Greetings all! It's an unsettling feeling, seeing your own words come back to you in a form whose outline you recognize, but whose substance has so changed that you can only wonder how they came to be so transformed. I can only infer that it must have been my suit and tie that so dazzled some of the audience. :<) Anyway, here's what I thought I said: For starters, I said nothing about the demise of BayMOO or any other place. We run on a crl machine; but the owner has said nothing about booting us off. He seems to regard us as a good thing, and continues to support our efforts. MOOs and MUDs have come and go in the past, of course; but right now, we are in a definite growth phase. I'm a humanist and NOT a social scientist. I'm not "studying" social interactions in MOOspace: I'm involved with creating the environments and getting into both serious and lighthearted interactions with folks there. I think that MOOs have the capability of supporting serious discussions about such issues as: -- the conflation of word and act on the NET in general, and in MOOs in particular -- anonymity versus responsibility -- the transformation of text into something approaching the incantations of magic (like what Vernor Vinge was driving at in "True Names") -- Can you love someone you've known only on the NET? -- Can MOOs support commercial transactions, including new modes such as digital banking? In MOOs you can build fun stuff; but there can be serious issues addressed too. I drew on several implementations of special rooms at BayMOO to illustrate this point. I cited the modeling of the spiritual wold of the Ohlones (SF Bay Area Native Americans) in a series of virtual rooms dedicated to Coyote, Eagle, Hummingbird and Gismen (the sun). Language morphing rooms offer yet another unique way to explore the transformations of text in virtual words. We talked about the feudal and democratic aspects of MOOs -- and a lively proto-discussion took place (proto = to be continued) about whether the NET is destined to remain, or to become even more, dominated and driven by current social and economic forms. I invoked *Snow Crash*, and got a good deal of righteous debate on whether or not the vr world was headed down that path. Finally, I gave a couple of instances as to what I thought were the emerging moral customs of MOO life: -- If need, then help. -- There is no such thing as a dumb question. And finally, a maxim, of which MOOs serve as one significant illustration: "You can tell that a technology has truly arrived when the new problems it gives rise to approach in magnitude the problems it was designed to solve." *********************************** I enjoyed the meeting a lot, and thank all the folks here for the chance to follow up the virtual meeting with a RL one one related topics.