Categories: Articles

BloggerCon This Past Weekend

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.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.