3pointD.com

I had a great time at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival, where I was on a panel on “the secret sex lives of computer games” and did a presentation about the Second Life Herald with Herald founder Peter Ludlow. (In fact, it was right after SXSW that I first posted some early thoughts about the 3pointD world on my old blog, and this one was launched two weeks later.) I very much want to make it back next year, preferably running a couple of panels of my own this time. The organizers are in the process of selecting panels and panelists, and what’s nice is that they’re letting the community have a say this year in a kind of Hot Panel or Not competition. You can dial over to the 2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker to vote for the 10 panel ideas you find most interesting. I’ve proposed two, which you can find if you go to the “gaming / virtual worlds” section of the pull-down menu there and just look down the list for “Mark Wallace.” They’re described after the jump, but here on the front page I’d just like to make my plea that you vote early and often — if you like the ideas, that is. Voting deadline is September 8.

Probably the cooler of the two panels I’ve proposed is tentatively titled Living the Metaverse: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Connectivity. The description:

As virtual worlds, online games and geospatial technologies increasingly converge, a new kind of connectivity is emerging, one that is changing the way we use the Web — and how we live our offline lives. A look at the changes taking place as metaverse technologies like Second Life, Google Earth, GPS and RFID give people new ways to interact with the physical world and connect with each other.

Worth your vote, right?

The second one is of more interest to those focused on virtual worlds as emerging business platforms. That one’s titled Building the 3D Web: Real Companies Discover Virtual Worlds.

With retail and media companies like American Apparel, Universal Records, Warner Brothers and Fox seeking a presence in virtual worlds, a new crop of 3D online services companies has sprung up, doing for the metaverse what designers have done on the Web for years. In this session, virtual world services executives, administrators and content creators share their secrets for winning business, getting the job done, and designing for the metaverse.

There’s actually still time to submit proposals, so if you have any ideas for panels you’d like to see and that you think I might be able to pull together, drop ‘em in the comments thread. See you there in any case.