“Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.”
—Jerry Seinfeld

I’m a bit late in reporting this, but Wired News recently (okay, a month ago) ran this interesting article about how musical artists both new and well known are using Second Life to reach fans.

On August 3, Suzanne Vega became the first major artist to play in Second Life. You can see a clip over here on YouTube.

It won’t be too long before we see a virtual Woodstock happening online, where dozens of bands get together for a weekend of performances and hundreds of thousands of Second Lifers congregate on a virtual farm, avoid the virtual brown acid and and dance around in the virtual mud.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of music to be had in Second Life, with about a half-dozen performances this Saturday and another half-dozen on Sunday. If you’re into music and you don’t yet have a Second Life account, you may want to get in on this action.

(By the way: If you’re currently a member of Second Life, be aware of this security bulletin they’ve issued.)

Takeaway for marketers: Should you have a presence in Second Life? Maybe. Maybe not. Do your customers?

Geeks at large were all abuzz over what Apple’s announcement yesterday at a “special event” would be. The longshot prediction suggested an iPod cell phone, but the conventional wisdom turned out to be right.

As this C|Net story reports, and almost everyone who follows this stuff expected, it’s iTV, iTunes 7 (new and improved with some studio deals to facilitate movie downloading) plus bright shiny 80GB iPods to hold a summer’s worth of big-screen blockbusters or a coupla seasons of 24.

Now, if you could dump a Netflix movie into your iTunes library as easily (and cost-free) as you dump a CD worth of songs, it might almost make being a railway commuter the preferred way to get to work. Almost.

Veoh wants to be the next YouTube. It looks like they plan to offset the million-plus a month in bandwidth cost YouTube is enduring by setting themselves up as a peer-to-peer network. Think video Kazaa.

CNN is making its coverage of the events of five years ago — 8:30 a.m. till midnight, in real time — available free online via its Pipeline service. The details are over here.