Man, it was great to be at BloggerCon this weekend. What, you didn’t know that I was attending BloggerCon in San Francisco?
It depends on how you define “attend.” Granted, I was not in San Francisco at the physical location, but I was floating around Second Life and decided to visit one of my favorite Avatars, Koz Farina (that’s his SL name – mine is Mitch Till). In RL (or Real Life), Koz is the CTO for Podcast.com and is based in England. In SL, he owns some pretty impressive property and he does a ton of experimenting with what you can (and can’t) do in Second Life.
One thing that Koz can do, is grab live feeds of Podcasts and broadcast them across his property in real-time through his jukebox. I’m not sure how he does it (Koz, feel free to comment below), but he managed to grab the live feed from BloggerCon and was broadcasting it in Second Life. I grabbed a seat, along with a handful of other Avatars, and listened. It was especially cool for two additional reasons:
1. Koz also has a large screen that he programmed to grab pictures from Flickr based on tags. While the audio was playing, you could see all of these stills from BloggerCon. Damn cool stuff.
2. The group of Avatars hanging out and listening were diverse and knowledgeable. As the discussions were unfolding at BloggerCon, us Second Life folks were able to hold our own conversations. Awesome.
I think we’re not even able to wrap our heads around how fascinating Second Life is and what the opportunity/potential is (and will be). One early prediction: environments like Second Life will become their own unique channel in the digital (or new) marketing mix.
As an aside, a tribute band to U2 also played the other day live in Second Life. You need to check out the slideshow of it here: U2 In Second Life – Virtual Tribute Band.
BloggerCon This Past Weekend
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Never another podcast episode or article 
This is really the way to integrate real life into Second Life. Can Second Life replace Webex as way to do conference calls/meetings?
“One thing that Koz can do, is grab live feeds of Podcasts and broadcast them across his property in real-time through his jukebox. ” I would guess he sets him parcel media url to the stream.
Seb – On some level, though the participants would have to be comfortable in that sort of env I think. Many people see it as a game space (specially people with no experience in those spaces).
see you at casecamp 🙂
Hi there! Just saw this! 😉
Max, you’re right – it’s a question of setting up a screen with the correct scripts inside and also setting the media url.
For audio, it’s similar – so I created a podcast listening post, which the owener of the object or land can ‘say’ the rss feed url to and then the object goes and reads the rss feed (using php on a webserver) then it will return the url of the latest episode in the podcast feed and set the land audio url automagically! 😉
so much more can be done with this technology – it’s not rocket science – but can be a bit fiddly to start with.
But like most things in life, each time you do something, it gets easier and cooler – and inspires more ideas for great iteratiion.
To visit the land I’m working on in SL – go to the Find : Places tab and look up ‘RSS platform’ 😉
I currently have the Across The Sound podcast playing on our Featured Podast area, where people can sit togther and listen and discuss the podcast there.
I have som ideas brewing where people will be able to send email and leave comment ‘in-world’ too.
Cheers!
Kosso – aka Koz Farina 😉