London, Tuesday 23rd to Friday 26th October. 3pointD already has the press release, so I won’t bother reproducing the speaker list or even the programme; you can just as easily get them from the conference website.

The speaker list is a star-studded list of dozens of thought virtual world thought leaders. Ren Reynolds (no relation) will be there, and I might even finally get to meet Alice Taylor. As you’d expect, IBM are well represented. Colin Parris (IBM VP, Digital Convergence, which is where the 3D Internet work in IBM) is giving the keynote on Thursday (“Cross-world, cross-platform; how close are we to a multi-world integrated framework?”) and Ian is joining a panel later that morning (“Harnessing the power of virtual worlds for corporate collaboration”).

I’ll post about some other upcoming conferences soon. (Update: Ren recently posted a great list of relevant and interesting looking events at Terra Nova). Hope to see you at one of them.

I spoke at the Blogs and Social Media Forum yesterday.

The agenda had me slated to join Ben Edwards (publisher of Economist.com), Jem Stone (Executive Producer, BBC New Media and Technology), Adriana Lukas (Big Blog Company) and Myles Runham (General Manager, Europe, Ask.com) for the keynote panel.

Euan Semple, who chaired the event, kicked off the day by getting a feel for the audience by asking how many of the participants a.) read blogs, b.) write blogs, c.) use wikipedia and d.) have edited wikipedia. A surprising number of people said yes in all categories. Indeed, it seemed to me that the percentage of the attendees blogging was slightly higher than the percentage of the keynote panelists blogging publicly; Although Ben Edwards said he wants to start, the fact he doesn’t already have one surprises me enormously given his previous role as director of New Media Communications in IBM’s HQ at Armonk. Equally surprising is the fact that Myles Runham (who previously worked “…in BBC Corporate Strategy (focusing on new media)” also doesn’t seem to have a public blog either.

I think I was subconsciously quoting either Suw Charman or Euan himself when I said that a corporation is made not of employees, but of people.

After some case studies from the Economist and BUPA and a quick speed networking event, we were treated to an open space session facilitated by Lloyd Davis. Lloyd invited anyone who was interested in hosting a conversation to stand up, introduce themselves and share what they wanted to talk about. A dozen subjects were covered, including mobile applications of social media, moderation, spam and (of course) virtual worlds. Yes, the Ian and Roo show was there in full force, attracting a couple of tablefuls of people which opened up into a detailed Q&A and discussion about the virtual worlds.

[CC-licensed photo from Robin Hamman]

Great fun, and an unexpected chance to share in more detail with some very untested (and of course interesting) people.

Sadly we had to dash off during lunch to a meeting across town, so we missed the afternoon sessions. I hate leaving conferences early, and it was only because I was invited to join the conference (replacing another speaker who had dropped out) at the last minute that my afternoon was already full up. It meant we missed Lee Bryant (Headshift) and Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer) present, plus a couple of really interesting looking panels too. I am hoping we get the recordings of the afternoon sessions soon, so I can catch up with the end of a great conference.

Update: due to the frankly stunning level of spam it generates, I’ve disabled comments on this individual post. Email me if you have something you want to add.

I presented at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium yesterday. I wrote up my brief notes from the event, and there has already been an impressive amount of blogging about the conference.

If you missed the live stream on the day, I believe all the videos will be made available by Eduserv soon.

For now, here is my presentation.

It’s a brief introduction to the breadth and variety of virtual worlds (I cheekily included EVE Online in this list, even though it is of course an MMORPG rather than strictly a virtual world). I also cover what IBM and IBMers have been doing already, as well as a brief overview of what’s interesting in the world of education, both within IBM and in the wider world. Right at the end I included a teaser for what’s going on behind the firewall. The reasons for an internal metaverse are pretty obvious; while there will continue to be virtual world activities we’ll want to run in public, there are some situations in which IBMers would benefit from having a virtual world running on our own servers.

I learned a new word during the conference (always a sign of a good day). When discussing people being more ready to communicate online, often in the form of ranting and flaming in blogs and forums, I was introduced to the term ‘cyber-disinhibition‘. Daniel Goleman’s term describes how,

In order for this regulatory mechanism [of impulse inhibition] to operate well, we depend on real-time, ongoing feedback from the other person. The Internet has no means to allow such realtime feedback (other than rarely used two-way audio/video streams). That puts our inhibitory circuitry at a loss — there is no signal to monitor from the other person. This results in disinhibition: impulse unleashed.

It makes me wonder whether 3D virtual worlds, by bringing a palpable sense of presence, provide some of the real-world cues required to allow people to express themselves while helping prevent the negative effects of cyber-disinhibition. Certainly some of the research into interpersonal distance of avatars (see this study of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments for a review) have been pretty interesting, and may suggest that the spatial cues in virtual worlds are already good enough to bring out our real-world social norms.

Update: video of my presentation is available from Eduserv’s site