My fellow bloggers will appreciate this problem: much to blog about, little time to blog. So it is that a compelling presentation by Stew Sutton of The Aerospace Corporation at the Knowledge Leadership Forum week before last has not gotten its due. As I've said before, one of the unnoticed benefits of being a speaker is hearing other speakers (viz. Robin Gerber), as I did at the Brookings Leadership Lab in September. Rarely does one (meaning this one) have the time but because the Knowledge Leadership Forum took place within quick driving distance, it was possible to hang out.
Stew was the person who really introduced me to Second Life, the online virtual world where people create digital versions of themselves (or of the beings they wish they were). I wrote a bit about IBM's guidelines for Second Life a few months back. In truth, I first learned about Second Life only 18 months ago from that serial tracker of new things digital, John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion. Like a couple of million other people, I logged in after talking to Stew. If you're there, you're unlikely to find me teleporting around but should you be curious, search for Pesha Linden. I chose the name Pesha for reasons known to my family and a few close friends; the name Linden was available on a list and I went right for it: my last name, original spelling Lipniak, means "linden tree" (or white wood, depending on whom you ask) in Ukrainian.
Of course, now that I have time to write this post, I can't find my notes from Stew's great presentation. He showed us all the cool things that his company, possibly the very first company to use Second Life, to support collaboration. Freed from the physics of our little planet, things fly and float and pulse and disappear in the Aerospace collaboratorium (they don't call it that but it deserves such a grand term). Astrophysicists can stand in the spray of rockets; they can invent new ways for rockets to spray. Very, very cool and apologies to Stew for the poor reportage (my early editors would be upset with me).
Here's the one fact I remember: you can have an avatar, meaning a digital version of yourself, made these days for $300. I mean something that looks like you. $300. Three bills for the virtual you.
