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.

Read James’s blog here: Second Life 2.0 Analysis: Epic Win for Userbase, Competition Killer… But Not Mass Market Game Changer (Yet)

Second Life has several barriers to mass adoption. Ease of use is only one of them, and it’s not even the biggest one.

The first barrier is that you have to register. That’s a barrier for all social media sites, but other social media sites have boiled the registration process down to e-mail address and password. In Second Life, registration is a lot more than that.

Read the rest at the Computerworld Tool Talk Blog: Second-day thoughts on the new Second Life viewer

You remember Second Life. It’s a virtual world, a three-dimensional environment like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto. But it’s not a game, it’s a simulation of a world. You can build virtual buildings and vehicles, create virtual clothes, play live music, role-play as a vampire or cowboy, and buy and sell virtual goods for real-world money. It’s the closest thing we have now to Star Trek’s holodeck.

Second Life drove a huge amount of hype in 2006-2007, with many tech journalists predicting it was the future of the Internet and would be bigger than the World Wide Web. Then, like a lot of hyped things, the Second Life bubble collapsed. Now, Second Life has a reputation as a failure.

That reputation is, quite simply, wrong. Second Life continues to keep a loyal user base, which has been growing, albeit in fits and starts, since it was out of the limelight. The service is now running 680,000 active users, defined as users who spend more than an hour in-world any given month, said Tom Hale, chief product officer for Linden Lab, in an interview in Second Life on Monday. That’s not competing with the Web, or even Facebook, but it’s respectable.

Second Life is also profitable, Hale said. The service is free to use, Linden Lab gets revenue from people who want to lease space on the company’s servers to host their own virtual islands and tracts of land.

Now, Linden Lab is looking to bring the service the mainstream appeal that eluded it. They want to make Second Life mainstream, starting by increasing active users by 40%, to 1 million, by the end of 2010. The dream over the long term: Linden Lab wants Second Life to be bigger than Facebook. Much bigger.

“We have a long way to go until we reach Facebook scale, but that’s a reasonable goal,” Hale said. “However, I’m not going to sign up for those numbers until we have ample evidence that the market is ready to see that kind of adoption.”

Read the rest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog: Second Life seeks mainstream adoption

Harper Beresford (left) and Rissa Maidstone

In the virtual world of Second Life, you can be anyone you want to be. A middle-aged fat man can be a saucy, sexy young woman. A woman can be a vampire or sentient cat. But these all turn out to be other facets of our own identities. In the words of Buckaroo Banzai: Wherever you go, there you are.

In Second Life, users—they’re called “Residents” in Second Life jargon—take a new name when they register, and an alternate identity to go with it, as a robot, furry, vampire, or sexy human of the opposite sex. One of the few ironclad rules of the service is that one Resident is forbidden from outing another’s real-life identity without their permission. Even the name describes an alternate existence: Second Life.

But longtime Residents know that identity is a sticky thing. Second Life and real-life identities have a tendency to merge over time, real personalities come through.

Kim Smith, who’s been in Second Life for about three years, is uncomfortable with the commonplace language of referring to events outside of Second Life as the “real world.” “By saying ‘real world,’ it makes everything here a fake, and it’s not. It’s an extension of self, it’s an enterprise application, it’s recreation for some people. It’s as real as the physical world,” she said.

Read the rest and listen to the entire podcast: Our Avatars, Ourselves

Next on Copper Robot, we’re talking with Jeff VanderMeer. His recent Booklife discusses how to maintain a creative career as a writer in the age of blogs, Facebook, podcasts and Twitter. He talks about the outer life of writers, include dealing with publishers, finding and working with agents, and getting publicity. And he talks about writers’ inner lives, including maintaining creativity and keeping a work-life balance. Jeff has been a publishing professional for 25 years, as a fiction writer, book reviewer, editor, publisher, publicist, teacher, and creative consultant.

WHEN: Wednesday, February 17, 6 pm Pacific/Second Life time. NEW DAY AND TIME

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

Jeff has quite an impressive list of credentials: Novels published in 15 languages, multiple award winner, and listed on multiple best-of-year lists. Booklife came out in the autumn, since then, he’s published Finch, a science fiction mystery about a detective in a city of sentient funguses, and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals.

Join us for a lively discussion, of interest to aspiring writers, professional writers looking to manage their careers, and people interested in learning about the lives of writers. Also, Jeff’s insights are useful to any entrepreneur looking to start and build a business — every business requires publicity, every business requires sales, every business requires balancing professional and personal needs, and that makes Jeff’s advice broadly applicable.

And we’ll talk about funguses and steampunk and other cool stuff.

While technology blogs nitpick the iPad over missing features and inadequate specs, they’re missing the point of the device, which is to create a tool that people love to use.

"From a techie point of view, one could say, oh, my gosh, it didn’t have this feature, it didn’t have that feature. And I think a lot of the blogosphere has gone along with that line of thinking. But I think [Apple] is after a different market entirely," said ArminasX Saiman, an Apple enthusiast and IT manager for a large multinational company.

Me (left), Armi, and Joe

The iPad is designed to appeal to people who don’t know much about computers at all — the crowd that has "12:00" blinking perpetually on their VCRs. "Those people don’t have a hope of running a desktop machine. There are a lot of those people, and I think that’s the group this is really targeted at," Saiman said.

Read the rest and listen to the podcast here: Apple iPad: It’s not about the features

WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 31, 6 pm Pacific Time/Second Life Time

WHERE: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast later on this Web site.

Joe (left) and Armi

The iPad is Apple’s answer to low-priced PC netbooks. It’s a tablet computer with a 10″ display and a multitouch screen like the iPhone. It runs a Web browser, plays videos and music, displays e-books, and functions as a gaming console. It also includes an office suite, and runs all the applications in the App Store, with its own software development kit to allow developers to write more. You’ll be able to buy it, priced starting at $499, in two months.

Apple supporters say it will reinvent computing the way the iPhone reinvented cell phones. Apple detractors shrug and say the device isn’t much, it’s just a big iPod touch. Join us Sunday when we’ll decide what’s really going on.

About our guests: As VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab, Joe oversees the technology strategy for Linden Lab. Previously, he oversaw all of engineering, including operations and viewer development, which included the viewer used by tens of thousands of Second Life Mac users (including yours truly). He headed up deployment of SL Voice (without which the Copper Robot would not be possible — well, I suppose we could do it in mime). Joe’s a Mac user himself, and follows Apple quite closely. He’s been a registered Apple developer since 1983, before the first Mac. He’s even met Steve Jobs.

Armi is author of the popular Second Effects blog, and proprietor of the particle effects store Electric Pixels. Armi keeps his first life and Second Life separate, as so many of us do, so I don’t know a lot about him, and I can tell you even less. But I do know this: He knows a great deal about Apple products and business technology. He was one of our guests when we had a roundtable discussion about Apple’s spring announcements last year.

Hope to see you Sunday. Bring your questions and opinions, this will be more of an open discussion than our usual interview format.

AM Radio is a well-known SL artist. I’ve heard of his work for the whole three years I’ve been in SL, but I’ve never been moved to check it out myself until recently. A friend compared AM’s Second Life builds to paintings. AM’s builds don’t do anything, but they’re beautiful, my friend noted. He also noted that AM uses creative building techniques to create infinite landscapes and brooding skies, both of which are difficult to do in SL.

Head over to Tor.com to read and listen to the Copper Robot’s recent interview with Cory Doctorow, who is a blogger at Boing Boing, and author of novels including the recent Makers, as well as Little Brother and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

A cheery conversation with Cory Doctorow about the upside of economic collapse

Cory Doctorow got the idea for his latest novel, Makers, during the economic meltdown that started the decade. He released it during the meltdown at the end of the decade. And he wrote it during the boom in the middle.

“I wrote it as a parable about the dotcom collapse, and specifically the aftermath in San Francisco. Because there was this amazing thing that happened when the money went away in the Bay Area,” Cory said in an interview. “It really seemed like one day there was an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around the city, and the next day it just vanished. I remember walking down Van Ness [Avenue, in San Francisco] one day, somewhere near 18th Street, and passing a guy who had 50 Aeron chairs and five boxes of dotcom T-shirts on the street. He had a sign up that said, ‘Make Me An Offer.’ He was literally folding up his company and going back to the midwest that day, as soon as he sold his Aeron chairs.”

But the money running out didn’t put a stop to the creativity.

Read the rest at Tor.com

Tor.com has graciously agreed to let me write up science-fiction related Copper Robot interviews and post them there, which will help bring Copper Robot to the attention of their large audience, and also spread the good word about Second Life.

I’m going to be blogging on other subjects for them as well. I’m very pleased to be blogging at Tor.com, a blog which I’ve enjoyed reading since its inception a year or two ago. Tor.com blogs about science fiction and related subjects, and they understand that “related subjects” can be a pretty broad area. Also, I’ve known Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who oversees Tor.com, for nearly half my life now, a thought which I find disturbing, because it actually doesn’t seem longer ago than last week when we met. Update, Saturday 1/23: Patrick says: “I don’t oversee Tor.com, I just buy the fiction. Pablo Defendini runs the place.”

I do encourage you to bookmark Tor.com and read it regularly, but if you’d rather not do that, I’ll continue posting updates about Copper Robot here, as well as in the Second Life group, mailing list, Twitter account, etc. — see the sidebar for those links. I also post Copper Robot updates and more on my personal blog, Mitch Wagner’s Blog. By the way, I came up with the name for my personal blog all on my own, I didn’t focus-group it or anything. And I post pointers to all my Internet activity on @MitchWagner on Twitter. I’m all over the Internet, baby. I’m like a brother-in-law who always wants to borrow money; wherever you go, there I am.

Photo: ArminasX Saiman on the Second Effects blog.

Gaetano Mosca noted the tendency of an elite group to form in any organization–what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The elite wields some combination of power and influence, more or less of each depending on the setting. In the US Senate, senior senators have power over things like committee appointments. The parents who really call the shots at PTA meetings may not sit on the PTA board at all, but have considerable influence over the faculty, staff, and other parents. (And then there’s this comic but terrifying story of a bare-knuckles political battle among department store Santas…)

The same Iron Law holds true of user communities. Over time, a subset of customers emerge who participate regularly in user group meetings, discussion forums, the comments sections of blogs, groups in social media channels, and other channels of face-to-face and electronic communication. Because vendors are interested  in feedback, this group of notables get increasing attention from product managers, product marketers, and the like. Unless the company takes deliberate steps to mitigate the Iron Law of Oligarchy, a small and often unrepresentative sample of users will wield disproportionate influence over the vendor’s thinking about products and services. 

Second Life is an extreme case of how you can develop a very happy group of customers, and still fail miserably at reaching a wider audience. Some businesses are comfortable with that outcome, as long as the customer base stays loyal, and the business stays profitable. Most would be terrified to discover that their best customers are, in subtle ways, holding them back. I can’t say for sure that the Second Life notables are the reason why the UI is still klunky, and the useful content is hard to find, but I definitely have my suspicions.

It’s a nice theory, but it suffers from the main fault of most outside analyses of Second Life problems: The author didn’t do research. His evidence is thin. He doesn’t have any experience with Second Life, he comes right out and says so upfront, and he didn’t talk to people with Second Life experience either. He read an article by someone else who did do the research, and also read the comments on that article.

New World Notes’s Wagner James Au is more charitable than I, he says Grant is half-right:

I’ve seen a similar phenomena on this blog, in many of the responses to my editorial series on making Second Life more mass market:

To a significant degree, the distinct tenor was active and almost angry resistance to the features that might make Second Life easier to learn, and more accessible to the tens of million who regularly play virtual worlds, and the 10+ million who downloaded the SL software, but found it too intimidating and confounding. As one reader put it succinctly, “Don’t dumb down things for the riff raff.”

But Grant is only half right. For every Second Life user who could scarcely care less if SL fails to go mainstream (even if that ultimately leads to SL’s decline), there’s a plethora of content creators, educators, enterprise users, and many more who want Second Life to get big, and indeed, have a deep personal and professional stake in seeing that happen. (Including, well, me.) Consequently, Second Life’s userbase also devotes more energy and effort to growing and improving, and defending itself from outside critics, than just about any other Internet product. That’s a rare and precious thing.

Second Life has a cadre of users who seem to hate everything that Linden Lab does, and complain bitterly about every change. Most of the service’s users seem content to shut up and use Second Life. If they get dissatisfied, they don’t complain much, they just stop logging in.

Some of the most vocal complaints seem justified, but many of them are just silly. For the silly variety, see the first comment on this post — for Pete’s sake, he’s a new employee introducing himself, don’t start complaining right away! It must be hard to do customer service for Linden Lab, the group of users who complain loudly about everything must make it hard for management to find the complaints that actually should be listened to.

I’ve seen the opposite of the Iron Law of Oligarchy at work. Twenty years ago, I was extremely active on an online service called GEnie. Owned by General Electric, GEnie was a market leader in the early 90s, the period of three years or so before the Internet really took off in 1994, when consumers mostly connected their computers over proprietary online services, including GEnie, CompuServe and AOL.

Like Second Life, GEnie had a small but fiercely loyal user base. But GEnie management had a history of hostility to its most loyal users. In an era when online services charged hourly rates for usage, GEnie launched a pay-one-price, all-you-can-eat service plan, and then management complained when users took advantage of it and stayed connected a long time. What did the management expect, anyway?

GEnie management commissioned a shiny new Windows user interface — Windows was new then — and ignored vocal criticism from existing users who said the new client software was crap.

GEnie management consistently behaved as if its existing, loyal customers really didn’t understand the service, and the existing customers’ needs were hostile to the needs of the millions of new customer who would come into the service any day now.

GEnie alienated its existing customers, and the anticipated new customers never came.

In 1992, GEnie was the second largest online service in the world, competing hot and heavy with CompuServe. AOL was a distant third, and the Internet was still only being used by a small group of researchers. Over the course of the next eight years, AOL bought CompuServe and then Time-Warner, the Internet took over the world, and GEnie — whose management thought its existing customers were idiots — shut down on Jan. 1, 2000. GEnie is now pretty much forgotten.

Second Life has a lot of problems, but its most loyal customers — even the ones who complain about everything — are not among them. They are the service’s greatest asset. To Linden Lab’s credit, they seem to understand this. From what I understand, the company plans a lot of changes to relaunch the service over the next six months. By summer, I think we’ll know for sure whether Second Life has a bright future, or whether it will follow GEnie and die the long, slow death of obsolete online communities.