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The acronyms are flying this month, and I am too. First to the South by Southwest Interactive festival, where I’ll be running a panel in the Screenburn track on microcontent and user creation in online games and how that’s beginning to change the face of gaming. This should be fun, especially as it features Raph Koster, who’ll be able to talk a bit about Areae, the lovely Betsy Book of There.com, Corey Bridges of Multiverse, and Reuben Steiger of metaverse services company Millions of Us, who has been creating cool opportunities for user-generated content as part of corporate marketing schemes in the virtual world of Second Life.

Later in the month I’ll also be on a panel on the future of virtual worlds at the new Virtual Worlds 2007 conference here in New York. This is looking like a great conference, with panels that go beyond the usual fare and actually look closely at what’s happening in virtual worlds and where they might be going. There are four interesting keynote speakers lined up as well, including Matt Bostwick and Jeff Yapp from MTV (both of whom were featured in my Wired article on Virtual Laguna Beach, Steve Youngwood from Nickelodeon, and Colin Parris, VP of Digital Convergence at IBM. What I love about this roster is that it doesn’t include any world-builders. Instead, it features voices from the sectors that are going to drive virtual world development in future: media, entertainment and business. We need more conferences like this. See you there.