Next on Copper Robot our guest will be Linden Lab chief product officer Tom Hale. I’ll talk with Tom about Viewer 2.0, and Linden Lab’s plans for Second Life in the springtime and beyond. Join us!

WHEN: Wednesday, March 31, 6 pm Pacific/Second Life Time

WHERE: The lovely Copper Robot Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast afterward.

As chief product officer, Tom, known in Second Life as T Linden, drives product strategy for Linden Lab, reporting directly to CEO Mark Kingdon (M Linden).

Tom joined the company in September, 2008. Prior to joining Linden Lab, he worked 15 years in product development, marketing, and management, most recently serving as “entrepreneur-in-residence”" at Redpoint Ventures. Before that, he was vice president and general manager at Adobe Systems’ Knowledge Worker Business Unit, driving strategy for Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Connect, and Flash Media Server.

Tom is a Harvard man, but despite that disadvantage, he seems to have done well for himself in life. I myself went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, but I try not to be snobby about it.

We’re going to try something a little different this time: We’re using Twitter for backchannel discussion and questions during the event. Use the hashtag #CopBot. Also, we’ll continue using Second Life chat for comments and questions as well.

Chronic City is a novel about how the real world is becoming more unreal, like a virtual reality, so it’s appropriate that I interviewed its author, Jonathan Lethem, in the virtual-reality world of Second Life.

Lethem described Chronic City as a “very morbid and paranoiac social satire of contemporary life.” It’s set in a near-future Manhattan. “My characters are pretty silly. They’re bohemains and artists in a Manhattan that’s no longer welcoming to artistic types, and they’re dealing with a world that is kind of crumbling around the edges, suspiciously like a badly maintained virtual reality. They’re constantly wondering if they’re living in a simulation. Not only hasn’t anyone informed them, but no one has updated their software anytime recently.”

I interviewed Lethem on my podcast, Copper Robot, which is recorded with a live audience in Second Life. The picture above is Lethem in real life—whatever that is—and his Second Life avatar. The avatar was created by my friend Kim Smith, a.k.a. “Rissa Maidstone” in Second Life. She’s COO of World2Worlds, a consulting company that helps other companies doing business in virtual worlds.

Lethem’s avatar is based on Perkus Tooth, one of the two main characters of Chronic City.

Read the rest on Tor.com: “Novelist Jonathan Lethem Goes Virtual”

Next on Copper Robot, our guest will be Gina Trapani, author of the book The Complete Guide to Google Wave. We’ll talk to Gina about Google Wave, and the book, and its unusual publishing model.

But that’s not all we’ll talk about, because it’s not all Gina does. Gina wears a lot of hats. She is a project director at Expert Labs, an initiative to help policy makers use technology to take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens. There, Gina is leading development of ThinkTank, an open source crowdsourcing platform for the White House. ThinkTank started as a way to filter and capture useful information out of conversations Gina was having on Twitter, and it’s evolved beyond that.

Also, Gina is co-host of This Week In Google, with uber-podcaster Leo Laporte.

Previously, she was founding editor of Lifehacker.com.

I’ve known Gina a few years, she’s wicked smart and wicked nice. And busy too. Join us!

WHEN: Wednesday, March 17, 6 pm Pacific/Second Life Time

WHERE: The lovely Copper Robot Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast afterward.

This is short notice, I know, but at 1 pm Pacific time today I’ll be a guest of Smarter Technology, talking about the 2005 science-fiction novel Accelerando, by Charles Stross Accelerando details an effervescent and moving vision of the future in which human and machine intelligences join and compete in surprising ways to remake everything. We’ll talk about Stross’s vision of the near future and its implications for Internet policy, law, culture, and virtual worlds.

The host is my friend and former colleague John Jainschigg, of Ziff Davis Enterprise.

You can catch the event in Second Life or on the Web.

More info on the Smarter Technology Web site.