3pointD.com

(left to right:) Reuben Steiger, Wagner James Au, and former Virginia governor Mark Warner, in avatar form

Former Virginia governor and possible Democratic “fallback” candidate for president Mark Warner spoke to a crowd of about 30 avatars in the virtual world of Second Life this afternoon, in a live interview with journalist Wagner James Au of the New World Notes blog (Hamlet Au in SL). The event, which lasted about 45 minutes, marked the first appearance by a national political figure in the virtual world, and went off without a hitch. The governor appeared to respond “live” to Au’s questions in text chat, and used the space as a politician would use a physical space, walking through the crowd as he left the stage rather than simply logging off where he sat. The event was held in a model of the New Globe Theatre built by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us virtual-world services company, which produced the event. (Millions of Us is a sponsor of Au’s blog.)

Warner was apparently led to Second Life after one of the staffers at his political action committee, Forward Together (which is concentrating in part on taking advantage of the Internet as a promotional platform), met Au last spring. The result was the first virtual whistlestop on any national political tour, and — quite aside from setting a precedent — gave attendees a good look at what could form the planks of a future Warner campaign. 3pointD will save further commentary for a later post, but for now here’s a transcript of the interview (minus audience comments): (more…)

The “population” of the virtual world of Second Life passed the 600,000 mark sometime early this morning — at least in terms of the number of avatars that have ever been created. But many of these are people who have looked in once and never returned, and many more are “alts,” i.e., alternate avatars created by the same person. (I have about five. Some people have many more.) The SL splash page lists 264,281 as the number of avatars that have logged in over the last 60 days, but even that number overstates the true population in terms of users, due simply to the alt phenomenon.

Whatever the “correct” population number, Second Life has seen strong growth over the past year — strong enough to inspire a mildly famous quarter bet between Linden Lab’s CTO Cory Ondrejka and University of Illinois games researcher Dmitri Williams. Cory puts his coin on Second Life having more North American users than hit MMO World of Warcraft by March 2008. A couple of recent reports suggest Dmitri may have to start saving his pennies (well, 25 of them, anyway) in order to make good on the wager. (more…)

Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely “fallback” candidate for president should Hillary Clinton not run in 2008, will visit the virtual world of Second Life today for a chat with New World Notes’s Wagner James Au, at 12:30 SLT (3:30pm EST), in an event produced by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us (a sponsor of James’s blog). The idea for the visit seems to have come from within Warner’s Forward Together political action committee itself, according to an interesting interview Au has with Nancy Scola (SL resident Nancy Mandelbrot), whose job at Forward Together consists in part of trying “to connect with the technology/geek community.” While there have been local political candidates in SL before, this certainly marks the highest profile politico to visit this (or probably any other) virtual world. It also raises interesting questions of what’s public and what’s private in a place that (on the surface) is primarily governed by a Terms of Service rather than by a Constitution. [And see update below.] (more…)