I’ve let my experience with the virtual conventions panel at Eastercon, and related events, percolate around in my mind for a couple of weeks. Here are some brief thoughts.

You can get an audience. There were 33 people online for the Virtual Conventions panel. That’s a lot more than were actually in the room. And that doesn’t count the people who attended only via Second Life, or the 18 people who watched the replay, or however many people listened to Jim Mowatt’s podcast of the panel. If, say, Iain Banks had been on the panel I think the online audience would have been much bigger.

Having decent free wi-fi in the convention venue makes a huge difference. I did a lot of tweeting from panels. Others did too. According to Danie Ware the #eastercon hashtag was actually trending worldwide for a short period on Sunday. A lot of people would have been able to follow panels just because of that. In a few cases I was able to use incoming tweets as input to discussions.

On the other hand, if you need to do anything serious, such as webcasting a Hugo Award Nominees announcement, you desperately need dedicated Internet access that you can guarantee won’t be dragged down by the tweeting of the attendees.

Video is possible, but limited. UStream works, but the video quality is awful unless you have really good connection. What it actually does is provide decent quality streaming audio. However, the unmoderated backchannel isn’t very useful.

Indeed, even if you are only watching Twitter, the backchannel can quickly become overwhelming (and if popular enough will be spammed by bots). Any popular event will need to be moderated.

I remain convinced that Cover It Live is an excellent tool for virtual panels, especially because of the moderation facilities, but fandom at large appears wedded to awful solutions like UStream, LiveJournal and chat rooms. I may actually have to run a virtual convention to prove the point.

Moderating a panel online and in meat-space at the same time is hellishly difficult (and thanks to my co-panelists for handling much of the meat-space stuff themselves).

I’m not convinced that all convention events are suitable for being both live and online. The Hugo event worked because it was of huge international interest and had almost no live interaction. The Virtual Conventions panel worked, at least in part, because there were so few people in the room. I think the best things to webcast are things like the Hugo event. For discussion panels I suspect it may be better to be all online, or to be live plus Twitter.

I wasn’t able to see what went on in Second Life, but the possibilities are intriguing. Once I have a home of my own I shall look into getting a computer with a decent graphics card so that I can go there myself and check things out. In the meantime, here’s a quick taster (thanks Bill!).