Wagner James AuSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

"Hamlet Au," the first embedded journalist in a virtual environment, continues to play the job on his blog, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com).

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, Harvard Business Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, BBC, CNN International, and NPR's All Things Considered have all included Au and his work on virtual worlds, gaming, and Second Life.

From 2006 until 2009, Au worked as a contributing editor for GigaOM.com, one of the web's most prominent blogs on Internet business and technology. She wrote about the gaming industry, online worlds, and digital culture.

He has given talks on all of the above at The Milken Institute, South by Southwest in Austin, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, O'Reilly's ETech series, and twice at State of Play.

The Making of Second Life is a behind-the-scenes look at the construction of the Internet industry's most implausible venture: the building of a virtual 3-D world with its own culture, events, companies, and social systems.

Second Life, currently the largest 3-D virtual world on the market, had a huge influence on Internet phenomena that we now take for granted: virtual products, user-generated content, and avatar interaction.

Au was hired as a "embedded journalist" by Linden Lab, Second Life's inventor, in 2003, and has had unique access to Second Life users and the company's founders, who have gone on to become important roles at YouTube, Facebook, and other top social media businesses.