Second Life Convention Intro and Mitch Kapor

At the Second Life Convention, the presentation is about the convergence of Second Life and Real Life.

How people are reacting, interacting within their Second Life is affecting (in a positive way) the way the react in their Real Life. In the movies that are being shown, one person met another person in SL, fell in love, moved and married. One person became a Buddhist, built a full Buddhist temple in SecondLife for others to find relaxation – with a always-on sunset for people to have the relaxed set of mind. Pictured to the left is the founder, Philip Rosedale. 🙂

The keynote is by Mitch Kapor (on stage below) – his blog is here – who turns out to be an (early) investor in SL, and is speaking on the larger question and how disruptive technologies are changing the world, and might start small but tend to be huge influences on the world. When things come around, there is always a small group of early adopters. As technology improves, price drops, more value – there is the second wave of pragmatists who early on spot the value, and find ways to use it. Then, there’s the large block of the mainstream audience that come along, and then there are the laggards – the last to adopt.

Enthusiast, fan, supporter, evangelist – it is about the community, technology and how it is transformative. And, while SecondLife is “not ready for everyone,” as others note – it will be. It’s at the early adopters, the early stage – and we will see maturation growth and further change.

Hard to grasp what the long-term impact of SecondLife is going to be, though – in the short term, there is a chasm between the power users and the newbies, and it’s just not ready for primetime (and this will not change overnight). It will become mainstream, just not overnight… . But, you have things like the American Cancer Society opening an office in SecondLife, and you see that there is value because members in SL and ACS RL’ers wanted to do outreach within the community, and find ways to share information.

Updated with photos and captions …

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.