3pointD.com

Call me Mad Dog Winters. (I’ll explain in a sec.) The Mini Cooper, everyone’s favorite cute little British car, is teaming up with Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us to bring a cool-sounding promotion for the new Cooper S to the virtual world of Second Life. The thing I especially like about this project is that it offers a contest/game that’s played not just in SL, but on a handful of Web 2.0 sites as well, which, as regular readers know, is one of my favorite kinds of mashups.

It’s also amusingly retro. Check out the Hammer & Coop site to get a taste. Mini has commissioned half a dozen short episodes of an 80s-style action show (think Knight Rider) starring “Jim Turtledove” as hapless action hero Hammer and a Mini Cooper as his sidekick, Coop. I put the actor’s name in quotes because it’s the kind of thing generated by the Action Name Generator on the Hammer & Coop site. Walker Spaight, my avatar in Second Life, for instance, was dubbed Wildfire Seawolf. Me you can just call Mad Dog Winters.

But the coolest thing about the promotion — which I believe starts Thursday, February 22 — is that it combines Second Life with Web 2.0. The episodes will air in-world, and will apparently feature items from the films that are given out as 3D SL objects (which is cool in itself). I’m not sure exactly how the contest works, but in the first phase, users will apparently be given tasks that involve the objects from the first episode. Screenshots must then be uploaded to Flickr, tagged appropriately, and whoever’s judged the winner (or winners) receives some Mini swag — real Mini swag, I think, not just virtual. Later phases of the contest involve other social sites.

While this isn’t actually a mashup, of course, it’s a cool way to mix media. Instead of a mixed-reality event, Mini and Millions are mixing their platforms, getting their 2D in their 3D, and vice versa. This is not exactly the kind of crossover functionality I’d like to see from Second Life (and which we’re already beginning to see, to tell you the truth), but it does sound like fun, and it nicely illustrates how the virtual world can smoothly dovetail with the rest of what we used to call cyberspace, but which we now hardly give a second thought.