Somebody Gets It!
I went to a *great* event today!  The Metanomics lecture series is affiliated with a class taught by Robert Bloomfield of Cornell University's business school. Today's session was on fashion, featuring Raven Pennyfeather of Rfyre, FL to SL designer Nyla Cheeky, and virtual worlds consultant and author Jack Myers. 

Despite a very late start due to sound problems, and a fresh-baked n00b stuck on the runway, the event began with a tremendously professional and effective runway show of Rfyre designs.  I've been to a few fashion shows in SL, and this was among the best, with very effective product descriptions and clockwork timing. It would have been nice to have kept the models onstage longer, but considering they had to make up time, the crew did brilliantly.

The panel was *interesting,* despite the moderator's frequent interruptions and somewhat ignorant questions. Raven and Nyla were both engrossing, in talking about their backgrounds, their approach to design and to doing business in SL and FL.  

One of the drawbacks to the Metanomics series, and something that makes it, for me, inferior to the Dr. Dobbs events (and, gods know, to Sophrosyne's Saturday Salons!) is the suppression of audience participation - they require questions to go to a moderator, and then to the host, before being asked.  This time, Nite Zelmanov called them out on it, and we got a bit of backchat going. The quality of the audience at this sort of event is usually at least as good as that of the panel - and it's a real credit to this week's group that they *weren't* outshone by the brilliant audience!

Highlights? The mini-insurrection when Professor Bloomfield scorned Residents for being taken in by cartoons as if they were real people (I'm paraphrasing - the panel was all in audio, so I don't have a chatlog).  More than one of us stood up for our own reality - and all of the panelists backed us up!  They all also ran with a discussion of "entertainment" in virutal worlds as drawing on pre-broadcast customs of peer-to-peer entertainment: both designers said that the unique value in synthetic-worlds fashion was having direct, mutual relationships with their customers, rather than just pushing stuff onto the market.

It was a brilliant, brilliant session, and I just wish it could have run much longer (and that *I* hadn't had to run as soon as it was over!)

And, I got to friend Lillie Yifu (who agreed to do a Salon! weeee!) and Cybergrrl Oh - *and* panelist Jack Myers friended *me* out of the blue (even if I did turn him down at first for having a day-old av with a blank profile!  go me!  :P  ) Special thanks to Raven's assistant Harper Beresford for her unnerving, but deeply appreciated, offer of assistance! Today was the first time I've been *recognized,* and it was kind of weird but really nice :)

	the Metaversed conference facility, with runway
	Rfyre fashion show
	Media Blessed (Jack Myers), Raven Pennyfeather, Nyla Cheeky, Byers Sellers (Robert Bloomfield)