The Association of Internet Researchers is finally having its conference in Europe, specifically in Copenhagen, next October. Deadline for abstract submissions is February 7, call for papers here

Being a Mac fan, with some occasional doubts, I found this list of future projects from the omnipresent Apple quite engaging(source: Mac Life).here is the iCar, complete with iSight and iTunes of course;the iEye, super digital camera with embedded editing options;and the iProtection, an Apple-branded stun gun.And I thought this strip from Wolff and Morgenthaler was funny!

Technorati Tags: futuristic

Definitely Picnic is all but a no-frills conference. A central salon looking like a slightly under-toned Biennale, wall sized projections, giant faces half open, performance actresses with heart-shaped heads, human avatars you can control though a mike (the Girlfriend Experience), press rooms with floors made of wood scraps, and above all the omnipresent RFID tag machines proposed by Mediamatic, to put to good use the RFID tags you would be given at the conference.

My favorite has been of course the Friend Drink Station, that would print free drinks coupons, too bad I accidentally deleted all the pictures from Amsterdam, and I can’t find a picture of it online.
Here is the iTea Table, that would show information about you to others when you sit,

and the photo booth, to take pictures of you with somebody else and have the pictures immediately published on Flickr and the profiles of both (you need to be enrolled to the Picnic network in order to access all this fun stuff) would become connected on the Picnic network, and so on.

Oh well. This and more you could do with your RFID tags; at the end of the first day, after a lifetime of spy stories and movies, I felt so nervous that I slipped my tag into a nearby lady’s bag on the bus. Just in case.

This is no news at all, as it happened on April 4, but it is still interesting: the organization Adventure Ecology decided to flood several parts of Second Life for a few hours, to show the (not-so-future) effects of global warming.
Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, and the entire Mediterranean island of Ibiza went under,

although the in-world people would quickly get organized with boats, swimming suits and swimming scripts, watch video on YouTube.
Interesting enough, I am hearing from one of the organizers that the event affected mostly press, while Second Life inhabitants didn’t pay that much attention. I wonder how many other media-activist actions are being performed on Second Life; there is a lot of activism around there indeed, but mostly related to First Life politicians ( Democrat John Edwards’s campaign, and the Front National, french extreme right party (what are THEY doing in SL?!), below you can see some reactions)
) I wonder if this lack of activism from “engaged” members is because of the in-world demographics (not so many engaged members, maybe?) , or simply because I don’t know more about it.