Nick McLaren

As some of you know, I decided to do something unique with my new song by debuting it inside of a Virtual World platform called Metaplace. That proved to be an interesting experiment and generated a decent little crowd of 20 or so across the event, with a little help rounding people up thanks to Cuppycake.

While some aspects of doing this were a little cludgy (the fact that I’m holding an acoustic guitar in-world, but not actually playing one in the song, just looks strange.. for example), the actual execution of essentially playing a set of my mp3′s for an audience couldn’t have been easier and for essentially NO real planning-time, I’d still call this event a huge success! I may do this again in the future, possibly in a custom-built world and a bunch of actual planning. We shall see, but in any case it was fun giving it a shot!

Oh, and I had my first virtual-world hecklers too! I’m living the life now.. YEAH! =)

If you’re interested, “The Device” will be making it’s grand (or not so grand) debut TODAY at 4pm PST over at Metaplace. If you aren’t already signed up, you might want to do that ahead of time by either registering over at Metaplace.com or if you use Facebook, by adding their Facebook application. Once logged in, you can find me in the MPCentral world. That world has gotten a lot larger recently, so you might want to do a little poking around ahead of time. I’ll be in the “Metaville” section of the world at a small stage in the upper right-hand corner. In Metaplace, I’m known as “Logikal” so feel free to send me a /tell in-world if you need help getting there.

Those of you who stumbled across this site after checking out my recently changed twitter background, might be looking for a copy of my new song “The Device”. Unfortunately, I will not be posting it available for download until next week. Sorry for the trouble, but honestly I didn’t feel like having to change the background again later when I do put out the song. I know, I’m such a lazy ass. BAD NICK!

For those of you who want to hear it sooner, look for an announcement really soon about a chance to hear the song streaming live over at Metaplace. This is something I just decided to do, so there are details to be worked out as to how to setup the event, in which world to host it, etc. You can be prepared to attend ahead of time by making sure you’re signed up with them over at their website, or if you’re using Facebook, then you can get setup with Metaplace via their app at http://app.facebook.com/metaplace. Either way will work just fine..

Why do this you ask? Well, some of the folks behind Metaplace are really cool friends of mine, and it’s one of the places on the internet that I really enjoy thanks to it giving you the ability to create your own world and explore those created by others. Also, somehow premiering a new song in a virtual world just seemed like a cool idea to me… even if only a few people show up.