3pointD.com

If things are a bit slow around 3pointD on Wednesday, it’s because I’ll be on my way to San Francisco for the second annual Second Life Community Convention, which should prove to be a hoot, if last year’s event was any indication. This year’s will feature a number of announcements that could help spice things up, we hear (see below).

I’ll be chatting on a panel of journalists who cover virtual worlds, headed by New World Notes’s Wagner James Au, who’s probably been doing it longer than anyone. We’ll try to make a SecondCast out of the conference on Sunday, as well, despite the fact that Lordfly and I will be the only cast members in attendance, everyone else being kept away by work, money or gall-bladders. (Feel better, Torrid!)

It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the convention. Last year’s was more or less the first time a large number of SL residents had gotten together in the physical world, and you could almost see the bonds forming between people. At that time, the community of prominent content-creators was still small enough that I think bringing a lot of them together in one place probably made a tangible difference in the world, just in terms of more connections have been formed and existing connections having been made stronger. I wonder whether those numbers have grown considerably as the population has grown, or whether it’s still a similarly small number of people who are creating most of the content on the Grid.

There are, to be sure, a new crop of virtual-world services companies in attendance, and I can think of at least four (both large and small) that are planning various kinds of announcements at or around the time of the convention. There’s also a session of Linden Lab’s resident-feedback forum, SL Views, which will be discussing, among other things, the SL user interface and the directions it may be headed. (Don’t hold your breath for the kind of open API that would make SL more powerfully interoperable with the Web, we hear.) Other panel topics will include marketing in SL, building your business there, what makes communities work, a chat with Linden Lab’s chairman of the board Mitch Kapor (who also happened to found Lotus), sex (of course), and more. See you there.