(Check out my Flickr account for the full set of photos from this event. Click on a thumbnail below to see a larger version.)

For those who couldn't already guess this, being a nerd in Second Life is the best; and that's because all the nerdy conferences you love are rebroadcast there, with all the nerdy companies you love owning their own virtual spaces. And as a RL Chicagoan, I also find it great for attending things I wouldn't normally get the chance to; I've sat in on Creative Commons events there, BarCamp ones and more, groups that usually never schedule live events in the American midwest.

Such was the case this morning, for example, when I had the chance to attend a part of the cutting-edge Video On The Net conference, taking place as we speak in RL Boston. Organized by Jeff Pulver, it's a sequel of sorts to his infamous '90s conference "Voice On The Net," which led among other things to the formation of the commercial VoIP industry, as well as Pulver's company VON. Pulver apparently has gotten really interested lately in what can be done with streaming video over the internet; which is why he put together this conference, and called for the leading voices in the industry to come together and talk about it.

Now, thankfully for us, Pulver is a fan of Second Life as well; in fact, his company decided to buy a plot of land there and build a cutting-edge facility for showing off video over the internet, which they call Pulveria. It's pretty impressive, too; designed in a cool, postmodernist style, the three-story facility contains not only private conference rooms but a large lecture hall in the basement, all of them wired to receive streaming video with the touch of a mouse button. And as part of the promotion for Pulveria, the group decided to broadcast Pulver's keynote address from it live at the virtual site; and that's what took me to Pulveria this morning, and what I just got done attending.

I admit, there is something simultaneously joyous and jarring about viewing streaming RL video, within the artificial confines of SL. As immersive as the grid can be, one ultimately still has to resort to a series of tricks while there, to keep the environment as immersive of one as possible; one of these tricks, for example, is to try as much as possible not to let the real world invade your consciousness while in the grid, so as to keep the cartoonish avatars and physics-defying architecture your only "reality." Sitting in a computer-generated conference center, with a photo-realistic 3D avatar I can control in real time, surrounded by others around the globe with the same abilities, is like a wet dream from my science-fiction teens; like something pulled straight out of a William Gibson novel and plopped right into my crappy little Mac Mini. But what Gibson didn't predict was how consistent such a CGI-reality would need to be; of how fast the illusion of "reality" there is broken, simply by introducing images from the real world.

For what it's worth, Pulver's speech was great, and makes me want to start getting active with my YouTube account again. Pulver's one of those BoingBoing-type people, all into the net neutrality and copyleft movements, user-created content and the shutting-down of corporate conglomerates. Of course, his speech wasn't all just rah-rah about the future; one of the things he almost insisted will happen, for example, is that the FCC will eventually demand the right to regulate what happens on the internet, just like they do now for television and radio. Pulver argues that this is actually coming, no matter how ludicrous a thing it might sound like right now, and that we who oppose such a thing need to start preparing a defense for it now.

If you get a chance to stop by Pulveria, by the way, do make sure to take a minute to wander the facility; it's a spectacular build, architecturally-speaking, a grand mesh of navigability and stunning visuals, a combination rare to come by in the grid. Unsurprisingly, it's yet another project by The Electric Sheep Company, a collective of SL designers, programmers, architects and filmmakers, who have banded together to create one of the grid's most impressive multimedia companies. In fact, I'll be doing an interview in just another week or so with Electric Sheep's CEO, Sibley Hathor, so I hope you'll get a chance to come back for that; they're a pretty fascinating company, and are doing some things these days that will make you flabbergasted.