Running live and running scared in Second Life at Wimbledon

Yesterday a team of us ran a mixed mode live event at Wimbledon. It was an amazing set of thigns we were trying to mesh together, with real people, press, telephones second life and live webcasting and recording of audio and photography.
Between Roo, Andy, Mark and I we managed to hit all the areas we wanted to hit. It was an amazing bit of teamwork for teh entire day. That teamwork and trust does nto come easy, Roo and I were in the main roon Andy and Mark we in a remote room.
Also though we had amazing support and trust from the attendees for teh press conference and the IBM and Text 100 team there. The press conference had been all arranged by Bill and Karolina, and Chris (the project director for IBM at Wimbledon) put a great deal of faith in us 4 mad SL/Web2.0 crew to work this.

Picture by Roo @ Flickr
The notion of a live event with RL speakers represented in SL we had observed was one that kind of works, but needed something else. We had Ian, Anne and Ivan providing their insight, via a telephone conference. They were not all going to be able to drive the Second Life interaction, so their words were transcribed and actions puppeteered into SL by Andy and Mark, who were listening to the conference.
Roo, and to some extent me, we in SL as ourselves to act as facilitators, back channels conversationalists and reporters on the event.
I was attempting a ustream, with my video cam pointed at my screen. It became very apparent that to run a camera and provide a live feed is also a puppeteer mode of operation and makes it much harder to enagage with SL audience with the same depth I would normally.
We ran 3 events, including one aimed at IBMers. We had all sort of people turn up aswell due to the map green dot effect.
I was a little bit annoyed at the number of times I lost SL, my laptop either crashing or SL dying, and I am also getting some very weird behaviour with my ctrl alt zoom on that machine (all of which made camera work a bit rough)
I am trying to edit up some of the video as I recorded a lot on ustream, but editing FLV files seems to be a little tricky with the application I have at the moment!

Anyway, I am really proud of everyone for both doing this and taking the risk. WE all learned a whole lot, which is a feature of the metaverse and of the rise of Web 2.0. You get to learn by doing, everything is live all the time.