More research thoughts and questions

My question of the day is… can we "simulcast" our "event' on Gator Nation to invited UF participants as well as collaborate with other places in world? For example, I attended the "Power of Positive Thinking" session at Stonehenge (Wisdom and Enlightenment Center) on Saturday to see how they do it and get a feel for how many people show up, what type of interaction they had, how successful was the communication, etc. I ended up with more questions than answers… and ideas. There are so many sociological perspectives we could approach from this… So, my thinking is, (for example)

1. I had no idea who the woman (assuming she was) was who presented the session in SL I attended on Saturday. She did a very nice job and got good response from her audience… but, I'd be interested in expanding the role of avatar profiles (that would be authenticated) and measuring credibility and celebrity in-world based on in-world presentations. If these type of events are to become more mainstream, wouldn't that be important? And,when giving advice or public presentations in-world, would people consider avatar profiles more than/ equal to/ less than their avatar look? Can we allow people to pick between two or three avatars that would be the presenter based on either profile or look (be able to pick race/gender/and look i.e. hair color, attire, accessories) and see which they tend to prefer? See if they even really care what their profile credentials or avatar features are? We could even give the same exact presentation content and measure feedback, then compare results. Am I making sense? The collaboration with/simulcast between UF/open sl community question would also apply here and be worthy of measuring if environmental difference influences audience perception.
or...
2. As another example... could we ask the Dean of the College of Journalism and Communications to have a "conversation" about the directions he plans to take the college in new media and invite UF students to attend? Thinking in the convergence culture, we could also be blogging it (I can't believe the Emory people didn't do any of this yesterday!!! WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY!!!!), recording it in video for a YouTube post that could be distributed on the J-school Facebook listserv and he could actually be presenting live in the college. Then we could measure blog posts, compared to IMs in world, compared to YouTube hits, compared to actual discussion in RL. Do we have the authority to seek this type of interaction with colleges? (we can put any college/any official in place of the example I've given)

I've also had multiple conversations with faculty from mass comm, sociology, and family/youth/community science who are all intrigued by the potential for ethnographies from observation of avatar behavior at these events. The scripting tool to create avatar expression that we're working on could be very helpful in that regard as well!!

Sorry to be so long winded!! But I look forward to your feedback!