Don't miss our upcoming discussions in Second Life, where you can learn about the best ways to do business in the virtual world, and about using the new voice feature.

We'll get a visit Tuesday from Michael Monello, a partner at Campfire, the interactive marketing agency that built the Motorati area of second life for Pontiac.

Here's a description of Motorati, from a story which we plan to publish Tuesday:

Pontiac is another company that's developed an area that's one of the most popular in Second Life.The agency that developed it, Campfire, solicited input from car enthusiasts already in Second Life before building Motorati.

Rather than using Motorati as a platform to try to force-feed users a marketing message, Wildfire gave away server space -- known in Second Life jargon as "land" -- on Motorati to people with plans to use the land for attractive, automotive-oriented sites and activities. That way, Pontiac brought in partners who built a bumper-car area, a nightclub with a parking-lot theme, and an area for AskPatty.com, for women car enthusiasts.

Second Life marketing is different from traditional media and the Web, said Michael Monello, a partner at Campfire. In traditional media and the Web, agencies talk about "pushing messages" out to the audience, he said. "But Second Life really is a new mindset. It's very community focused. You have to go in and say, 'What can we add to the community?"

Monello will discuss some best practices for doing real-life business and marketing in Second Life.

Look for that 8 a.m. Second Life Time (PDT) Tuesday, Aug. 21, at the Amphitheater at Dr. Dobb's Island.. This is sort of a follow-up to the last session, where we had the creators of another RL-to-SL business, Infinite Vision Media, which created the Weather Channel's area.

Then, a week later, we'll hear from Jeska Dzwigalski, director of community for Linden Lab, creators and operators of Second Life. Jeska, who's called Jeska Linden in SL, will give us an update on the new voice capabilities.

That session will be at 8 a.m. SLT/PDT Aug. 28, also at the amphitheater.

And we plan to hold both sessions using the voice client, with the usual plan: If voice starts acting wonky, we'll just switch to text chat and carry on.

And a final note: We're renaming our regular schedule of Second Life presentations; they're now called GridTalk. Stay tuned to find out about more great programming and presentations to come.