Eric Eggertson has an interesting post about the recent decision by Second Life gated community Dreamland to ban PR and marketing professionals who have allegedly made public statements claiming to be the "first" at something in SL that longer-term SL residents believe to be untrue.

Says Eric: 

"This is an interesting case of having to defend your reputation in a semi-official way, as opposed to keeping an eye out for rumours, and trying to combat them with information.

… it will be interesting to see if this goes in a positive direction – encouraging discussion of expectations and rules of behaviour – or if it’s the virtual equivalent of the blacklists, where corporations are assumed guilty until they appear before a committee."

Getting to know the expectations and norms is important in any environment, and seemingly more so in Second Life where perhaps currently the sensitivities between pioneers and early residents, and the more-recently joined, are somewhat delicate.

By the way, if you’ve got the time and the money, a conference that’s sure to be fantastic and may touch on some of these issues is State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse taking place in Singapore in January. The program promises to cover taxation of virtual property, global virtual world journalism, legal regulatory issues affecting virtual worlds, intercultural communication, and virtual worlds as global learning environments. 

And speaking of interpersonal conflict, for anyone wanting to make nice with my avatar Ceara Moore, please note that calling her a "bitch" when she doesn’t immediately offer you friendship — maybe because she’s never met you before, your profile says nothing about you, and you haven’t even made the effort to engage in small talk — doesn’t cut it. And simply propositioning Ceara on the street with a "wanna f***?" doesn’t cut it either.

Those approaches never worked on me in real life and they’re sure as heck not going to work on my avatar in SL. Just goes to show that there’s more overlap between RL and SL than some may realize.

Tags: secondlife, avatar, cearamoore

This Sunday and Monday, October 15-16, residents of SL (and people around the world in RL) will get the chance to help set the first Guinness World Record for the greatest number of individuals to stand up in support of the eight Millennium Development Goals of the United Nation’s Millennium Campaign to help fight extreme poverty worldwide.

Aimee Weber of Aimee Weber Studios is the brains behind the SL effort and explains more here (you can also listen to a SecondCast interview with Aimee here):

"To be counted in this historic endeavor, all you have to do is locate a ‘Stand Up’ kiosk and obtain a free wrist band. There are nearly a hundred Kiosks around the grid already, including in the central plaza of Midnight City. On October 15-16, click on the wrist band to assume the ’stand up’ pose and register yourself as a supporter of the Millennium Development Goals. Your participation will be recorded and included in the final count for the Guinness World Record. Our contribution will make a thunderous statement to policymakers everywhere."

It’ll take just a few minutes of your time to make history. Wow.

And sometimes the way to foster that "you’re special" feeling is by taking it slow, or what Evelyn Rodriguez calls slow marketing:

"Not that it’s necessarily opposed to buzz marketing, but slow marketing is a focus on human, one-on-one connections sans stress… rather than a focus on the mass, aggregate, broadcast-blast level.

Slow marketing is intricately tied to slow conversations, naked conversations."

Sometimes slow is better (right?).

(Picture from Photo Monkey)

Especially with children and teens, there’s ongoing concern that an over-reliance on online interaction will make individuals socially inept. Except in select cases, and where additional underlying factors also play a role, I don’t believe this is a prevalent problem.

However, there’s no question that right now technology doesn’t serve as a completely satisfying replacement for face-to-face interaction. And where people continue to feel a void, they’ll choose to either supplement their online activities with live ones, or take a break entirely.

The continued success of social networking sites, therefore, will likely lie in their ability to combine the online and offline worlds.

With so much focus on industry-specific (e.g., the nearly 700 PR-related blogs) and subject-matter-specific blogs (e.g., the 3700+ technology-related blogs), it’s easy to overlook the less flashy, locally-focused sites.

But it’s these sites that we’ll see proliferate in the long run, probably much more so than others. Why? Because local residents will be invested in them and regard them as the true voice of their respective communities.

According to Lisa Williams, who runs H2otown, a community site for Watertown, MA, there are already probably more than 700 placeblogs or "site[s] dedicated to a particular geographical community — a county, town, city, or neighborhood." And to track these placeblogs, Lisa has created Placeblogger.com, which she talked about at today’s J-Lab Citizens Media Summit II.      

PR and marketing professionals will also increasingly take note of these local blogs, seeing opportunities to engage one-on-one with members of the community on matters specifically important to them.   

(Flickr image of Placeblogger.com from Lisa Williams)

"Blogs are like virtual pubs."

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in consumer products PR, high-tech marketing, politics, or something else, it’s always about connecting with your audience.

Blogs are like virtual pubs… gotta love it.

Case in point is an ABA eReport article that discusses a New York State proposal that would designate legal blogs as advertising, thus subjecting them to state scrutiny and regulation:

"The storm was set off by a proposal that ‘computer-accessed communications’ such as blogs be included in New York’s definition of legal advertising, and therefore require state scrutiny. The proposal, by a committee created by the state’s Administrative Board of Courts, also suggests the state code of professional responsibility extend court jurisdiction to out-of-state legal advertising that appears in New York….

And if blog posts must be approved, what’s the point? ‘This seems to be another in a series of recent regulatory efforts by state bar regulators that seem woefully out of touch with the Internet era,’ wrote Dennis Kennedy, a St. Louis lawyer who posts at Between Lawyers." [Read Kennedy's post If Lawyers Can Advertise in New York, They Can Advertise Anywhere...But They Probably Can't.]

Equally bothersome, however, is when individuals expose themselves to legal liability by doing something that appears to be intentionally stupid. I’m referring to examples provided in the USA Today article Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites (via Chris Heuer), such as posting false STD information about someone on Don’tDateHimGirl.com or setting up a fake MySpace.com page that contains obscene content. Not very smart — and that’s an understatement.

Josh Hallet, who is hosting Friday’s BlogOrlando conference, emailed the session leaders a reminder that our role isn’t to spoon feed the audience with information, but to lead and facilitate the discussion. Phew, that makes it a lot more interesting!

And since the Legal Issues session is scheduled for right after lunch, I hope no one’ll be in a food coma when they come back   Why? Well, because this session gives us an opportunity to cover some important areas, such as whether bloggers are considered journalists and if so, what legal protections they may have; libel & slander (and the role of satire); how to protect against liability regarding blog comments left by other people, and so on. And if we have time, we can also talk about what conflict management approaches, short of using cease and desist letters or initiating other legal action, may be open to bloggers.

In other words, this session will hopefully provide basic information that ultimately will help us avoid some mine fields and allow us to focus on what we really enjoy doing — communicating and interacting with our readers and others in the community. 

Here’s a brief list of some helpful sites to know about:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
• Media Bloggers Association
• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
• The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
• Stanford Law School for Internet and Society

And these lists of blogs, compiled by 3L Epiphany, are also good information sources and commentary to keep on hand:

• Media Law blogs
• Internet Law blogs
• General Intellectual Property Law blogs
• Technology and the Law blogs

I recently started bookmarking legal-related information pertinent to blogs, podcasts and vlogging on del.icio.us. While the list definitely isn’t comprehensive, maybe you’ll find something of interest to you, so feel free to have a look.   

See you Friday!

Yeah, there are only so many hours in the day… or, as I’ve been guilty of doing, only so many hours of sleep you can sanely forfeit.

Still, I’ve found that my involvement with Second Life so far has been very beneficial.

And now there’s another Second Life-based event that I’m looking forward to, Harvard Law School’s CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, which is about "the creation and delivery of persuasive argument in the new integrated media space constituted by the Internet and other new technologies. Our premise is that ‘First World’ and corporate domination of entertainment media, laws, and news can be balanced by the voices of individuals, groups and universities who use new media intelligently."

The course is open to Harvard Law students and Harvard Extension School students, but also to anyone with an Internet connection. Check out the course details for at-large participants. 

Alright, I’m on board.

Legally, Starbucks’ withdrawal is probably on solid footing. For example, Jan Margosian, spokeswoman for Oregon’s Department of Justice consumer protection unit, stated that "there’s not a statute that covers a mistake… The fact that they tried to honor it [the coupon] and it was too much isn’t a violation of consumer-protection laws."

Still, Starbucks may have caused a raised eyebrow or two, at a minimum regarding the question of why an internationally successful and marketing-savvy company didn’t anticipate that the e-mail, even with instructions regarding to whom it could be forwarded, wouldn’t immediately take on a viral life of its own and be shared beyond the originally intended sphere of distribution.

And, as do many large companies, Starbucks has its share of critics (represented in part by the oh-so-subtle I Hate Starbucks blog) and its labor issues (see the IWW Starbucks Workers Union).

Nevertheless, diehard loyalists won’t let the coupon snafu prevent them from flocking to Starbucks to get their fix.

With the company’s new Coffee Conversations podcast debuting today, blogs such as Jim Romenesko’s Starbucks Gossip and Starbucks Everywhere (chronicling Winter’s — yep, that’s his real name — attempt to visit every licensed Starbucks in the world) going strong, and new entries such as the unique Sketchnap (created by a "caffeine-fueled Starbucks’ doodler committed to coffee, napkins and sketching" — check out the pictures, doodles and other stuff) joining in, there’s no reason to believe that the Starbucks brand will take a serious hit.