Before heading down to ad:tech yesterday, I paused to wonder if it was worth it. All the conferences tend to look and sound the same. Rarely does a panel ever live up to the ‘tell me something I don’t know’ request that so many writers seek. Tales from the Bleeding Edge was different. It was the best panel I’ve been to in ages and Lori H. Schwartz, SVP and Director of Emerging Media at IPG Media Lab deserves kudos for putting together such a panel. The write-up alluded to all kinds of cool technologies, many of which were not touched upon, but the ones that were, were wonderful.

Bill Capodanno, Director of Digital Marcom Planning and Effectiveness, Microsoft led off with a brief discussion of Microsoft Surface. He asked how many people in the audience had heard of it and a majority had. He spoke about a brief video they did about Microsoft Surface as well as the parody that was produced. It is a very funny parody, well worth the watch.

In recent days, there has been a lot of activity as investors in Second Life corporations attempt to recover assets from failed companies and their owners. The actions, as well as discussions surrounding these actions raise the question of whether Directors’ and Officers’ Liability Insurance might be coming to Second Life.

Many people view Second Life as a three dimensional gaming environment. Others, recognizing the value of the immersive environment look to set up advertising in Second Life or to use it as a fancy new way to hold online conferences. Yet many overlook the importance of the Second Life currency and the evolution of financial markets in Second Life.

It can be a wonderful things when things come together just right. As an example, I finally got around to upgrading my antiquated cellphone, and I can use my new phone as an MP3 player and a video camera. It makes my life easier and much more fun.

Today, I heard about two other interests of mine converging. This is a much geekier convergence and I’m trying to find out if it too will make my life easier and much more fun. What I’m talking about is the press release announcing Linden Lab Selects StreamBase’s Event Processing Platform To Power Real-Time Analytics And Reporting Throughout the Second Life Grid.

Cool! Will I get to play with that?

The online experience is changing from a world where users pull static text off of webpages to a world were the experience is much more immersive with pictures, videos and three dimensional animations and much more interactive with Web 2.0 functionality, instant messaging and real time data. As these changes take place, information providers need to rethink their online strategies and how they use various tools.

At the center of any information strategy is a good content management system. Drupal is a widely popular open source content management system that facilitates the organization and presentation of information. It allows users of the site to easily add content and has been expanded to include better functionality for images and video. It is this ability to easily be expanded that makes it interesting as more immersive synchronous environments become more popular.

One such environment is Second Life. Second Life has been getting more and more attention as companies explore how they can use to achieve corporate goals. With Second Life, you use a Second Life client, instead of a web browser to access the Second Life servers. These servers provide a three-dimensional real time environment where uses interact with objects that have been created as well as with one another. Second Life has it’s own currency which facilitates micropayments there and there is an active currency exchange to change the Second Life currency, called Linden Dollars, into U.S. dollars.

Back in January, I wrote a blog post about managing transitions and a new company called CenterNorth. They specialize on the human side of technology leadership and work with companies of all sizes.

Today, I found an article about Leadership Near the Summit. It speaks about an MIT grad climbing his way up to CTO and then facing a difficult annual review. I saw many aspects of myself in that article and at Toomre Capital Markets, we work with some of the brightest engineers out there. We see stories like this all the time.

I’d encourage you to read the article, and if you see characteristics of yourself or people that you’ve worked with in this article, please contact CenterNorth to assist them in their qualitative research into the “best practices for leaders of technical all-stars” You can respond in writing or they will talk to you one on one and will keep all data you provide completely confidential, even in the write up of the report.

Between Twitter messages about SXSW, video streams and online text chats about Freedom to Connect, Blogging the Libby Trial, and preparing for theNew England News Forum, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Internet and I want to share some of these thoughts in terms of the financial services industry as well as a broader context.

There is a lot of data available out on the web that could be scrubbed and analyzed to give firms competitive advantages. Lars has worked with weather contracts and I spoke with him about methods of gathering and scrubbing that data. I’ve spoken about Second Life as an emerging market place with data that could be scrubbed and analyzed as well. It provides a good starting point to explore how to scrub and analyze online data.

In my post about foreign exchange trading in Second life, I asked about getting real time data from Second Life. I mentioned http://secondlife.com/xmlhttp/secondlife.php as a source for some information in XML format that could be used. Yesterday, I wrote about 70 lines of PHP code which retrieves, parses and stores the Second Life statistics into an SQL database. Below is a slightly geeky description of what I did, which illustrates some of the issues your run into.

In 1989, Brewster Kahle introduced his Wide Area Information Server Concepts. In many ways the web is now being used in ways that Brewster was suggesting for WAIS. Included in his suggestions were issues of how people would get paid for the content they put online.

Today, people are still working on different ways to get paid online. You can download music online complete with digital rights management for a buck from various sites, if you sign up ahead of time. You can subscribe to various newspapers online. Yet the problem of micropayments still hasn’t really be solved.