1. Jeff Bezos blogs about Amazon Web Services and Second Life: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/07/amazon_search_i.html

He also talks about the first SL product to use AWS, Second411 (http://www.second411.com), an item-by-item search engine for SL! With the S411 search HUD, you can search both SL and, now, Amazon.com. Hal9k, the creator, has plans to add both Google and Yahoo! searches in his next version.

Posted at 5:56PM on Jul 25th 2006 by Adri Saarinen

2. Jeff /Barr/ blogged about it, not Jeff Bezos. Jeff Barr is the Amazon Web Services evangelist and maintains the AWS blog and development studio in SL.

That's what I get for typing too fast-- thinking of one Jeff and writing about another!

Posted at 4:59PM on Jul 26th 2006 by Adri Saarinen

3. Hi, I can explain and even take credit for the little presentation space in Athabasca!

My real name is Jeff Barr and I work for Amazon.com as Web Services Evangelist. In that position I travel to conferences and user groups all over the world and give them presentations about out services.

My personal "reality", if you will, is that I spend an awful lot of time walking into rooms that look pretty much like the one I built in Second Life: a podium, a projector, a bunch of seats, and an audience. I fly into a city, do some presentations, and then move on to the next one. That's the life of a technical evangelist.

My thinking (which I must emphasize is mine personally and not yet officially shared by the company) is that I should be able to do some presentations in-world to some virtual developers. The presentation space that I built should be considered to be a proof of concept at this stage, something to experiment with and to learn from. It was built on my own time and with my own funds.

The actual PowerPoint that's loaded into the screen is one that I delivered at Linux World earlier this year. I saved it as a series of JPEG files, uploaded each one to Second Life, and then wrote some script to show them on demand. There's also some more script in the podium to handle restarting, and stepping (forward or backward), and controlling the lights. This code is protected and will respond only to my magic touch. As you have noticed, you can also click the screen to advance to the next slide.

I am still working to get official approval to present in this space. I will take full credit/blame for the lameness of what's there -- I am a software developer, not a city planner.

So far I am very encouraged by what I have been able to do. There's a certain realism that comes into play when you sit down and then Alt-zoom to make the presentation take up most or all of the screen.

Posted at 2:39PM on Jul 30th 2006 by Jeff Barr