I spoke with the event producer. Michael Doyle is a B2B veteran with experience in both print and event media. VirtualEdge 2009 reflects the coming transformation in event media. Especially impressive is a slate of speakers that includes Nielsen, Ziff Davis, and United Business Media. These are companies that are on the front lines of B2B event media evolution. The concurrent technology showcase has a unique format, with individual meeting rooms with interactive demonstrations. They’re developing the audience for this event as a community, through the website VirtualEdge.org, and you receive a Virtual Event Handbook when you join the community. The event is May 28-29 in Santa Clara.

In a similar vein: Government scientific and technological research efforts often incubate and spawn important commercial innovations. This week, National Defense University is hosting the Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference. The consortium seeks to “improve government collaboration through the use of virtual worlds to enrich collaborative online experiences.” While it may be too late to attend the event, the online agenda serves as a catalog of virtual environment technology in the service of distance learning, personal interaction, and information sharing.

Second Life first caught my attention when Visa committed to a sponsorship of over $75,000 to create their own environment and event on Second Life. This was at a time when I was trying to get Visa to take out a minimal sponsorship on a live event where we had a proven audience. I was surprised that they were willing to spend so much on an unproven format.

Here’s what I’ve learned: 1. If a large portion of your audience is spending time in Second Life, then they are likely to come to an event in Second Life. They are enthusiasts. 2. Second Life is not like other “virtual event” platforms. If an attendee is in Second Life, then they they are compelled to interact with their surroundings, and other characters. In other virtual events, they can just log in and tune out (which they often do). 3. Since it’s a virtual environment, you might assume that it’s cheap to produce. It’s not. To create the elaborate 3D environments in second life requires professional designers who spend hours of development time. 4. Like the Internet itself, most of the (non-business) environments in Second Life look amateur, flaky, menacing or worse. That’s a red herring.

As an introduction to Second Life for B2B markets, it’s worth taking a look at the projects that have been created by World2Worlds. Also, Second Life and other virtual platforms have now inspired real-life meeting, where real people meet face to face and discuss opportunities for creating virtual events, including the Virtual Edge Summit, and the Second Life Community Convention.

Here’s what I think about the trend toward Second Life-style events: The majority of people born after 1975 are comfortable with these environments after a lifetime spent on Nintendo, xBox, Playstation. This experience will translate into new modes of business interaction that are richer and more productive than those we currently know. New memes in conference organization will emerge, and one can imaging a hybrid live/virtual model with a lot of exciting possibilities. Business event managers can ignore or dismiss this trend at their own peril. This is an integration opportunity.

CNBC recently covered the phenomenon of business conferences in Second Life: