Recap: Real World Press in Virtual Worlds

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Last Monday, February 18th, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics convened a panel to discuss "Real World Press in Virtual Worlds. Our Guests included:

- Eric Krangel of Reuters Press
- John Jainschigg of CMP Metaverse
- Rhonda Lowry of Turner Broadcasting
- Prokofy Neva of SecondThoughts.

Broadcasting live on SLCN.tv from CMP Amphitheatre, this event discussed:

- How does a presence in Second Life fit into the corporate strategies of real world profit seeking media giants?
- What is the impact of real world media on the Second Life community?

This post also contains some highlights of the event, after the jump.

On how a presence in Second Life fits into the real-world media picture:

John Jainshigg:

Like many companies in Second Life, we look at this in part as a platform of potentials as much as we do a platform of actuals. It seems obvious to us--has seemed for a long while, that 3D immersive virtual reality of this kind of open buildable sort is going to be part of every computer user's experience and necessarily a part of every business's experience in coming years. We're unwilling to project at this point how soon the magic hockey stick inflection point will occur, but it does not seem to us as though [month-to-month linear] projections of 30,000 sims in Second Life would be, by end of 2008, would be out of whack with what we see happening in numbers now.

So we think of this as important. And the reason CMP, in particular, thinks this is important and the reason CMP's corporate parent, United Business Media London, thinks this is important is because, collectively, we are the largest producer of business technology events and other events in the world. UBM produces the largest single event in the world. For example, Japan Jewelry Expo, which gets 750,000 people across two weeks in Tokyo every year. We run NetWorld's Interop. We run Black Hat. We run Web 2.0. It seems to us that conferences are in the crosshairs, particularly in recessionary conditions, be-cause they're extraordinarily expensive. They're extraordinarily not green. They place enormous logistical and financial burdens on the organizations that want to hold them.

Eric Krangel:

Part of the reason I'm here personally is because I find Second Life absolutely fascinating. And I think no one anticipated, and it's not just my interest, but also Reuters' interest, is how complex of a creation Second Life has become. And when you sort of bring together all these metaphors of virtual geography, of a cur-rency, of land that you can build on or sell, I mean I think of some of the stories that I've been writing about for the past year, with intellectual property issues, with a recent story I wrote about ad farms, which brings in sort of zoning issues. Stories about Second Life's currency. This is far more complex than I think anyone realized.

But just to get back to what I was saying earlier about ROI, which is, Reuters had a start up cost. They had to build the is-land. They had to set up a presence. They had to put in the infrastructure within Reuters as a wire to sort of acknowledge Second Life and come into it. Except now, really, all of Reuters' expenses are what they pay me, the monthly fees on our island. So what we're talking about is that Reuters reaches out to the 1.2 million people who are in Second Life every 60 days. It is a tremendous amount of press that Reuters is getting. A lot of knowledge of people who are understanding what Reuters is, what Reuters does, who perhaps wouldn't otherwise have that. So really, I mean I think they're extending their brand in a way on a very little expenditure that I think perhaps other organi-zations might follow suit.

Rhonda Lawry:

It seemed natural to us that, in the Virtual World where people reside, have experiences and encounter these new technologies, that they would also have stories to tell and share with us in a way that was most effective. So we extended our CNN iReport presence from the Real World, if you will, into this virtual space late last year, and it's been a positive experience for us mostly. It's an opportunity for us to learn as a news organization specifically speaking with CNN. We are interested in under-standing how emerging technologies are impacting people's ability to communicate, to see stories from different angles, to understand different perspectives, if you will, an almost a 360 perspective. So the 3D environment's certainly part of that.

So the media equation's changing. It's changing rapidly. And rather than sit back and predict or, rather, try to influence with a big stick, you know, Time Warner's a rather large media organization, it's most effective and most important to us to learn. So this experiment for us in Second Life has been an opportunity to learn what are people doing, how are they doing it, what are they interested in and how can we translate that into our business.

Prokofy Neva, on why the role of the media in SL attracts so much controversy:

The reason why people have such fierce debates about the media around Virtual Worlds is because they don't agree what the story is or what the beat is. Basically, you have a world that's run by a government, let's say, to use a metaphor that only selectively tells you about itself. And it's filled with citizens, many of whom tell you nothing about their real selves. So you're faced with the problems that you would face in Real Life with a closed society, whether it was the old Soviet Union or whether it's North Korea or Iraq under the U.S. occupation or whatever. So the methods you use to cover closed societies differ, and people argue very fiercely about them. If you look at the tech press, the traditional press that's covered the internet and web developments, they usually have to get into a posture where they celebrate the technology and maintain very close contacts with the companies that make it because that's how they get their information because these are private compa-nies so they're not obliged always to give out information. So it's more about communications than it is about investigative reporting. So that sort of structure has been carried over onto Second Life so you get some reporters, tech media or even main-stream media covering it with sort of a celebratory or superficial take. Or they lurch to the opposite, like Valleywag, and they cover it with a very snarky kind of take because it doesn't fit with what they view as being the cutting edge technology.

The full transcript contains additional content, most notably, the guests' predictions about the 'big news stories of the coming months.