I just saw an interesting photo of myself in the Second Life version of Sun’s press conference announcing open source Java. Here’s the twist: I wasn’t at the conference. My comments were filmed by Sun in my hotel room at the Web 2.0 Conference a few days in advance, as I wasn’t going to be able to attend the actual event. So my question is this: which is more virtual? My video comments at the actual Sun conference, or Jonathan Schwartz’s avatar presentation in Second Life? In Second Life, even live participants were present only on the video screen, some on video and some with avatar. Some participants were time-shifted, and others were live. Meanwhile, I caught this image in someone’s flickr photo stream, and other people have since watched the press conference on YouTube or as an audio stream, in which case even the live participants were now merely disk representations.
You can have events that are virtual but live, and events that are live but virtual, and virtual events that have both canned and live content, and in this digital world, even live eventually becomes frozen in time.
