I blame Cameron Reilly!

I’ve been spending more and more time in Second Life lately, mostly for researching TechCrunch posts (see coverage here) and then I noticed Cam had set up a HQ for The Podcast Network. I met up with Cam Friday night (still in Brisbane for the Australian Blogging Conference, the Chifley had a fairly decent net connection) in world and he took me for a tour of a design company where we sat in the board room and had a chat, then we teleported across to TPN HQ where we chatted with a couple of other people. It was like tasting blood, I’m hooked again.

So I’ve gone a bought some land, and unlike my 2005 forays this time I bought big, a 19,500 sqm mainland block with dual road frontage and water. Beautiful block. I’ve already started subdividing it to see if I can sell about half and cover my cost of buying the full block, which given the steal of about L$10/ sqm I should. Bought a house and am looking at a skyscraper for corporate space and rentals. I’ve also got an idea for a Second Life business which is sort-of Web 2.0 related: this won’t be my big startup but I can see it being a nice hobby on the side. I’ll send out some requests for permissions I need probably tomorrow. I should be shy at entering retail again after my last experience of socialism gone mad, but I’m a bit more confident on this one.

More as I go along.

I’ve finally got around to doing some personal blogging today, the travel of September and the long weekend behind me, and I just wanted to do a short post congratulating Peter Black on hosting a great conference in Brisbane.

It was hard to work out numbers, maybe 100-150 people turned up to QUT Kelvin Grove for the conference, a thoroughly modern venue which someone said to me was too post-modernist…I liked it.

The sessions were great. I was on stage with Professor John Quiggley and Senator Andrew Bartlett for the opening discussion…on one hand I felt overwhelmed to be on stage with two men with such great backgrounds, yet on the other hand it was a great platform to preach blogging inclusiveness from, and get straight to the point, and as one of the few professional bloggers at the conference I had a different take…which I hope was good 🙂

I spent the next period at the legal session: EFA is still going, which is a surprise for me, given their low to non-existent profile, but it is sort of nice knowing that they are still there. Some interesting feedback on legal exposure for Australian bloggers; they claim I can still be sued in Australia even though I host everything in the US. It’s a worry, but I’m still hosting everything in the States, if I suspect it’s a big risk I’ll set up a US shelf company to own the sites.

In the afternoon I led The Building a Better Blog session and I roped in Yaro Starak to help. Personable bloke who speaks well and is a credit to his industry. After that I sat in on Des Walsh and Yaro for the Business Blogging session. Again, interesting stuff, different perspectives on things which I found personally interesting.

Best thing about the conference all up was the face to face conversations and feedback: as a networking session alone it kicked ass, but I’d like to think that at least some of those in attendance learnt stuff as well.

My only negative was the split into the various sessions; I would have liked to sit in on more of them but the concurrent format made that impossible. Maybe the trick is to do shorter sessions, or hold less at the same time.

According to Peter the next conference will be held in Sydney or Melbourne next year, which I’d suggest would mean a bigger audience and more possibilities. Where ever it is I’ll be back for more; brining Australian bloggers together in the great Dave Winer style unconference format is a worthwhile thing.

Shel Israel makes an interesting point: would I have said TechCrunch 40 was great if I wasn’t reporting it for TechCrunch (or words to that effect: read the post, like most of Shel’s stuff its far better put forward that I can summise it here).

Simple answer is no. If it sucked big time I’d be selling my sole for lying and Arrington doesn’t pay me enough.

The truth of the matter is that I thought it was bloody brilliant. Sure, there were some hiccups, mostly with presentations from companies with the AV setup on the first day; I’ve got no idea who is to blame for that, but it was interesting that one company would come out and deliver their spiel badly, the next was brilliant, the following poor, the next great again…I get the feeling fault may lie more with some of the presenting companies.

On the completely personal level I loved the expert panels with the VC’s covering raising VC, the middle one (can’t remember the title) and exit strategies. If I had to pay to attend I would have paid to listen to what they had to say because you don’t get advice from firms like Sequoia at that level every day…if ever at all. The startups themselves were a mixed bag, some really, really great ideas and others I wondered why they were picked to present; end of the day my likes are different to your likes are different to the next person or even Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis, it’s subjective decision making and you can never please everyone…it’s just unfortunate that some people seem to forget the rule of subjectivity.

Just for the record I did sh*tcan a couple of companies in my live blogging; sure, I was trying to be kind but one startup in particular had the worse business model I’ve seen for a long time with a worse presentation, and even the panel of experts said so as well. If the money was talking every single one of them would have received praise…but that’s not me, full stop.

On Shel’s client: I still love Cubic Telecom, brilliant idea that seemed to be lost on the Americans on the panel, probably because they don’t travel enough. Anyone who travels internationally will immediately get Cubic Telecom’s idea. The lack of mobile number portability was the only bad thing I can say about it, but for those sorts of savings, and presuming I’ll be traveling abroad regularly next year I’ll be signing up some time after they launch in October.