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As previously noted, I spent much of Friday and Saturday at the joint State of Play / Terra Nova symposium at the New York Law School. I’m always happy to spend a couple of days talking virtual worlds with a lot of smart people, and the symposium was no disappointment in that regard. Great panels were held on governance, methodologies of study, diversity, taxation and learning, but what was hardly touched on were the putative topics of the meeting: “How did we get here?” and “Where now?” As revealed below, however, there was much to be learned about both those topics at the symposium. (more…)

Bill Lichtenstein of Lichtenstein Creative Media sends news that his firm is bringing actress Mia Farrow to the virtual world of Second Life this Friday at 9am SL time (noon Eastern), to discuss the worsening situation in Darfur and Chad. The event is being put on in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and produced by in collaboration with Infinite Vision Media. It will also replicate in SL a photography exhibition which projected images of the Darfur crisis onto the walls of the holocaust museum (as pictured above), which is great if you live someplace in which visiting the museum is inconvenient or impossible. If you have a Second Life account, you can teleport directly.

We all need our rest. Some of us, though, catch our catnaps at more vulnerable times than others. For that reason, I’ve coined the term geeksleep, which hasn’t exactly caught on since I started using it in March, but still has enough breath left in its lungs to keep knocking at the door of global Internet meme-hood. What exactly is geeksleep? Well, as defined in Geeksleep #1, it’s the following:

Geeksleep: (noun) 1. the act of sleeping during a technology conference or while involved in any geek-like activity. 2. sleep performed by anyone who could be described as a geek. (verb) 1. to capture a geeksleeper on camera and post his/her picture to Flickr with the “geeksleep” tag.

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I had the honor yesterday of chatting with Reuben Steiger, CEO of virtual-world services company Millions of Us, for the first in a series of podcasts he plans to do from his car during his 15-minute drive to work each morning. (I’m calling this technique “roadcasting.”) We mostly covered the State of Play / Terra Nova symposium I’d been at, but Reuben also started a betting pool going as to how many registered users Second Life would garner by the end of the year. Free to enter, prize is US$500 in cold, hard, taxable cash. Give us a listen.

Rivers Run Red sends word of the second annual Avalon Film Festival they’re holding this week in the virtual world of Second Life, in association with 4 Talent and The Guardian. Through December 11th, you can watch 80 different short films — including dramas, documentaries, animated films and machinima — in what sounds like a very cool »venue«, an enormous Zeppelin airship, floating high above Avalon Island. There’s even a cute little festival guide, in PDF format, that you can download. A number of Second Life films will be on display (check the guide for scheduling), as well as short documentaries with cool-sounding names like Subverting the City (shown here). If it gives us a peek into something called the Office of Subversive Architecture, I’m all for it.