Jason Romney from Telstra reflected on the telco’s entry into the Second Life virtual world, including the impacts of the real world on the virtual world. Romney says Telstra is now the best trafficked real-world brand in the virtual realm. Hence Telstra’s investment in Second Life will grow over time, including its recent initiatives in selling real estate, as too will its investments in other web 2.0 technologies such as RSS and tags relating to its content, and in some cases mashing them up together. He also talked about other initiatives such as US academic Edward Castranova’s Arden initiative, which sees actors performing Shakespeare in Second Life 24 hours a day. Romney says Telstra is also now working with Second Life creators Linden Lab and technology companies to further improve the experience for Australians in the virtual realm.

The Chinese rarely seem to do anything by half measures, so when Dr David Liu presented on the Cyber Recreation District being developed in Beijing, he described a facility that is 84 square kilometres in size. The CRD also includes the Dotman platform, a two-dimensional and three-dimensional portal, based on real-world economic mechanisms. Dr Liu emphasises the importance of the linkages between the real world and the virtual world. In one example, clothing designs from the real world are translated into the virtual world for sale to owners of avatars in the Dotman world. Consumers can personalise the clothing and the have it reproduced in the real world.

Canadian Martha Ladly also spoke about her life in design, music and digital media, including her 10 years spent working with Peter Gabriel at Real World in the UK. She is now working on developing ‘scaffolding’ to assist people with memory loss, using digital devices, but also detailed many of the interesting and intriguing developments in mobile media.

And finally Tom Kennedy from belong discussed some of the uncertainties and conundrums that are still apparent in the development of new media forms.

The final session before lunch was presented by Jason Roks, a technical advisory board member from The Real News. His organisation is building a global news network that is no way influenced by government funding or corporate sponsorship. Set for a public launch in 2008 with coverage of the US election, the The Real News network is creating a donation-funded model to sustain itself.

According to Roks, it is technology that makes such a model viable. The Real News is enabled by Archive.org, which donates bandwidth to people who want to put media online. The second element is peering, which makes it much cheaper to deliver last-mile high-quality video.

He also spoke of user-generated distribution, allowing the thin layer of people who act as recommenders to a wider audience, using the XSPF format to allow recommenders to create channels and build an aggregation sites around specific topics, but pulling content (and bandwidth) from content providers.

Liz Heller from LA-based Buzztone talked about the need for people to belong to groups, and how this translates online. Her company spends a lot of time looking at the formation of groups, which includes investigation of things that have always been happening, and how they are evolving. Heller’s presentation ran through several examples of how to successfully create online groups, such as the Red Bicyclette Social Club, and the first student social network for tech students for Microsoft, called The Spoke. In the latter instance Buzztone started with nothing, and grew to encompass 14 languages.

She says social networks provide a mechanism that allows for user generated selection of collaborators and filters. Cited examples included Block Savvy, Moveon, Our Chart, Buzznet and MtvVirtual Worlds, along with houseparty.com, www.reunion.com and www.paltalk.com.

“Is this the beginning of another group and another loop – smaller niche and more restricted, just like it was when you were a kid? Only this time you have a lot more influence.”

There are many issues to be resolved, and money is the big question. The majority of consumers are still going to the free sites that show premium video content, such as Joost. Hence the models are still to be proven out.

One way or the other, broadband video will find its way onto the television, be it directly or via a games console or other entertainment device. The future will also include new content experiences and services on mobile devices.

In summary, Ford-Livenes says consumers like premium content, but on their own terms. While broadband TV is growing, regular television still matters, because it can still reach a mass audience. The TV experience is also evolving, and the advertising that will support internet television – while growing at 30 percent – is still in need of standards. Distribution models are also evolving, as companies battle the ideas of protecting and distributing.

The final speaker for the first session at X Media Lab was Shekhar Kapur , who as well as being a noted director of films including Elizabeth and the soon-to-be-released The Golden Age (both with Australian actor Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth) is also one of the founding partners in Richard Branson’s Bangalore-based Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation. That group has already involved collaborations from director Guy Ritchie and musician David Stewart.

Kapur says he loves the idea of the unknown, hence is moving his attention into new media forms in order to explore unknown territories for content creation. He also described the rise of the important of the East as a place for the generation of new ideas and new opportunities in media, something that Western companies need to wake up to, as more and more Asian consumers become connected to broadband networks.

Kapur is also putting together a US$1 billion fund to support the development and integration of Asian media businesses to take advantages of the latent consumer demand for multi-platform content.

“It will be a breeding ground for the next Google, and to do that we need a billion dollars to create the ecosystem,” Kapur says.

He says content makers also need to work harder to find the culture of the new delivery systems that are being created, rather than just recycling existing format.

“Entertainment is the emotional interface between content and technology,” Kapur says. “It is very hard to predict the business models, so we have to predict the social behaviour, and through that the business models will come up. The business models will come out of the consumers, and you might hope to catch them for a while.”

The third speaker for the day was Kevin Anderson, the head of blogging and interaction at the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, who spoke about helping mass media companies transform and adapt to social media.

Anderson says that at times mass media has played up the aggression that can be unleashed through a public forum. He says it is up to media operator to set the tone for discussions though, and take responsibility for the user experience, hence The Guardian uses a team of moderators to make its communities a nice place for its users.

His goal is to take site users from being casual to connected, where they interact more, then on to committed users, and eventually catalysts. The final concept seeks to turn people into advocates who help spread the world. The Guardian is now one of the most linked-to sites in the world, and trails only the BBC in the UK, all through word-of-mouth marketing.

“This is about maintaining our relevance in a very cluttered media landscape,” Anderson says. “There are a lot of media hack-tivists doing interesting things online, and we need to be doing that too.”

He also talked about bloggers are becoming more integrated into the news gathering process, in particular in places where it is hard to get to, such as hot-spots in the Middle East.

In the future, he expects to see more growth within social sites around news, such as Newsvine , to extend the discussions further into communities. He also believes that user generated content will become more empowering for consumers, through creating platforms for sharing real time information on events ranging from terrorist attacks to traffic accidents.

The first speaker was Dale Herigstad, co-founder of the US-based company Schematic , who in his presentations ran through perspectives on the way we will interact with digital content (members of his team also worked with Microsoft on its recent demonstration of surface computing .

Herigstad began with a discussion of television and the evolution to the delivery of rich media content on any screen. He believes screen experiences will evolved from the ’10-foot’ experience of television to the ‘two-foot’ experience of the computer and the ‘one-foot’ experience of the mobile device. Over time we will move away from the experience of a screen altogether, and into an immersive environment.

Interfaces aren’t the only things that are changing. More immediately, the fusion of different content forms is only going to grow stronger. Herigstad is talking to the games developer EA Sports, regarding what it calls the pre-game space (before a player begins playing a game). EA can now bring in life television information into the game environment from the ESPN sports network, through a broadband connection, and make this part of the game experience.

He also talked about the changing nature of content consumption, from the standard notion of programming to one of on-demand delivery and ‘catch-up’ viewing of missed content (as is now offered through several Australian television portals).

This includes the new ways of looking at information on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, combining live information from broadband feeds that is interlinked into the content of the disc itself. He demonstrated a system whereby consumers can access information directly about products within a film. Schematic is exploring new variations on exiting tools such as menus, using spatial concepts to help guide consumers through the content offerings, including bringing in live Google Earth information.

“This is not slapping a web browser in the space - it is taking IP content … and bringing it into this space to create new experiences,” he says.

Herigstad also talked about how companies are also using new media forms to directly connect with consumers. Schematic has have create 7-foot by 10-foot screens at airports for Accenture, called the Accenture Interactive Network, which incorporates pre-prepared content and live content from CNN, that people can interactive with through a touch-based interface.

Welcome to the live blog from the 2007 X Media Lab in Melbourne. X Media Lab itself is designed to bring together leading thinkers from around the world in the various fields of the digital content industry, to share the latest innovations with an audience that includes many of Australia’s best up-and-coming digital media projects. Throughout the day I’ll be posting notes on the various presentations, along with some commentary on the event itself.

Today was opened by the newly appointed Victorian Minister for Climate Change and Innovation, Gavin Jennings, MLC, who spoke of the potential for digital media to produce strong economic gains for the state and the nation, along with his own belief in the importance of digital media in developing communities, particularly the disenfranchised.

Tune in throughout the day for updates on the presentations of other speakers.