Nature to charge for SL conference attendance

Nature are streaming the Science Online London conference live in Second Life, organised jointly with Mendeley and the Royal Institution.

Nothing unusual about that of course. What's interesting is that they are charging £10 (that's about (US)$16 or L$4100) to attend for the day.

Attendance will cost the princely sum of 10 GBP/15 USD to cover costs and will give virtual attendees access to the island for the whole day as well as an opportunity to ask the speakers questions – we will have a member of staff in the audience to get your questions to the speaker just like the RL attendees.

I'm sure this isn't a first but it'll be interesting to see how it works out in terms of uptake. The cost itself doesn't look to be too unreasonable.

The RL event is happening in London (UK) on August 22nd 2009. UK time will probably make this a tricky event to attend for some people.

Using SL to support events

I'm speaking at a JISC Services skills event in Oxford next week about how virtual worlds such as Second Life can be used to support events.

I plan to do the whole talk in-world, to give the RL audience a better feel for what is possible.

I'll be using in-world voice and will provide an in-world copy of my slides.  It would be great to have a SL audience as well, particularly if you are willing to offer your views on what is good and bad about virtual world events.  I'll allow plenty of time for some RL/SL cross-over discussion at the end.  (We'll probably use chat for the discussion part).

My talk will be on Thurs 25th Sept and will start at 15.30 (UK time - UTC+1) and run for about an hour.  I'll be in the Virtual Congress Centre on Eduserv Island.

Hope to see you there...