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.

Second Life blogfather Wagner James Au weighs in on Viewer 2.0 He loves it — or at least he loves parts of it — but he says it won’t drive Second Life mainstream adoption. He’s right.

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

Linden Lab, which develops and operates Second Life introduced a new beta version of its desktop viewer software on Tuesday, the first big upgrade in many years. Will the new software help bring about a renaissance of the once-trendy service?

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

Go to Tor.com to listen to the podcast and read about our discussion of avatars with fashionista Harper Beresford and business consultant Rissa Maidstone:

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.

Go to the Computerworld Tool Talk blog to read the write-up and listen to the podcast of Sunday’s Copper Robot session:

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

Next on Copper Robot, we’re talking about the Apple iPad with the two of the best minds and Apple observers in Second Life: Joe Miller, a/k/a Joe Linden, VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab; and Second Life entrepreneur and blogger ArminasX Saiman.

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.