The number of avatars on the sim was 40 at the moment I checked. That was too much for me. Despite that the discussion was interesting, I lost my grip, I simply couldn't follow. :(

I agree with both of you. There were simply too many people. I largely tuned out and spent time IMing people I already knew at the conference. There were points I wanted to have people expand on, and things I wanted to rebut, but they flew right off my chat window in the general noise.

Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but mostly what I saw was a lot of people proclaiming their own personal views on the singularity, or making witty commentary, but very little meeting of minds or rational dialogue. A discussion just isn't rewarding for me unless one side or the other says "Wow! I never thought of that" or at least "I can see why you might feel that way."

How about some sort of fishbowl format? That way you have a few people (say 3 in SL as opposed to the 5 or 6 of a FL fishbowl) talking and everyone else looking on, and more chance for rational back-and-forth dialogue. Plus, talkers enter and leave the fishbowl on a regular basis so it's not just "meet the experts".

Even using this you would still need to cap the event size, and you would have to make an effort to keep people who are outside the fishbowl generally quiet. Maybe create an "audience group" or "fishbowl group" for people to do IM chat in? As Dande says, some sort of script/software solution may be the way to go.

I agree that separating "experts" and "audience" is often a bad idea, but I think we should find some kind of solution to the problem of everyone talking at the same time, also because this interleaved threads that become difficult to follow in the chatlog. Perhaps like in RL conferences: passing a token to the next speaker, and who has the token has the floor. Easy to implement in software I think.