Omega Point

Northern Voice 2007: Day 1 — MooseCamp

So I’m at North­ern Voice this week­end! Friday’s agenda is Moose­Camp: the “uncon­fer­ence”. This morn­ing, peo­ple seemed inter­ested in a ses­sion about Sec­ond Life, so I signed up to run one after lunch. Now even more blog­gers know about Gore­ans, fur­ries and lag. Mis­sion accom­plished.
Today’s high­lights included:

1. Real­iz­ing that it’s at the main Point Grey cam­pus of UBC, not Rob­son Square this year… about 10 min­utes before I left.
2. This guy. Jeremy David runs “Choose my Adven­ture”, a blog where his read­ers get to tell him what to do. His poll asks, “Should I wear my Dragon Cos­tume at the Blog­ging Con­fer­ence?” The answer was clearly yes.
3. Meet­ing more peo­ple who had never used SL but who had heard of it than I ever had before in my life. There wasn’t any “so, it’s like Active Worlds/The Palace/The Sims, right?” And nobody seemed to be aware of it because “you can make money in Sec­ond Life”, they seemed to have heard about it because it’s an online com­mu­nity where you can do any­thing you want. That was… novel.

Tomor­row I’ll be doing a more for­mal talk on vir­tual worlds and com­mu­ni­ties along with Jeff Hen­shaw, exec­u­tive pro­ducer for Xbox Dig­i­tal Enter­tain­ment. I’m going to make it all up.