Podcast: Neville Hobson, Blogger

08-05-2007

by Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery's guest on this episode of Podleaders is blogger, podcaster and intrepid Second Life explorer Neville Hobson. Neville is one of the leading European early adopters and influencers in social media communication for business.

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Tom invited Neville to come onto Podleaders to talk about Second Life, Crayon and communications in general.

Here are the questions Tom asked Neville and the times he asked them:

Neville, can you give us a bit of background on yourself, how did you get into this whole arena?

How did you get into blogging and podcasting, how did that kick off? - 02:19

And you have been doing a bi-weekly podcast with Shel Holtz for nearly two years now... - 03:54

How do you keep it going though, two podcasts a week is a huge commitment? 04:47.

What do you see as the advantages of an involvement in Second Life for a company? - 06:51

So a lot of it is about experimentation, as opposed to actual business benefits? - 09:51

Questions from readers:

• Paul Watson
  My problem with Second Life is the disconnect when moving between the "game" and the rest of my digital life (Mac desktop, browser, e-mail client etc.) It takes time to load and even when run as a window switching between it and everything else is not as slick as other applications. Is Second Life best as a completely immersive experience or will the boundary start to fade and switching between it and everything else become faster and easier? - 11:33
• At the moment there are no voice capabilities in Second Life, will they need a slew of new servers when this is brought on stream? - 13:45
• Evert Bopp
  You might ask him if he would like to comment on the articles on Second Life by Randolph Harrison. - 15:37
• James Corbett
  How does Neville think the imminent integration of voice functionality will affect the culture of Second Life? Will it erode the fantasy side of the environment? What opportunities are afforded by the increasingly immersive capabilities going forward, for example regarding telepresence vis-a-vis high-end systems like Cisco's Telepresence 3000. - 19:12
• Ina O'Murchu
  Second Life is very time consuming and lags quite a lot, despite this there has been an initial rush to set up businesses there and many educators are investing a lot of time and effort in Second Life to try to get the virtual world of education going.

  Is there not the fear that something better will come along as in the case of Sony's PS3 Home community, and people's attention will be focused into something that works faster and is better. Admittedly not everyone will have a PS3 console so "Home" may become an elite community, however, people will more be inclined to join the better-looking community. How does Second Life expect to survive with so much change coming, and cope with the continuous competition? - 23:10

• Neville, Do you believe virtual communities hurt real communities? Is it such a smart thing to devote so much attention to fantasy when there is so much to be done in the first life? What's your take/opinion? - 27:37
• Jasmine Chng
  I'd be interested to hear what their plans are for Crayon. Seems like a lot of marketing done in and around Second Life. Is that the only platform Crayon uses for its marketing efforts? How are they using new tools like Twitter? - 29:24

You guys are running a thing called Coffee with Crayon, what is that, and how does it work? - 38:48

Finally, if someone wants to get into Second Life, how do they go about that and what do they do once in there? - 41:51

All content, including audio interviews is copyright of Tom Raftery of Podleaders.com. Tom is a podcaster, blogger and web marketing expert and is available for freelance or full-time projects. You can see Tom's skills set here.