Around 40 people showed up yesterday for the first of our coffee with crayon sessions at crayonville Island in Second Life.

This is the weekly get-together where everyone can discuss literally anything related to new marketing. With no formal agenda, the session could have been a damp squib.

Instead, it quickly developed into a vibrant and interactive community of voices constantly in conversation. Discussion topics ranged through ethics in PR, transparency in blogging and disclosure, virtual identities and more. Even some chat on the type of coffee we were all drinking.

With conversations primarily open text chat with some one-to-one instant messaging on the side, you need to be pretty nimble to keep up with it all. David Tebbutt has a good take on the feeling of chaos such interaction can provoke. And is this the future of such events? asks Cardie Mahoney.

That’s how it is right now, that’s for sure.

I chatted with quite a few folk, many regular visitors, some new. One of the challenges I always have in Second Life is figuring out who’s who from their avatar name. That becomes very difficult when those avatars have no information in their profiles which you access by right-clicking on their avatar.

Is your profile important? I think so. Unless you are purely a lurker, it does help to have a little info about who you are that others can see. That’s a social (and business) advantage, just as in real life. (My SL name is Jangles Junot and I have a lot of info in my profile.)

We had such a full house that Second Life crashed on us at around the 50-minute mark, a reminder of some of the current technical limitations of the platform.

CC Chapman took some great photos (including a nice one of Shel and me) and captured the whole conversation – typos and all, especially mine – which you can download to read at your leisure.

A hugely worthwhile event and I’m looking forward to next week’s get-together. Hope to see you there.