience.

Sound like fun?

Good. find us a couple of spare servers please....

My apologies for the downtime today everyone. We had a scheduled OS upgrade on the server and it borked the entire site for a couple of hours. It appears all is well again however, so consider normal service to be resumed :)

The Metaversed Friday Geek Meet today is set to be an absolute cracker. It's gadget time! and we've put together an awesome line up of Second Life's best gadgeteers, toolmakers and technologists for you at Dr. Dobb's island today at 12pm SLT/PST. The last time we did one of these the SIM was maxed out within 5mins, so please get there early!

Metaversed Geek Meets are co sponsored by Dr Dobb's Journal and InformationWeek.

Who?

Giff Constable, aka Forseti Svarog will be talking about the Electric Sheep Company's makeover of SLBoutique and it's transformation to Shop Onrez. Giff will speak on some of the issues involved in the overhaul and their plans for the inworld/web shopping platform and future integration of Sheep Search.

Anjin Meili will be demonstrating a very cool new technology that spiders an entire island to produce a 3D sculpties map of the terrain and structures. The end result is perfect for telehubs, and makes for a great visual demo of sculpties technology.

Robbie Kiarma will unveil MetaMart 4 and talk about the new featureset, and the teams plans for Second Life's popular Shopping Search HUD.

Fox Diller of Crystal Studio speaks on the logistics of creating large infrastucture services with Second Life.

When and Where?

Today's Metaversed Geek Meet will be hosted at Dr Dobb's Island [Teleport URL] at 12pm SLT/PST, 8pm GMT Friday 20th July. Here's the official event listing. The event lasts for around an hour and a half.

Important: These events get maxed out very, very quickly, and there is no 'access list', it's first come first seated! If you want to attend, you'd do well to arrive a half hour early if possible.

How?

The best way to get notified/reminded and to also keep abreast of upcoming events is to join the Metaversed group in Second Life. Simply go the Search, hit the Groups tab, key in Metaversed and pick the Metaversed.com group and click join.

You can also get notified via my Twitter page or IM 57 Miles inworld for a teleport at the time.

Need Help?

If you're new to Second Life, or need help with any of this stuff, or just need more information you can comment in this post, email nick@metaversed.com or IM 57 Miles in Second Life.

Press and Bloggers

If you're a member of the press/blog community and need additional information, help, interviews with panelists or anything at all to help you get the info you need, just email nick@metaversed.com and I'll do my best to make it happen.

See you all there!

This Friday, I will be moderating a panel discussion in Second Life (as my alter-ego Beyers Sellers). The goal of the panel is to allow the panelists to describe the current state of the markets, and what they would like and expect to see in the future (particularly regarding regulatory and non-regulatory ways to strengthen investor confidence).

Panelists

The following panelists have kindly agreed to take part in the discussion.

• Maelstrom Baphomet, COO of AVIX (or Investor Allen, CEO of AVIX)
• LukeConnell Vandeverre/Sinatra , CEO of WSE
• Arbitrage Wise, CEO of SL Capital Exchange (a proposed exchange)
• Mystik Boucher, CEO of Mystik Designs, listed on WSE
• TraderJohn Susa, Chairman of SL Exchange Commission
• OliveEue Sholokhov, CEO, SL Business Bureau
• Me, Beyers Sellers, Cornell University Professor (moderator)

Details

This will be a Metaversed Geek Meet
Co-sponsored by Dr. Dobbs Journal, Information Week and Cornell University

Dr Dobbs Island, Noon SLT, Friday, July 13th.

If you have questions, please feel free to IM me, or send email to rjb9@cornell.edu. Keep in mind that the panel is not the venue to name names of people you believe are untrustworthy, nor to ask why you lost 3000 Lindens in ABC Company on May 12th, etc. Instead, this is a forward-looking discussion about what could be done better in the future, and what progress will require from exchanges, possible regulatory bodies inside and outside Second Life, and whether/should Linden Lab take any active role.

I hope to see you there!

Rob

Note to Press and Bloggers

These meetings get packed out really fast. If you're interested in attending and are a member of the press or blogging community please IM 57 Miles, or email nick@metaversed.com and I'll do everything I can to make sure you get in, and help arrange interview opportunities and provide any other information you might need. ~Nick

In addition to our regular Metaversed Geek Meets on Friday's, co sponsored with Dr. Dobb's Journal and InformationWeek, we'll be starting a new weekly spot today at 5pm SLT/PST, 1am GMT that will be voice enabled! That's right, geek speaks!

There are no plans to add formal speakers to the Tuesday voice meets, they're simply a fun, informal gathering of friends that like to talk about business and technology in virtual worlds. Discussions are led by InformationWeek's Mitch Wagner and myself, and cover a broad range of topics.

If you've never been to one of these, or are very new in Second Life and need a hand, IM 57 Miles (that's me..) in Second Life, or email nick@metaversed.com and I'll help you out. Metaversed meets are very newbie friendly, and everyone that attends welcomes newcomers to the group.

Where and When

Today's meet is at 5pm SLT/PST, 1am GMT at Rissa Maidstone's place [SLUrl].

The best way to make sure you make it though, would be to join the Metaversed group in Second Life. Just go to the Search, then the groups tab and key in Metaversed to find and join. I'll send out a notice later in the day.

Just holler if you need a hand!

At the first Metaversed Geek Meet co sponsored by our friends over at CMP Media's Dr Dobb's Journal and Information Week, Second Life bloggers, press and alpha geeks met to hear Mysical Cookie, Vincent Shore and Alidar Moxie talk about the cool gadgets they're famous for building in the virtual world. Fortunately for those of you that couldn't make it, (we were maxed out at 52 people) Veejay Burns summarizes the session, and also kindly provided the transcripts you can find linked below.

Transcripts

• Prechat
• Vincent Shore, Squawk
• Alidar Moxie, Mechanized Life
• Mystical Cookie, MystiTool

Coverage

A few folks blogged about the event before and after, here's a few of the links:

• Meeting The Best Gadget-Makers In Second Life At Geek Meet - Mitch Wagner's pre Post
• What now? Vincent Shore on the future of Squawk
• Cat Jericho got some good pics
• Geek Meet Gadgeteers - Veejay sums up the highlights
• Geek Meet: Gadget Makers Edition - Akela Talamasca hoping if he ignores Metaversed, we'll go away...

It was a great meet last week, thanks to all those that came! If you want to keep up with Metaversed events, subscribe to the site rss or join the Metaversed group in Second Life.

Alidar Moxie of Mechanized Life, makers of the popular Calendar Cogs Google API integration app for Second Life as welll as the new StatsCollector RSS app, and Vincent Shore, creator of Squawk, the Second Life Twitter / Jaiku presence and bookmarking app, will be joining Mystical Cookie, creator of the MystiTool, who we confirmed earlier at this week's Friday Geek Meet. Our regular Friday tech forum in Second Life is co-sponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal, InformationWeek and of course Metaversed, and has quickly become the virtual worlds top regular technology and business networking event, where bloggers, journalists, new media types and tech heads of all kinds come to talk about the business and technology of virtual worlds.

When and Where

Mark your calenders for this Today at 1pm SLT/PST, 9pm GMT, 10pm CET - You can find the event listing here, though the landmark will be altered slightly a little later today -- the Meets are Held on Dr. Dobb's island in Second Life.

We're very pleased to announce that Mystical Cookie, creator of one of Second Life's best known, and most loved multi gadgets, the Mystitool, will be speaking at our regular Friday Geek Meet in Second Life this week! The Geek Meets, co-hosted and sponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal and InformationWeek are where bloggers, journalists, technologists, futurists and other 'ists gather to talk about business and technology, network, and generally geek out for an hour or so each week. If you've not been to one before, they're very friendly, informal gatherings that welcome newcomers -- If you need help, just IM 57 Miles in Second Life.

Mystical Cookie's Mystitool has been on my list of absolutely essential Second Life tools for a long time now. It's a kind of Swiss Army Knife knife for the virtual world and is also a Metabrand success story, despite the fact that Mysti never set out to achieve that. Her addition to the line up this Friday is fantastic, and I can't wait!

When and Where

I'll be announcing more speakers later in the day, but for now, mark your calenders for this Friday at 1pm SLT/PST, 9pm GMT, 10pm CET - You can find the event listing here, though the landmark will be altered slightly a little later today -- the Meets are Held on Dr. Dobb's island in Second Life.

More confirmations and announcements to follow.

See you there!

Metaversed.com's regular Geek Meets have been growing and growing of late. What started as a loose weekly get together of bloggers, journalists and new media types to discuss business and technology in the Metaverse, has become a jam packed weekly hub of information and discussion that regularly maxes out the SIM. With the aim of making our meets even better, and bringing you even more discussion and networking opportunities, we've partnered with our friends over at CMP Media, publishers of Dr. Dobb's Journal and Information Week who will now be co-sponsoring, and providing technical and logistical support for the group.

Many of you will know Mitch Wagner, who regularly blogs about Second Life on InformationWeek, and is also a prolific Twitter'er. Mitch and I have been discussing business and technology issues in the virtual world for some months now, and it was through him that I was introduced to John Jainschigg of Dr. Dobb's and Rissa Maidstone, who put together the recent Life 2.0 inworld event. The addition of these guys to the Geek Meet team will not only give us a dedicated space to host the events, but also give us text bridge capability, voice, and raise the profile of our discussions even further.

We'll be announcing the speakers for this Friday's meet later in the day, and you'll be able to stay abreast of upcoming schedules by joining the Metaversed group inworld, following the site here, by subscribing to our RSS Feed or joining the InformationWeek group inworld.

Late on Friday evening, late if you happen to live in Europe, forty of Second Life's more notable bloggers, journalists and technologists gathered to discuss the future of the 3D web at Metaversed.com's regular Friday Geek Meet in Second Life. The event, which featured presentations from Amazon's Jeff Barr, Cisco System's Christian Renaud and Ogoglio's Trevor Smith, was held on what Second Life celebrity protagonist Prokofy Neva described as Metaversed's Techno Pagan Island, and it was quite the debate...

Transcripts Available

Veejay Burns covers the event minutes after it closes here, and also, kindly took transcripts once again. I've uploaded them to Google Docs. You can find them listed below. As with all of these events, my monitoring of the discussion at the actual time is hampered by IM's and generally making things work, so it's very useful to be able to go back over the logs. Thanks Veejay!

• Geek Meet Pre Chat
• Cisco System's Christian Renaud
• Amazon Web Services' Jeff Barr
• Ogoglio's Trevor Smith

The conversation didn't end after the meet. Two hours later there were still a handful of people there discussing all manner of things. And Prokofy even gave metaversed a massive techno-buddha sculpty to install on the land. It looks very cool just off the meeting area!

Coverage

A few of the folks present picked up on the meet and blogged it.

• Quick Comment about Virtual Worlds
• Tonights Geek Meet Wrap up
• Pres. of MacArthur Foundation on Philanthropy in Second Life and Reviews from TED Global 2007
• The Future of Polydimensional Thinking
• Metaversed meetup: Cisco’s Christian Renaud
• Be a Lover, Not a Typist

Thanks to guests and speakers for helping to spread the word of our fun get togethers! If you want to learn more about our Geek Meets, follow this link or email nick@metaversed.com

See you at the next one!

Just a reminder that later on today at 3pm SLT/PST, 11pm GMT, our regular Friday Geek Meet in Second Life will kick off on the grand, wide ranging topic of The Future of the 3D Web! The group is friendly, fun, new comer friendly, and will feature discussions led by some of the leading voices in this space.

Who's Speaking?

This weeks Metaversed Geek Meet will feature three very good friends of the Metaversed group:

• Cisco Systems' Christian Renaud, who recently set this topic afire with his blog post Look into the ball and tell me what you see.
• Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr who'll be talking about Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud Service and how it might be used to scale virtual worlds, and virtual worlds' services and events
• Ogoglio's Trevor Smith, who will talk about Open Source's role in the future of the 3D web. Trevor is a tireless evangelist for open source 3D applications, and also a fan of the Amazon EC2 Service I believe.

Where and When Is It?

The Geek Meets are held on Metaversed's plot within Second Mirage [SLurl - Teleport here] and today's meet will be at 3pm SLT/PST, 11pm GMT, but you can also find us under the places and event Search, or just join the Metaversed inworld group and I will IM the location a little before we start.

Be There Early!

If you want to ensure a spot, then get there early. It's first come, first served, and we will max out at around 40 people. We will try to get transcripts to the web of course, but it's more fun if you're actually there!

On the Web!

Though it could all go south in a hurry as it's a major bandwidth hog for me, but I will be broadcasting the event live on uStream, at uStream/channel/nickwilson from 3pm SLT. If it proves to cumbersome though, it will be the first thing to go. With a bit of luck, and web2.0 jiggery pokery i should be able to zoom in on the chat as well as pan around the guests and speakers.

On Twitter

You'll also be able to follow some commentary if you subscribe to my Twitter page, where when time permits i'll be sharing what's going on with SL friends and anyone ffollowing me there.

Need Help?

Press, bloggers, and anyone that needs me can IM me at 57 Miles in Second Life, or post a comment here. I'll be inworld from 1pm SLT!

See you there!

On Friday at 3pm PST, Jeff Barr, Amazon's web services evangelist, will join Cisco's Christian Renaud and Ogoglio's Trevor Smith to talk about the future of the 3D web. In particular, Jeff will speak about how Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud can be used in the context of scaling virtual worlds and virtual worlds services.

If you want to attend this Friday's meet, be there early. It'll be maxed out pretty fast! See you there.....

Press should email nick@metaversed.com

At our regular Friday Geek Meet this week, the theme of which will be "the future of the 3D web", Trevor Smith of Ogoglio will talk about the role of Open Source in the future Metaverse. Trevor joins Christian Renaud from Cisco Systems to address 3D tech heads, press and bloggers at the Metaversed meet.

If you've not meet trevor, or are unfamiliar with Ogoglio, I suggest you check it out. He has ambitions to be the "apache web server of the 3D internet" and has, as you might imagine, a lot to say on where this is all going.

At this Friday's regular Geek Meet in Second Life, Cisco Sytems' Christian Renaud will speak to assembled bloggers, journalists, futurists and tech heads on the future of the 3D web. Christian recently wrote about his vision of the future, which we discussed at length here, and I was fortunate enough to spend an hour or so talking to him about the subject on Monday this week. It's going to be an awesome discussion!

The Geek Meet this Friday will be at 3PM SLT / PST and is a MUST for anyone interested in the 3D web!

You may have noticed it's been a little quiet here today. That's because we've been working hard at getting a new design in place, and working on some things that some of you would probably consider fundamental for a community site like Metaversed. Things like a privacy policy,community guidelines and even an about page! You know, the boring pages...

57 and Onder Become Nick and Caleb

Caleb and I have been talking about moving to our real names on the site for some time. It seems short sighted to use Second Life avatar names on a virtual worlds news site. Though there is a downside to diluting two fairly strong brands, I think it feels right. And that's good enough reason to do it.

You can see Caleb's profile here and my updated profile here if you're interested in our backgrounds, and find out more about Metaversed authors, including how to become one.

Not Done Yet

This was never going to happen unless i just put other things aside and got on with it, but it's nearly done. Im aware that the logo sucks like no logo has ever sucked before it, but im graphically challenged and am waiting on a friend to help me, and im still working on the 'blocks' you see on the left and right colums as well as a dozen other things. But if you do see problems, or just want to express an opinion on anything, feel free to drop a comment, I'd welcome the feedback.

Thanks everyone.

Last Friday, the Metaversed Geek Meet maxed out the Second Mirage SIM in Second Life as over 40 Metaversal tech heads, and new media web Jedi converged to talk tech with folks from IBM, Intel and SUN. Friday's meet was the first time we've intoduced a little structure to our regular sessions, and judging from the reactions and IM's I've been getting over the last few days I think we can safely judge it as a success!

For a good overview of the whole event, see Ian Hughes from IBM's post where he says "For me it was also good to be in a room with some people who do know what this is all about, very often I am evangelizing to people who are coming to the concepts with some confusion or fear. Having a group of 40-50 experts together really sparked my thinking on some more issues." and Aleister Kronos's writeup where he says "This was a well-attended meeting with the sim full. Get there early if you want to attend the next one!" and lastly Veejay Burns' post. Veejay says "Friday's the night of the weekly Geek Meet at the home of Metaversed's 57. This weeks turned out to be übergeekmeet."

Transcripts

Veejay kindly grabbed transcripts of each presentation, and I've put them up on Google Docs for any that want them. You can find them linked on this page.

Thanks to the Speakers!

Many thanks to Epredator Potato, Core Stine and Klaatu Niu of IBM, Intel and SUN respectively, it was a great session!

Future Sessions

Have ideas for who you'd like to see speak at a geek meet? Have something to say, or a tool/gadget/idea to present? Do get in touch! IM 57 Miles in Second Life, or email nick@metaversed.com to talk to me about it!

IBM's Ian Hughes, one of the companies Metaverse Evangelists, known inworld as Epredator Potato, working with the Innovate Quick division has confirmed that he'll be joining Sun's Klaatu Niu, aka Brian Foley and Intel's Parviz Peiravi at Metaversed's weekly "Geek Meet". The Geek Meet is a loose gathering of web and tech heads interested in business within virtual worlds, web tech and in particular Second Life. You can find out more from our earlier announcement.

The Meet starts at 1pm SLT/PST, 9pm GMT Friday and will last about an hour and a half. If you want to hang out with a fun bunch of new media geeks, bloggers and tech geeks then you'll be most welcome to join us!

The Metaversed Geek Meet, which has become an awesome weekly social and networking event for Second Life tech heads, new media geeks and bloggers will for the first time, feature a little structure this week! The group has been getting so large, that a number of members have asked that we at least loosely organize it. We've invited SUN and Intel, who're both prominent real life tech firms operating in the virtual world to give short talks on their grid/networking efforts at the meet, as well as invite Cadroe Murphy, inventor of the ShapeGen tool used by many SL builders to demonstrate his newest gadget.

Intel's Parviz Peiravi, and Sun's Brian Foley will give short, 5min talks on their topics followed by Q&A from Metaversed members. We've deliberately kept the formal part of this short as I'm keen to not loose the "loose gathering of friends" feel we've managed to maintain at these weekly events.

When and Where

The Geek Meet will start at 1pm SLT, 9pm GMT, 10pm CET on Friday 15th and last for about an hour or so at Metaversed's Business & Technology site [SLUrl]

Show and Tell

Have something you'd like to present to the group? IM 57 Miles in Second Life, or hit me on SkypeNickWilson to arrange

See you all there!

Though we barely have seats set out on the new Metaversed land, do join us for the Metaversed Friday Geek Meet today!

The Metaversed Geek Meet is a weekly networking event where we discuss the weeks business and technology news, make new friends swap blog and twitter urls and more. Join us today at 11am SLT/PST at the this landmark!

Dont miss this one, it's also a house warming for my new home - im still building, but hey, we have seats!