Funny thing – eight days ago, after taking a couple of days to edit my social networks post, one of my thought exercises turned out to be (somewhat) prophetic. In the post, I suggested:
Now think about Senator Clinton, building a virtual campaign office in SecondLife, the 200K member community that allows for intellectual property ownership and currency exchanges. In this case, the campaign has a virtual store within the office where you can purchase “Hillary ’08” paraphenalia with your Linden dollars (L$). To pay the “rent” in SecondLife, the campaign converts those Linden dollars used to buy the campaign gear into US currency through various online exchange sites. (Ooch – those pesky-little rules from McCain-Feingold could potentially problem for compliance issues – but it does help in those data collection needs).
Okay – so I did not have the candidate correctly, but on Thursday, former Governor Mark Warner made an “campaign stop” in secondLife and had a terrific Q&A session with about 30 visitors in the session. The following is a list of blogs discussing the event:
- Wagner James Au, the moderator, reports on his blog (New World Notes) with full transcript and photos. Additionally, he posts a post-interview wrapup of the impact of the event in the main-stream media.
- YesButNoButYes comments on the potential gimmickery of the event (not sure if this is a real blog or just one trying to generate clicks for their ads…)
- My friend, Dave Weinberger jots a note about the visit in JoHo
- Rik in secondLife provides video of the event at his blog, Click Heard Round the World with some his own reporting on what Warner said on Iraq and other topics on this post.
- And reported in Somewhat Frank, Warner might be doing more TownHall meetings over the course of the campaign.
I wonder – the event was sparsely attended (30 residents) and it was the first in the virtual world (as reported by MicroPersuasion). Will others follow? I would assume some might, since it only made a ripple in the main stream media.
Tags: Mark Warner, secondLife,
Virtual Town Hall Meeting,
Virtual Campaigning
