Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon: Chatbots!
Salon Spotlight Guest Corro Moseley, CEO of Daden Limited, brought us a different kind of Salon yesterday.  We had a peak concurrency of 34, with lots of new faces, for Corro's show and tell of terrific tech, including the Nabatzag bunny, which provides information on avatars visiting an SL location to an equivalent bunny in FL - essentially, an FL doorbell for SL. Kiki the Parrot demonstrated networked chatbot technology, but the hit of the day was Halo, the walking, talking chatbot avatar!

Unfortunately, we had our first eviction for public rudeness. I've been running a weekly event for eight months in SL, and have had to eject four people: one for nudity with a one-Linden woodie when we were at a PG facility that explicitly prohibited nudity, one for commercial audio chat spam, one for a replicating-script griefing attack, and only one, yesterday, for verbal obnoxiousness continued after a polite IM warning. One person who can't behave in 32 weeks of events with an average attendance of over 30 is extraordinarily good odds.

The Salons are a verbal free-for-all that are unlike other prominent discussion events in SL. I refuse to moderate audience questions and encourage backchat and side conversations: that's what's made the Salons such a success, and enabled them to serve as a nexus of professional relationships and friendships that have spread across venues and even platforms: the Salon crowd is well-represented every day in Twitter chat!

Aside from trusting the audience to be smart and interesting, one other factor contributes to the Salons' success: the rule Namav Abramovic articulated so succinctly as, "Don't be a dick." That only one person has clearly violated that rule in 32 weeks is a testament both to the good sense of Salon attendees, and how high the bar for unacceptably obnoxious behavior really is - *ordinarily* obnoxious behavior is more than welcome!

I hope we'll have at least another 32-week run before our next incident.