3pointD.com

It’s conference season, and 3pointD is hitting the road to flap our gums (or mine, anyway, if I could get out of the third person) at a handful of cool upcoming events. First up is the ScreenBurn festival at South by Southwest Interactive. I did a presentation at ScreenBurn last year, along with Peter Ludlow, on our brilliant work over at the Second Life Herald. At that point, ScreenBurn, which covers the gaming industry, was crammed into one corner of a huge empty hall with a few dozen chairs set around a makeshift podium. This year it graduates to the big leagues, taking place upstairs alongside SXSWi. On March 12 I’ll be running a panel on Gamer’s Games: Microcontent and User Creation, which should hopefully cover everything from making skirts in There.com and Second Life on up to building worlds in Multiverse and Areae. Chatting with me will be There’s Betsy Book, Reuben Steiger of virtual world services firm Millions of Us, Multiverse’s Corey Bridges, and Raph Koster, who by then will be able to give more details on just what his new shop, Areae, is working on. This should be a really fun panel, as pretty much all of us know each other already, so I’m hoping for something more chatty and interactive than the usual fare.

Then it’s back to New York for the first-ever Virtual Worlds 2007 conference, which is being put on by the people who used to run the Austin Games Conference. There (at VW07) I’ll be on a panel on March 29 about the future of virtual worlds — which is nice, since that’s what I’m always thinking about. I really like the schedule for this conference, as it doesn’t repeat the usual generalities much but rather goes for some more specific subjects that should result in some really interesting conversations.

After that it’s getting into April and PodCamp NYC on the 6th and 7th, which I’m really excited about. I always read about podcasting meetups and conferences and they sound like so much fun. Podcasters in general are an enthusiastic bunch, I find. Adam Broitman, Joseph Jaffe, Greg Verdino and myself will be talking about “social media convergence” at an informal roundtable at the conference — which is an unconference anyway. I will be there, of course, representing SecondCast, which recently passed its 50th episode. I’m totally looking forward to this.

Where I won’t be is at GDC (March 5-9), or at ETech (March 26-29). I’d love to be at both, but I can’t really rationalize the expense. I may or may not be at SuperNova on June 20-27 (last year’s was a lot of fun), but I’m not sure yet. And though I’d like to be there, I will probably miss the Indie MMO Game Developers Conference on April 14-15, but only because it’s in Minneapolis and again, I’m trying to cut down on conference expenses.

Any others I should know about? And by the way, if you’re going to be in any of these places and would like to meet up, drop me a line.